Existential Waters: On Employing a Game Engine for Artistic Expression within a Theater Play, and on the Implications of This towards Existential Games

Abstract

Water possesses an extraordinary expressive power, which has already been extensively exploited in the arts and in common sense thinking. Water can evoke deep feelings of purity, unity, and happiness, but also of dirt, drowning, and despair. We have explored this expressive power for a theater play, with an interactive simulation of water that was set into motion by the actor, and that expressed the inner feelings of his soul. We have employed the Ogre game engine for the simulation. We also believe that virtual reality technologies possess yet uncovered expressive potentials, among others for creating “existential games”, which means games where only main existential vectors such as life, beauty, death, love are represented.