QUEENS GAME Artistic Research

INTRODUCTION

Queens Game explores the potential of the computer as dramatic storytelling medium. Presenting history through the lens of the medieval imagination, it aims to create something more than a game. Featuring a real medieval princess and a girl from the realm of King Arthur, innovative interactive dramaturgy offers an exciting ludo-narrative journey into the Middle Ages.

Queens Game provides a game of exploration in a virtual now-lost 14^th-century historical castle and the chance to get to know the child-queen who lived there and gain insight into her time. It also offers the experience not only of a medieval tale of adventure, but also a medieval way of telling it - forgotten for 600 years but now made possible again by contemporary games technology.

RESEARCH PRODUCTION PROJECT

The Queens Game studio laboratory pilot HiStoryGame brings together advanced film and interactive media storytelling research and 3D interactive games-development for entertainment, addressing engaging, dramatic narrativity on the frontiers of film, animated musical, period drama and interactive game.

The year is 1363. Queen Margrete (formerly Princess of Denmark) arrives at Akersborg – today’s castle of Akershus, Oslo – as the 10-year old bride of 23-year old King Håkon VI of Norway. Players explore, with Margrete, the virtual medieval royal stronghold - most of whose physical buildings no longer exist today. Little is known of Margrete’s actual childhood (for medieval childhood, see Orme, 2016); this gamestory is an imaginative dramatization of her introduction to her new home.

In the storygame, when the ship bringing Margrete to Norway docks below the castle of Akersborg, Oslo, a few nights before Christmas Eve 1363, her beloved and independent-minded cat jumps onto the quay and runs off into the snow.

Margrete follows her cat up to the castle where she meets Ingegerd, daughter of Head of Household, Marta. Ingegerd, the same age as Margrete, offers to help Margrete find her cat and get back to the ship ready to make her state appearance at the castle the next day.

While 10-year old Margrete, chasing the cat, gets to know Ingegerd and explores her new home, playing games which incidentally reveal what kind of food people were eating and how they tackled the tasks of daily life, she overhears what her subjects think of their child-queen and of current events in the world around them. The player discovers how life in a castle works and can gain skills points for medieval crafts.

In 1363, Norway is still recovering from the Black Death, the plague which reached the country in 1349, killing an estimated 60 percent of the population. Although the main wave of infection had passed by 1353 when Margrete was born, during her childhood and queenship Scandinavia was struggling to rebuild and restructure itself. In 1363, imaginative Margrete finds refuge from the grim post-plague world and the grey castle of cliff-top Akersborg in the colourful, legendary realm of the Round Table. There she becomes player-character Lunete, whose name is taken from the tales of Queen Gunvor and King Arthur. Queen Eufemia, Margrete’s husband’s great-grandmother, who lived at the castle of Akersborg 60 years before Margrete and was renowned for her book collection, had these tales translated from French and German into Norse.

In Margrete’s Round Table World, players explore medieval life with Lunete - who, rather than marry the man her parents have chosen for her, runs away to find her own way in life - through the musical and oral storytelling modes that the Middle Ages used to represent themselves and their own idealized stories. The visual aesthetic in this part of the game follows closely the style of 14th-century manuscript-painting.

HiStoryGame

Queens Game transposes the classic ‘story within a story’ narrative into the gameworld, inspired by the use of the format in the Round Table tale of the “Knight with the Lion”, translated from Chrétien de Troyes’ 12th-century French “Le Chevalier au Lion” into medieval Norse as “Ívens saga” (Bornholdt, 2015: 107-112), where the character Lunete is to be found. In this tale, the hero is transported from the frame-story ‘real’ world of the court of Queen Guinevere and King Arthur into the timeless, enchanted Realm of Adventure, where actions and characters challenge assumptions and values. In Queens Game, Margrete – and the player - is transported from the ‘real’ medieval castle of Akersborg into this same enchanted, timeless and challenging realm.

From Lunete’s adventures in the Round Table World, as well as learning about the lives of people outside the confines of the castle, Margrete - with the player - acquires skills needed by a girl who is to become an active medieval queen. Margrete was effectively sole regent of the whole of today’s Scandinavia (the Kalmar Union, which she was instrumental in bringing about) by the time she was 35, and ruled till her death aged 59. The traits that game-Margrete/Lunete need to foster to negotiate their world – for example: confidence, courage, kindness and initiative - are skills girls today sometimes struggle to acquire and use in their daily lives. It is hoped that the example of a real medieval princess (not a spun-sugar fantasy) who achieved greatness by her own efforts will help to encourage and inspire girls today.

A story needs first and foremost to be intriguing and surprising; a game needs to be fun, challenging and engaging. Interactive narrativity in a games environment uses space/time differently from classical dramatic storytelling: instead of acts of varying length and action of varying intensity, it unfolds in episodes/scenes set in territory which takes more or less time to navigate at differing speeds. Queens Game experiments with contemporary interactive technology to support rich, explorable, spatially-organised, dramatic narrative storygame, set against an evocative historical background.

Popular period costume drama often focuses on the lives and experiences of high-status historical personages, including some medieval princesses and queens, both for cinema - for example, The Other Boleyn Girl (dir. Justin Chadwick, UK/USA 2009), The Lion in Winter (dir. Anthony Harvey, UK/USA 1968) and for TV - for example, The White Princess (UK 2017), The White Queen (UK/USA 2013), The Tudors US/UK/Canada 2007-2010). The animated musical, Anastasia (dir. Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, USA 1997) also entered this territory. But video games have tended to focus on fantasy medieval worlds offering empire-building simulation -for example, Grand ages: medieval (Kalypso 2015) or Medieval dynasty (Toplitz 2020); and to feature male fighting player-characters - for example Kingdom come: deliverance (Warhorse 2018) (see Thomas, 2021; Thomas & Stang, 2022).

In Queens Game, the player-characters are female, not fighters, but thinkers, explorers and doers who acquire the skills they need to make the most of their creativity. They remain in the player’s control as the drama unfolds in real time. At the castle of Akersborg, there are no pre-set animated ‘cut-scenes’: because the dialogue is reconfigurable within scenes and not repeated within a session, it is always new. In Lunete’s Round Table World, there are one or two extremely short ‘cut-scenes’, but these are integrated fully into the narration - showing non-player characters (NPC’s) responding to player-character action and taking action themselves through the use of trigger-zones, rather than requiring the player to cue them.

As player-character Lunete approaches the Dragon’s cave, she triggers the giant bird to steal an egg, but the player does not lose control of her. When Lunete decides to help the dragon by boarding a boat to follow the bird, she shows courage, kindness and initiative. But there is no wind – until, triggered by Lunete boarding the boat, the dragon blows into the sail, sending her out to sea, to find her way alone. The enchanted boat carries Lunete, singing of this new phase in her adventure, across to the enchanted island – but the player still has control of the character. Lunete sings the bird on its nest to sleep with a lullaby, so as to sneak the stolen egg. The reward for her courage and initiative is learning her destiny. When Lunete returns the egg to the dragon, she can follow her path towards becoming Queen Gunvor’s minstrel.

Thus the player remains in control of Lunete all the time, and in the game of Lunete recovering the egg both gains experience points and progresses the story. Cues to the player come in hints from the helpful snailbird which pops up as needed, in dialogue between the characters in the storygame, and in song.

This approach promotes a close and engaging relationship between player, character and story.

The effect is similar to cinematic immersion, and original music and songs provide emotional depth as well as storytelling as they often do in animated features; but unlike traditional linear screen narrative, the way the Queens Game story is configured emerges from the route by which players choose to explore the storyscape, the speed at which they move, and observation of or interaction with the characters they find there. The gameworld itself, including the environmental conditions which set the dramatic scenes, is designed eventually to benefit from Snow Castle Games’ technology to evolve and respond to player interaction.

GAMEPLAY

Gameplay analysis suggests that the top 3 activities for female players, who tend to “want to make creative choices”, are puzzle solving, gathering, build and design (Brune, 2021), atmospheric exploration and interactive drama (Campbell, 2017), all fundamental to Queens Game.

Brie Code, previously an AI programmer at game-developers Ubisoft and Relic Entertainment, set up TRULUV Studios, Canada, in 2016, because, an avid gamer herself, she wanted to make games for people “who don’t like video games” – mainly female; who “think video games lack depth” and that from games they “don't learn anything or change as a person" - or were “just flat out repulsed by video games. Few women, for example, are going to play a video game with terrible portrayals of women”. Code found these unconvinced players were irritated by “failing at things [they] didn't care about in the first place” and put off by the fact that “they don't find their own cultural references or interests in video games” (Code, 2016).

Like Code, Queens Game would like to engage people who don’t like video games (as well as those who do) and girls who don’t usually find their own interests reflected in games. Queens Game is not adrenaline-driven; no-one gets shot or tortured or hacked to death; and it does not offer rewards or prizes for speed, competition, violence or successful combat. Instead it affords a kind of ‘slow play’, providing musical, aesthetic and cultural story-rewards through atmospheric exploration - facilitating reflection and contemplation underpinned by the storytelling and gameplay, which offer the opportunity to gain points for crafting and displaying courage, kindness, confidence and initiative.

Dramatically, the relationship between Ingegerd, who knows the castle and its inhabitants, and Margrete, who has just arrived, develops, as Ingegerd takes the lead (the player-character switches automatically from Margrete to Ingegerd as they enter the kitchen) and the girls converse. They both also interact with NPC’s, trying to get some fish to catch the runaway cat, whilst incidentally overhearing NPC conversation (triggered by proximity, not explicit cuing) regarding the child-queen, who is not expected to arrive for another day.

The fishgame introduces the gathering motif; and at the same time, shows how a medieval kitchen works, using as nearly accurate a construction of the genuine, now-lost kitchen at Akersborg, as possible. It shows, incidentally, what kind of food is prepared for Christmas, and who prepares it.

As Margrete explores her new home, she and the player encounter different dwellers in the castle and can gain new medieval skills.

In the game as a whole, players can collect the fantasy chess-pieces which make up Margrete’s set, to access the full repertoire of original songs in the gameworld. Experience points can be gained for creativity, kindness and collaboration as well as courage, confidence and initiative. You collect songs and music rather than weapons or material possessions and the emphasis is on exploration and creativity.

Conventions

The stereotyped portrayal of women and girls in video-games, where even the most apparently proactive and dynamic females have a tendency to wilt into damsels in distress in need of rescue by a male player-character, is well attested (Sarkeesian, 2013). In Queen’s Game, Lunete rescues herself and others, finding her own way in the world and setting game-Margrete an example which real-life Margrete’s later policies suggest would have resonated with her.

Unlike the girls dressed in boys clothing, behaving like boys, who tend to inhabit medieval fantasy game worlds (Thomas & Stang, 2022; Thomas, 2021), the player characters and main non-player characters (NPC’s) in Queens Game, designed and animated by a female artist, have costumes and bearing based on 14^th-century manuscript illustrations of women and girls.

Queens Game experiments with techniques from stage and screen, such as character-based dialogue and unfolding relationships, music and song, to enrich emotional identification and dramatic effect.

FINDING YOUR WAY

The characters, challenges and outlooks game-Margrete encounters in Queens Game and in the persona of Lunete in the fantasy world of the Round Table playfully prepare a girl to handle the role of a queen in the making, who has both responsibilities and authority at home in her castle of Akersborg.

Many girls, and women, today will hopefully find themselves recognising and responding to the challenges of the game, and to Margrete’s feelings and actions. The dramaturgical approach should also appeal to those who enjoy period costume-drama and live-action or animated musicals. To those who don’t usually see their own experiences reflected in games, or who feel excluded by their adrenaline-driven ethos but nonetheless enjoy interactive, explorable storygame, Queens Game will, it is hoped, prove intriguing, fun and engaging, providing an insight into life in a medieval castle for a 10-year old child queen.

At the same time, players are immersed in a medieval aesthetic and way of storytelling in the World of the Round Table, to which imaginative Margrete, like real fourteenth century people, retreats - and which are strikingly well adapted to game technologies. Visitors will hopefully emerge with a strong feeling for the Middle Ages and their culture, based on authentic inspiration in the gameworld.

Queens Game’s incorporation of chance operations and reconfigurable, spatially-organised narrativity, including music and dialogue which is never repeated in a session, aims to make it surprising, however often it is played by those who fall under the spell of its medieval world, its music and its characters.

AUGMENTED REALITY

The Queens Game project, in addition to creating a prototype pilot video HiStoryGame, explores, with the Danish company Interaktive Oplivelser, the potential of an innovative on-site Augmented Reality experience at today’s castle of Akershus, incorporating research and some assets from the game. The ic3d stereoscopic viewer is an effective, convenient device for viewing recorded ingame footage, providing instant time-travel by enabling visitors to the castle to explore, from within the locations themselves, the virtual furnished and populated rooms and courtyards of Queens Game’s (Unreal Engine) navigable castle of Akersborg, as it was in the fourteenth century. No other interaction device – such as tablet, smartphone, headset or goggles – is necessary for the ic3d AR experience. This offers instant, situated, hands-free immersion in the colourful and dynamic animated world of the past created for Queens Game.

DISSEMINATION

Exhibition

Part of Queens Game was included as a standalone interactive exhibit, 'Medieval Akershus Castle', in the international exhibition ‘Vår fru dronning Margrete - Our noble lady Queen Margrete’ (March 2022 – September 2023: https://kultur.forsvaret.no/fo...).

As well as the Queens Game explorable model of the Bjørvika landscape and medieval castle, most of which is no longer visible after the ravages of time and rebuilding, this ‘minigame’ exhibit, designed to fit the timescale of a museum visit, includes characters and original dialogue and music from the HiStoryGame. As an owl or a cat, you can travel through time to visit the castle, furnished and populated as it was in the 14^th century. Like Margrete and her companion and real-life best friend, Ingegerd, you can overhear the conversation of the inhabitants of the castle as they go about their business in the North Wing, where the kitchens and great hall are situated.

For the ‘Vår fru dronning Margrete - Our noble lady Queen Margrete’ exhibition, Extended Media (Company Director Rafal Hanzl, Senior Research Associate, Queens Game) made a 120cm solid 3D-printed model of the medieval castle, developed from the newly-researched Queens Game computer model, in consultation with chief curator Tom Andersen. They used projection-mapping to show various theories of when and how the parts now lost or built over were constructed. This installation will, after the exhibition, become a permanent feature of the Visitor Centre.

For the exhibition, the Museum also commissioned Queens Game visual artist, Wenche Hellekås, to create a series of 6 images depicting important moments in Queen Margrete’s life, using the historical research and style developed for the HiStoryGame. This sequence of images will also become part of the permanent display at Akershus Visitor Centre.

In early 2023, in consultation with Maureen Thomas, guided by historian Tom Andersen (Curator for Akershus castle and fortress Norwegian Armed Forces Joint Services/Armed Forces Museum, and Manager of the Visitor Centre), Extended Media agreed to revise the Unreal-engine navigable model of Queen Margrete’s castle to conform with additional archive documentation and updated interpretations. The revised model was instantiated in Unreal Engine as a new interactive screen-based exhibit, Medieval Akersborg, in time for the Oslo Medieval Festival, May 2023.

The Medieval Akersborg interactive exhibit, where the castle cat now explores not only the interior of the North Wing and the Inner Ward, but also the Outer Ward, including the timber buildings where the humbler castle dwellers lived and worked, will remain as a permanent attraction at the Visitor Centre.

Public presentation and trial

The Queens Game studio laboratory pilot demonstrator was presented for PKU at the Artistic Research Café, Myrens Verksted, Oslo, on 30 May 2022, contextualised with slides. Visitors had the opportunity to try the HiStoryGame and participate in Q & A. The music was presented in a live performance by composer and singer Kariina Gretere.

REFERENCES

• Bornholdt, C. (2015). The Old Norse-Icelandic transmission of Chrétien de Troyes’ romances. In M. Kalinke (Ed.) The Arthur of the North, (pp. 107 – 112). University of Wales Press.
• Brune, M. (2021). Zooming in on female gamers with consumer insights data. Newzoo March 31, 2021. https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/zooming-in-on-female-gamers-with-consumer-insights-data/.
• Campbell, C. (2017, Jan 20). Which games are women and girls playing? Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/2017/1/20/14337282/games-for-women-and-girls.
• Code, B. (2016). Video games are boring. GameIndustryBiz, 07 December. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/...
• Orme, N. (2003). Medieval children. Yale University Press.
  
• Sarkeesian, A. (2013). Tropes vs women in video games. https://feministfrequency.com/video-series/.
  
• Thomas, M. & Stang, B. (2022). A serioius game for cultural heritage? , pp 334-374 in O. Bernardes and V. Amorim (ed). Handbook on promoting economic and social development through serious games. IGI Global.
• Thomas, M. (2021). Cinematic forms and cultural heritage, pp. 122 -141 in Breeze, M. (ed). Forms of the cinematic. Bloomsbury Press.

Publications:

Thomas, M. & Stang, B. (2022). A serious game for cultural heritage?, pp. 334 - 374 in O. Bernardes & V. Amorim (Eds.). Handbook on promoting economic and social development through serious games. IGI Global. https://www.igi-global.com/book/handbook-research-promoting-economic-social/281145

Thomas, M. (2021). Cinematic forms and cultural heritage, pp. 122 -141 in Breeze, M. (Ed.). Forms of the cinematic. Bloomsbury Press. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/forms-of-the-cinematic-9781501361425/

Presentations

• 25th Anniversary Celebration, Norwegian Film School, Lillehammer Campus, Inland Norway University, 30 November 2022. The Queens Game
  pilot demonstrator is tested by visitors to the public exhibition-space, where it is available all day. https://www.inn.no/om-hogskole...

• Artistic Research Café (https://www.filmskolen.no/en/r...) Norwegian Film School, Oslo, 30 May 2022 Professor Maureen Thomas (Norwegian Film School) & Bendik Stang (Executive Creative Director, Snowcastle Games Oslo) present and demonstrate Queens Game live. Kariina Gretere sings her settings of original lyrics by Maureen Thomas composed for Queens Game against a projection of Medieval Akersborg Castle from the HiStoryGame played live by Wenche Hellekås. Sound mixed live by Idunn Snædis Agustsdottir. Immersive contextualising 3D animated visuals created and mixed live by Rafal Hanzl.

• PKU Artistic Research Forum (online) 14 March 2022 Professor Maureen Thomas (Norwegian Film School) Interactive Storytelling: HiStoryGame - Queens Game https://diku.no/en/events/artistic-research-spring-forum-2022
• Artistic Research Café (Norwegian Film School and Norwegian Film Institute Lab), Norwegian Film School Oslo (Online), March 2021 Professor Maureen Thomas (Norwegian Film School) & Game Developer and Director Bendik Stang (Snowcastle Games Oslo) in conversation: How can artistic research at a film school and professional practice at a games development/production studio benefit each other? Queens Game.
• Norwegian Artistic Research Forum, Norwegian Film School, Lillehammer September 2019 Maureen Thomas (Norwegian Film School) presents and Bendik Stang (Snow Castle) demonstrates Queens Game second pre-production prototype: June - September 2019 https://diku.no/arrangementer/artistic-research-autumn-forum-2019
• Artistic Research Café March 2019 Maureen Thomas presents Queens Game initial pre-production experimental prototype: January – May 2019 work achieved and in progress https://www.nfi.no/kalender/artistic-research-cafe
• Artistic Research Café (Norwegian Film School and Norwegian Film Institute Lab), Norwegian Film School Oslo, October 2018 Maureen Thomas presents Queens Game: proposed project https://www.filmskolen.no/artikler/2018/ar-cafe-1

QUEENS GAME CORE TEAM

Principal Investigator: Professor Maureen Thomas (research, story architecture, dramaturgy, dialogue, direction)
Senior Research Associate: Dr Rafal Hanzl (PhD, Leon Schiller Polish National Film, TV and Theatre School, Łódź. Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (PKU) Fellowship completed 2019). (3D sculpting, 3D model-rigging, 3D castle modelling, Unreal Engine project optimization, Unreal texture creation, 2D-animation, panoramic site photography, video editing, Perforce management, web-design, graphics, creative technology research)

Creative Practice Research Assistants:
Kariina Gretere (MA Music Therapy, Roehampton University, London; MMus Composing for New Media, London College of Music and Media; BA (Hons) Humanities with Music, Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts/Open University UK) (music and sound)
Wenche Hellekås (MFA Animation Storytelling, Norwegian Film School; BA 3D Animation, the Gameschool, Hamar) (concept art, 3D character art, modelling and animation)
Sindre Lie (BA Game Design, Vocational Diploma 3D & Animation, Westerdals Kristiania University College) (3D art, environment design)
Carlos Maldonado (Bachelors’ programme, Animation and Digital Art, Inland Norway University, Hamar campus, 2019-22) (Rigging and animation)
Johannes Skjeltorp-Borgaas (Bachelors’ programme, Game Technology and Simulation, Inland Norway University, Hamar campus, 2019-22) (Unreal programming)
Amir Soltani (BSc Computer Science University of Tabriz; PhD candidate, Dept of Architecture, University of Cambridge; Director, metrowave) (historical architectural modelling)
Emil Walseth (Noroff University College Bergen (2020 – 23) 3D and Animation; Åsane Folkehøgskole: Game Development (2020) (Unreal programming)
Iðunn Ágústsdóttir (BA New Media Music Composition, Iceland University of the Arts) (audio)

Special thanks to:
Ann Iren Bratt (financial management, co-ordination and support, Den norske filmskolen)
Christian Fremming Olsen (technical art – player-character model rigging)
Christopher Hobbs (design - chess pieces)
Interaktive Oplevelser ApS (ic3d stereoscopic viewer)

For Snowcastle Games A/S Oslo:
Erik Hoftun (liaison, co-ordination)
Nikola Kuresevic (games design)
Theo Nogueira (audio)
Bendik Stang (games design)
Fredrik Tyskerud (initial player-character modelling)

Snow Castle interns from Westerdals Kristiania University College, Oslo (2019):
Alexander Espeseth (project management)
Terje Ballestad (game design)
Erik Holst (sound)
Sindre Lie (3D art, environment)
Sindre Majgren Uthaug (3D art, character models)
Matthias Tellefsen (programming)
Rolf Jackob Thommesen (3D art, rigging, animation)

For the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum and Visitor Centre, Akershus Fortress and Castle:
Tom Andersen (Chief Curator & Historian)

ABOUT PROFESSOR MAUREEN THOMAS

Professor Maureen Thomas has integrated her love of medieval literature, drama and oral tradition into much of her creative work since graduating from the University of Cambridge, where she read English Literature and Drama with Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic. A Dame Bertha Phillpotts Bursary enabled her to carry out research at the Institute of Icelandic Studies, Reykjavik on myth as drama and the chivalric legends in Old Norse/Icelandic, before becoming a tutor and research fellow at University College London’s Dept of Scandinavian Studies. In parallel, while working as a dramatist and director (and script-reader for Channel Four Films), Maureen was a tutor in Screenwriting at the National Film and Television School UK, also developing and guiding film, TV, animation and documentary projects; she became Head of Screen Arts in 1994. In 2000, after working with Norsk Film and Statens Studiesenter for Film, Oslo, Maureen was appointed Professor of Narrativity and Interactivity at the Norwegian Film School, where, since 2018, she has been a senior researcher and research advisor. She is now Professor Emeritus.

Selected Production Credits

• Homo Novus. 2018. [Screenwriter] (feature film adaptation of Anšlavs Eglītis Latvian novel) Director Anna Viduleja. Production: Film Angels. National Film Centre of Latvia Centenary Prize for Screen Adaptation (script); most-viewed centenary film - Rigas Nami Award; Latvian Film Prize. (Teaser: https://vimeo.com/251614479; Trailer: https://vimeo.com/280358531).
• WE. 2016. [Writer/Director] (integrated media ‘total theatre’ performance) with Studio for Electronic Theatre (www.setlab.eu), Roundhouse & Camden People’s Theatre, London.
• Marvellous Transformations. 2015. [Dramatist, Lyricist and Reconfigurable-voicescript Writer/Director] (installation – digital 3D art by Marianne Selsjord, supported by the Norwegian Arts Council; music by Kariina Gretere) (Jock Colville Hall, Cambridge).
• GhostCinema. 2013. [Story-architect, Director, co-Writer] (interactive locative Apple App) Production: Universities of Cambridge, Liverpool and Edinburgh in partnership with the Survey of London at English Heritage (AHRC-funded).
• Viking Seeress. 2010. [Story-architect, Writer, Director] (live integrated media performance using realtime navigable 3D ‘set’ on stage) with performers Kariina Gretere, Helen McGregor; designer Marianne Selsjord (MIST, Cambridge).
• RuneCast. 2007. [Interactive Story-architect, Writer, Director] (interactive cross-platform RT3DVE & video cultural heritage media art – installation and broadband for smartphone). Spatially-organised aleatoric dramatic & musical narrative based on Viking mythology and aesthetics (EU IP funded).
• In Norway:
  Aldri mer 13 (Goodbye 13). 1996. [Screenwriter with director Sirin Eide] (feature film). Production: Moviemakers. LUCAS Award for Best Film, Frankfurt International Festival 1996, and Best Film Award, Antwerp International Film Festival 1997.

Maureen’s creative practice research and teaching at Higher Education Institutions (incorporating doctoral supervision/examination) includes: University of Cambridge; University College, London; Narrativity Studio, Swedish Interactive Institute, Malmø; Media Lab, Aalto University, Helsinki; Digital Studios, Goldsmiths University of London; Dept of Art, Design & Architecture, University of Ulster; Welsh Film School, University of South Wales; National Film & Television School, UK (former Head of Screen Arts and Chair, Academic Standards Committee).

Selected Publications

• Thomas, M. & Stang, B. (2022). A serious game for cultural heritage?, pp. 334 - 374 in O. Bernardes & V. Amorim (Eds.). Handbook on promoting economic and social development through serious games. IGI Global.
• Thomas, M. 2021. Cinematic forms and cultural heritage, pp. 122 -141 in Breeze, M. (ed). Forms of the cinematic. Bloomsbury Press.
• Speed, C., Thomas, M. & Barker, C. 2017. Ghost Cinema app: temporal ubiquity and the condition of being in everytime, pp. 313-336 in Penz, F. & Koeck, R. (ed). Cinematic urban geographies. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Prager, P., Thomas, M. & Selsjord, M. 2015. Transposing, transforming and transcending tradition in creative digital media, pp. 141-199 in Harrison, D. (ed). Handbook of research on digital media and creative technologies. IGI Global.
• Thomas, M., Selsjord, M, & Zimmer, R. 2011. Museum or mausoleum? Electronic shock therapy, pp 10 – 35 in Lytras, Damiani, Diaz & Ordonez De Pablos (ed). Digital culture and e-tourism: technologies, applications and management. IGI Global.
• Thomas, M. 2009. Taking a chance on losing yourself in the game’. Digital creativity, 20:4, 211–234 (Special Issue: Women in Games).
• Thomas, M. 2005
  (i). Playing with chance and choice – orality, narrativity and cinematic media, pp. 371-442 in Bushoff, B. (ed.). Developing interactive narrative content: sagas/sagasnet. High Text.
  (ii). The power of narrative: 2D, 3D, 4D', pp. 51-76 in Blackwell, A. & MacKay, D. (ed). Power. Cambridge University Press.
• Thomas, M. 2003. Beyond digitality: cinema, console games and screen language – the spatial organisation of narrative, pp. 51 – 134 in Thomas, M. & Penz. F. (ed). Architectures of illusion. Intellect.

Web layout and implementation: Rafal Hanzl. Last updated 06 November 2023.