Giant Sparrow
Company
4 documents in the library are about Giant Sparrow, from writers such as DiGRA and Game Developers Conference. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Giant Sparrow, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Giant Sparrow
Sacred Places: Designing 360° Narrative VR Games for Hybrid Use in CAVE and Mobile HMD Setups
"Sacred Places" is a design-oriented paper presenting a 360° narrative VR game that explores the memory and identity of Greek-Australian immigrants through landmarks, oral testimony, and ethnographic material.
- The paper presents "Sacred Places," a 360° narrative VR game about Greek-Australian immigrant memory and identity, built for hybrid use across a room-sized CAVE and mobile head-mounted displays.
- The design draws on Pierre Nora's lieux de mémoire and Jan Assmann's mnemohistory, with precedents including Woolf's To the Lighthouse and What Remains of Edith Finch.
- The game combines ethnographic research and oral testimony with multi-viewpoint 360° video, non-linear first-person narration, text overlays, interactive objects, and full-body motion tracking in the CAVE setup.
Embodied Engagement with Environmental Storytelling in Walking Simulators: A Case Study of What Remains of Edith Finch
This paper examines how environmental storytelling (ES) is experienced by players in walking simulators, using What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017) as a case study.
- The paper argues that players absorb environmental storytelling intuitively and bodily while navigating a walking simulator, rather than deliberately searching for narrative evidence like archaeologists, offering an embodied complement to existing archaeological and indexical frameworks.
- The analysis is grounded in 4E cognition theory, which holds that cognition unfolds through physical interaction with the environment, and uses playthrough poetics as its method.
- The study is based on a single-player, first-person interpretive account drawn from the author's own gameplay, documented via field notes and screen recordings, so it is framed as a avenue for inquiry rather than a comprehensive account of environmental storytelling.
Oedipus at the Crossroads: Tragic Agency in Contemporary Videogames
This paper argues that videogames offer a distinctive medium for enacting the tragic experience, one that allows players to confront the limits of their own agency rather than merely observe a character's downfall.
- The paper defines tragic agency as the total failure of human action in the face of fate, and argues that games can make players experience this as a first-person, affective experience rather than merely observing a character's downfall.
- Close readings of Bloodborne, What Remains of Edith Finch, and The Stanley Parable form the paper's core evidence, with Bloodborne producing an Oedipal recognition of the player's complicity and a final relinquishment of control.
- The author locates the tragic in the frustration of meaningful action rather than in the satisfaction that much ludic scholarship emphasizes, and distinguishes tragedy from the more common notion of the tragic as merely sad.
The Distributed Art Direction of Edith Finch
The development of What Remains of Edith Finch serves as a case study in distributed art direction, where a small, independent team successfully navigated the absence of a singular art director by prioritizing iterative collaboration and shared creative goals.
- Giant Sparrow successfully developed What Remains of Edith Finch over a five-year cycle using a decentralized, non-hierarchical art direction model rather than a traditional top-down structure.
- The team utilized a 'just-in-time' methodology, allowing the visual style to evolve organically alongside gameplay mechanics and narrative requirements rather than adhering to a rigid pre-planned aesthetic.
- To ensure high-quality, story-driven environmental design, the team produced approximately three times the amount of material that was ultimately included in the final game.
