Black Day is a series of three mixed reality games: Enter a creepy house with us, escape the treacherous traps of a crazy school or find your way as an influencer in the jungle of shady products. We take the players into a world that mixes elements of board games, adventure games, media art and comics. Among other things, the students have developed their own game format, the “game comic”.
Is the audience a spectator or a player? The roles are quickly reversed! For Black Day we have developed different interaction formats, together with the audience we guess, vote and face challenges.
This “Battle Royal” of a different kind was developed by students of the MS Lehen together with the media artists Sonja Prlić and Karl Zechenter and the media and cultural educator Iwan Pasuchin. Black Day was created in a year-long process. The young people developed their own mixed reality game ideas and rule systems, researched exciting locations, created and edited video, image and audio material, designed playing fields and game material, tested and played.
The students collaborated with the team of artists and a cultural and media educator under the motto “We are all game experts”. Together they discussed ideas, aesthetics and production methods and designed the game on an equal footing.
Black Day received the Young Creatives Award of Distinction in the u14-create your world category at the Prix Ars Electronica 2021.
Credits
Project management: Sonja Prlić, Karl Zechenter, Iwan Pasuchin
Collaboration on design: Reinhold Bidner, Martina Brandmayr
Cooperation software and technical support: Sebastian Frisch
Project sponsor: gold extra, MediaLab University Mozarteum Salzburg
Performance partner: ARGEkultur Salzburg
Supported by the City and Province of Salzburg
