How can artistic research at a film school and professional practice at a games development/production studio benefit each other?
We have invited Dramatist, story-architect and director Maureen Thomas (Senior Artistic Researcher, Norwegian Film School) and game designer and developer Bendik Stang (Co-founder & CEO, Snowcastle Games, Oslo) to engage a conversation, and illustrate with video and live demonstrations their currently developing collaboration.
Maureen Thomas’s feature-film writing credits include Homo Novus (Dir. Anna Viduleja, Latvia 2018 - National Film Centre of Latvia Centenary Prize) and Aldri Mer 13 (Dir. Sirin Eide, Norway 1996 - LUCAS Best Film Award, Frankfurt International Festival; Best Film, Antwerp International Film Festival). Her pioneering interactive movie-installation RuneCast (UK 2007) was developed at the Swedish Interactive Institute Malmø and Cambridge University with British Telecom, bringing together 5 higher education research institutions with 5 industry partners. In 2016, she wrote and directed the total-theatre performance, WE, including live interactive elements and a related phone app, for Studio for Electronic Theatre (London). Maureen was appointed a Professor at the Norwegian Film School in 2000, and is currently Senior Artistic Researcher. Development of her original script for the Queens Game interactive HiStoryGame was funded by the Norwegian Film Institute.
Games designer Bendik Stang, who represents Video Games on the Board of the Norwegian Producers’ Guild, is co-founding director and CEO of Snowcastle Games A/S, Oslo, which describes itself as ‘an independent developer devoted to making great games with a focus on charming art direction, unique mechanics and memorable characters’. Snowcastle is the creator and producer of the games Hogworld (2011 – App Store Best of List), Earthlock: Festival of Magic (2016) (sold 2.7 million copies) and Earthlock 2 (in development, due for release 2021) with Earthlock 3 in the planning stage.
Snowcastle planned the collaboration with Queens Game in 2017. At the end of 2018, Bendik joined the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme as a fellow to pursue his personal research on non-deterministic ludo-narrativity. He is an assessor for the game-design programme at Westerdals Kristiania University College, from which Snowcastle has been supervising teams of final-year Bachelor-level interns since 2014.
