Investigation: A 3D Interactive Exploration
Team 1: Richard Adams, Andrew Grevious, Dalong Hu, Jenna Kohls, Taylor Watkins
ABSTRACT
The goal of our 3D interactive environment, Investigation, is to
give the player a scenario and allow them to explore the
environment. To achieve a sense of drive in the player, Investi-
gation follows the story of a person who receives a very strange
and cryptic message about the true purpose of his friend’s
seemingly mundane office. The environment starts with the
player at this office but his friend and all the other employees are
gone. Here the game allows the player to explore on their own,
and as they explore they’ll begin to find clues that will lead them
to the revelation of what this office’s true purpose is.
1. INTRODUCTION
For this assignment, interaction and exploration were our main
goals, but to drive this there needed to be an element to compel
the player forward. The compelling element in Investigation is
the story that builds curiosity. The game begins when the player
receives a message from their friend Greg. He does not say too
much but his message leads you to a nondescript office building
where Greg works, but when you arrive, nobody is there. The
office looks very mundane, and what any person would consider
a boring place to work. In the main room, there are rows of
cubicles, in the cubicles, there are elements that the player can
interact with like images, paperwork, and blueprints. As the
player interacts with these items, dialog informs the player that
all of these items are related to the player. The player’s picture
from a distance, paperwork summarizing the player’s daily
activities, even blueprints of the player’s apartments. Once the
player has done enough investigating in the main office area,
they will be given access to the elevator. The elevator transports
the player to a secret lower level of the office building. In the
lower level is a large room full of rows of data servers. Once
here the player discovers that all of the servers in this room
contain information only about the player, every moment of the
player’s life eternally encased in the technological world. In the
room, the player will be driven by the horror they feel to turn off
all of the servers, and as they turn them off the servers begin to
fall and they must escape without colliding with any servers.
Investigation is inspired by games like Superliminal and The
Stanley Parable.
Figure 1: The Stanley Parable design inspiration.
Both of these feature very modular objects with flat textures
which is suitable for our skill sets as a team. The Stanley Parable
takes place in an office setting, so many of their objects were a
direct inspiration for our office setting.
2. THE STORY
The story behind Investigation plays with people’s ideas of
digital security and personal information. Today, personal
information is readily available, sold, and exploited on the
Internet. In Investigation, the story ponders the question: What
if everyone’s personal information, every single thing about
them, is stored away somewhere for future use or manipulation?
What is privacy anymore? The story of Investigation also slight-
ly mimics the ideas in the movie The Truman Show. For the
office worker’s their daily lives are consumed by the actions of
the player. This is similar to how Truman’s life is a reality show
and he has no clue. As the player, your entire life has been
followed and when you find the office this is when you realize
that the office workers have been watching you forever. This
narrative is intended to help people relate to the main character
and keep them interested in the interactions. Unlike The Truman
Show, in Investigation, the player never truly knows what the
office was doing with their information. Despite this, they are
still motivated to turn off the data servers and hopefully get back
some of their digital privacy.
2.1 Narrative in Video Games
Investigation is a narrative forward game and is influenced by
the ideas of Henry Jenkins [1]. This game most fully identifies
as an embedded narrative where the player has the agency to
move around and discover but as they discover they uncover
more and more of the plot. Investigation also includes a
confrontational scene where the player must try to escape the
data server room, but most of the gameplay is centered around
the idea that the player needs to discover more information to
know the full story.
3. MISE-EN-SCENE
In Investigation the mise-en-scene is most important to convey
the narrative. In the first level, all of the interactive elements are
meant to relate to the player while all of the other elements are
meant to convey a normal office setting. In the second level, the
elements may be a bit more abnormal but the purpose of this is
to give the player that sense of unease about what’s to come.
3.2 Sets
For the first level of the game, the office scene, we decided we
wanted the design to look very mundane, as though this could be
any office at any business. This is to hide the office's true
intention which is related to the second level, the data server
level. In this set, the props are important for the gameplay and
the scene itself. Elements like stacks of paper, photographs, and
notes are used to advance the player’s knowledge of the story
and to fill the scene with things that may typically be in an office
setting.

Figure 2: Cubicle model for office scene
On the data server level, we hope to convey the contrast
between a regular office and a secret agency that has been
collecting every bit of information about the player for their
entire life. To achieve this, the first level of the game features a
basic office cubicle and supplies with regular lighting and
coloring. While in the second level, we’ve included emergency
flashing lights and big rows of complex-looking servers to make
the player understand the significance of the change in environ-
ment. The lighting in the data server room is similar to what
Bordwell describes as low-key lighting [2]. This lighting
scheme indicates that the environment is more dangerous and
mysterious than the previous scene.
Figure 3: Data Server room design
3.3 Camera
A first-person camera is used to put the player into the environ-
ment and emphasize the element of the scene itself. With the
first-person camera, we hope to convey the sense that the player
is the main character and everything in the scene relates to them
in some way making the context more compelling. During the
game when a player interacts with an object the view changes so
that the object is front and center. This is important because the
player needs to be able to clearly see and perhaps read these
clues to progress the narrative.
3.4 Sound
The sounds in Investigation are meant to emulate what you
would hear in real life. This is also meant as a way to situate the
player within the space. We have ambient office noises for an
empty office, noises for picking up papers, elevator noises, and
more to help fill the scene. To help the player understand the
purpose of the game we included a start screen with voice over
of the message that they recieved from Greg. We also added
more intense background noise as the player escapes the data
server room to build tension in the scene.
4. THE GAME PLAY
The general gameplay of Investigation goes like this: the player
starts the game with a cryptic message from their friend Greg
talking about how his job is not what the player thinks it is and
the player needs to come to the office. After this message screen,
the player is set directly in the office but it is notably empty, with
no employees, no Greg. The player will then be enticed to move
through the scene and interact with various clues at their own
pace. Clues include things like stalker images of the player, the
player’s apartment blueprints, the player’s personal call logs,
and an activity log of the player’s daily life.
Figure 4: One of the clues the player can find
After the player has investigated these clues and found a key left
by Greg then, the elevator in the scene will be available for use.
The player will then venture downstairs where they discover a
large room full of data servers and a laptop. After interacting
with the laptop the player will realize that the entire office and
all the data servers are full of information about them, their
entire life documented in bits and bytes. After this realization,
the player will be compelled to shut the data servers down, as
they do this collisions will be activated and if the player escapes
to the door without being hit by a server then they win.
4.1 Interactivity
One of the main goals of Investigation is to allow the player at
least some agency to play the game how they wish. To achieve
this, we give the player access to the first scene in its entirety.
The player can choose which items to interact with within
whatever order they wish. The only constraint on the player in
the first level is that they cannot go in the elevator until they
have picked up enough clues.
5. CONCLUSION
Overall, Investigation embraces the theme of “tech” by playing
on humans' feelings of digital privacy while also featuring a
compelling and easy-to-follow narrative. The main pieces of the
gameplay include putting the player in the environment through
and first-person camera and allowing them to set their own pace
by giving them free rein of all elements in the first level. The
two scenes in the game contrast in style and gameplay but are
made this way to give the player a well-rounded gaming experi-
ence.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Bordwell, D. (2003). Film Art: An Introduction. McGraw
Hill.
[2] Jenkins, H. (2005). Game Design as Narrative Architecture.
Henry Jenkins Publications.