THE DRAMA MANAGER is a visual interactive storytelling that develops through the affective relationship conformed by the user (through the sounds he/she makes with his/her voice, mouth or hands) with an animated character. The emotional content from all sounds is captured with a microphone and interpreted by a program: it distinguishes if the user is laughing, speaking, singing, clapping, etc. The result produces changes in the character's mood and temper. By it's mood, the character decides where to go through some stages and which actions to perform in each stage making the storytelling happen.

 

Even though the story has a beginning and an ending, the sequences are presented in a non-linear way so the experience is different for every user, according to his/her voice self-exploring motivated by the relationship with the animated character.

 

This work was created from the notion proposed by some video game designers, where the player has the chance to choose among different paths and some events evolve based on those choices. In the case of The Drama Manager, the user doesn't choose in an explicit way: it confronts a character that simulates affective responses and it decides the course of the story.

 

The main objective of this installation is to provoke the user through a ludic experience to allow him/her to conform a sub-language, through personal experiences and sound gesture, to link with the character so that the continuous affective exchange results in a complex narrative experience.

 

The Drama Manager intends to make an emphasis in the daily decoding human being does from the mood and feelings from others, taking apart the description given by spoken word (as language) y leaving as only communication element the sound gesture; in the same way it disrupts this decoding by applying it to the humor on an individual whose affections are nothing but an evident simulation.