《Threshold 4.0》— XR双玩家游戏（展览影片） Original

As my graduation project in Design for Performance and Interaction at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, Threshold is a two-player XR game experience interrogating the power dynamics in Chinese fandom culture, which builds a game narrative from the interactions, behaviors and relationships between its two players. Through an asymmetric structure of gameplay, it illustrates the changing dynamics of the idol-fan relationships in attraction, collaboration, defense, antagonism, and termination. This forms the basis of the players’ interaction, one performing the role of "idol", the other of "fan" to explore five different stages of the dynamic relationships between fans and idols in the context of the Chinese fandom culture: entertainment-social, intense-personal, borderline-pathological, antagonism, and termination stage. 
 
Threshold is based on the mapping of relationships between real and virtual game spaces, where characters and props test the porosity of boundaries between virtual and physical worlds. On the one hand, the virtual game guides the players’ perception of movement in space; on the other hand, the application of interactive props and human actuation builds a bridge of physical interaction and emotional perception between two players, emphasizing the social significance of the two-player game. In addition, the innovative asymmetric gameplay enhances the imagination, randomness and fun between players. 
 
Structured as a linear narrative, the game and its corresponding interaction design provide ways and means of interrogating the often ambiguous and immaterial nature of para-social relationships through a powerfully direct embodied experience.