Game Information
| Title | Olympus: Violent Edition |
| Presenter(s) | Brian Winn, Adam Rademacher, Jon Moore, Wei Peng, et. al. |
| Session | Play the Past: Where Meaningful Play and Digital Humanities Meet to Talk |
| Time | Thursday, October 18, 11:00a-12:00p |
| Location | Gold A |
| Format | Game Exhibition |
| Description | Olympus is game that allows players to immerse themselves in the wondrous time of Ancient Greek history and myth. Olympus enhances the typical role-playing experience by getting the player off the couch. Through the use of a unique combination of input devices, the virtual actions of your avatar in the game world are driven by the players corresponding physical actions in the real world. Players succeed in Olympus through perseverance, sweat, and calories burned!
The violent edition of Olympus was an enhancement to a single scene in the larger game. The violent edition was built for a research study that explored what effect different levels of the graphic representation of violence would have on players of the active video game - in particular, would violent content in an active video game make players move more vigorously. The graphic depiction of violence was manipulated in this version of Olympus to be low, moderate or high. In the low violence condition, there were no sound effects of punching, grunting, or growling, no splatters of blood when hitting the enemy, and no onscreen splatter of blood when the player was hit by the enemy. The enemy would just disappear out of existence upon defeat with an on-screen feedback message of "guards defeated". When the players died, they would re-spawn and their health bars would be recharged. In the moderate violence condition, there were sound effects of punches or swords hitting but no sound effect of the results of the blows, such as grunts or groans. Minor blood splatter would show on screen when hitting enemies. No onscreen splatter of blood would show when the player was hit by the enemies. The enemies would drop to the ground on being defeated using ragdoll physics with on screen feedback of "guards defeated" but no blood would be shown on the ground. When the players died, they would be asked to fight death by shaking their Wiimotes and running on the dancepad. In the high violence condition, there were sound effects of punching, swords hitting, grunting, and groaning. Major blood splatter would show on screen when hitting enemies. Splatters of blood would also show when the players were hit by the enemies. The enemies would drop to the ground on being defeated using ragdoll physics with on screen feedback of "guards killed" and blood would appear on the ground near the corpse. |