Affordance created the Opera Shuffle Box game in an intense 48-hour sprint over the weekend of June 3-5 at the Jam Nation game jam organized by la Guilde des développeurs de jeux vidéo indépendants du Québec. For this Jam Nation event, 16 teams of 4-6 people built a game in the prescribed 48-hour period to showcase the Montreal Opera’s upcoming presentation of Verdi’s Aida. The other collaborators for Jam Nation were the Quartier des spectacles, UQAM and Cossette. In total, 120 people participated in the event including 12 video game studio teams and 4 students teams.
For Affordance’s Opera Shuffle Box, the team divided the opera into four main emotions: lying, jealousy, freedom and sadness. To advance in the game, players must recreate key scenes of the opera by placing the different emotions in order. Each emotion is represented by a physical game card which is connected to the game through an NFC tag. If the player places the emotion in the correct order on a table, the game recognizes the order and unlocks the related opera scene. Once the scene is unlocked, the player gets to watch the action play out on the screen with puppet-like characters accompanied by the beautiful music of Aida. The game gives the power to the player to become the stage director for the opera or for any other cultural content including films and television shows. This transmedia game can also be displayed in public spaces to encourage spontaneous and emergent interactions between the people and the game.
We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate all of the other teams who participated in the Jam Nation event for their tremendous work. And we would also like to thank the first person to discover coffee for getting us through the weekend as well as getting us through our 9am Monday morning meeting after the game jam event.
