Zombies! Run! UOW’s been infected!!

You heard right folks: the university has been overrun with flesh-hungry zombies! Or maybe they’re just students. Anyway!

This is my final map, the one that ended up becoming my assignment. I know it’s crude-looking (I’m still not very good at digital art), but it took me ages and I actually like it. The concept behind it was fun and I really enjoyed making this map.

For this I used an app on my phone, called ‘Zombies, Run!’ The app is designed both for fitness and entertainment for those who love a good zombie apocalypse. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where the player (affectionately named Runner 5) finds themself crash-landing in the township of Abel (based in the UK) and having to fight their way through a zombie-infested hospital to gather supplies. The story is very in-depth, using a combination of radio transmissions, notifications, warnings and your own personal music playlist. There are many different missions and side quests to choose from, each one following along from the last with the plot progressing new and exciting ways. You can choose from GPS or Accelerometer tracking, which comes into play when the player gets chased by zombies. You’ll have to really run if you want to escape them. Once the mission is completed, the player can expand their home base using the supplies they gathered on their run, ensuring the survival of their townspeople.

I decided to use this app to make a “real life” zombie apocalypse map. It shows my run and where particular events occurred, I traced a map of the campus from a picture on Google Images and edited it to look as though it’s been bloodied and battered. The legend shows a key of what each symbol on the map stands for.

My inspiration for this particular map, and the reason I chose it to be my main project, is because I have always had a fascination with the undead and whether or not it could be a real-life possibility. I wanted to express that interest in this map by making it as realistic as possible. I’ve decided to turn it into a sort of semi-interactive thing with creepy music and maybe some props or something. I want this map to make people almost think that it’s real, and think about the “what if” that has seemed to be a running theme for me during this whole project.

I hope this is enough for a pass, even though it’s not pretty. I worked hard on it! I hope it gets some good reviews 🙂

Loki’s Journey – A Rabbit’s Map

This is the third mapping experiment I have done for my research. I decided it would be interesting to map a living creature and how it behaves. So, with the help of a good friend, I took my rabbit Loki out of his hutch, put on his harness, and allowed him to run around the garden.

As my friend ran around the garden with him, following where he wanted to go, I observed and mapped out where he went. The dots represent spots where he stopped, and I labelled some of the ones where he did something other than just standing. It was interesting to note that some areas he actually designated for particular activities, such as digging, sleeping and grooming. The activity took us about an hour. He had a particularly fun time playing in the garden at the top left corner of the map, so we stayed there for quite a while. Funny how rabbits spend more time playing than sleeping.

I’ve labelled particular landmarks in my garden to give you a rough idea of where everything is. This is a pretty simple map, as I needed to be quick to keep up with Loki’s antics. He’s rather energetic for a bunny!

My inspiration for this map was animal tracking. I have a thorough love and interest in animals, and tracking their patterns is one of the most intriguing things ever. Animal tracking, and the maps made from those tracks, is an important social/biological experiment in order to keep track of animal populations in the wild and where they move to. I wanted to try and recreate this in my map, thinking about whether wild rabbits share the same traits as my domesticated rabbit has.

A Map of my Journey on Wikipedia

Have you ever been at your computer, bored out of your mind, probably supposed to be studying, and then randomly started searching things on Wikipedia?

I have. I do it all the time, I like to call it a “search journey”. Where you search one thing, and then go through and click random links until you come to something totally unrelated.

As my second experiment, I decided to create a word map of a search journey through Wikipedia. I started with the word “garden” (as that was the focus for our mapping projects in class) and then proceeded to click through the first hyperlinked word in each page that went to.

This map simply shows how “garden” and “society” are related through simple searching and word association.

I’d like to do another one similar, but instead of searching just the first word of each page, I’ll rather go through and click the links that interest me. I think that will make a much more interesting and diverse map.

Map Experimentation: Map of a Plague

I love the concept of “what if” maps. By this I mean, a map depicting how things would pan out if a particular event were to happen. This is the theme I’ve decided to follow with my maps.

I know I’m behind, but that’s because I was convinced until now that I had to do my map and experiments based on the Foundations garden. Once I realised that wasn’t the case, I decided to go full speed ahead with mapping according to my interests.

This particular experiment combines two of my favourite interests – gaming and diseases. Yes, it’s an odd combination. Allow me to explain.

The game ‘Plague Inc’ (designed by one-man game developer Ndemic Creations) is an apocalyptic game where the player creates and evolves a disease with the sole intent of destroying humanity. The aim of the game is to infect and kill every single human being on the planet, without first being eradicated by a cure. The game is challenging, strategic and above all, addictive.

I created this map through my own playthrough of the game. I took a stock image from Google Images that I thought would be appropriate, and opened it in Photoshop. As I progressed through the game, I would mark out where and when particular events would happen, using the in-game news reports and the game’s own time.

Here’s a quick profile of my disease:

Name: Cava Bug (yes, I named it after the class, CAVA101)
Disease Type: Bacteria
Origin: Australia
First Infection: 29/3/2014
First Symptom: Coughing
Transmission: Airbourne and waterbourne

I began by documenting which countries the bug travelled to, and which ones it infected. The blue dotted lines represent travel by boat, and the orange solid lines represent travel by plane. After a while, as my disease began to rapidly infect more countries, it became too hard for me to document them all, so I just recorded as many as I could in the first part of the game, before my disease went out of control. Each time another country was infected, I would pause the game and write the date of the infection. Each of the red dots and dates represent a new infection. They are all very scattered, so it’s a bit too hard to read them in chronological order. I recorded any new evolutions to my bug in purple, near the country where it first happened. Once my disease was spotted, I recorded anything to do with the cure effort in green. It was interesting to see which countries attempted to lead the cure effort, and which ones succeeded and failed. Although the cure effort began in Australia, where the disease originated, it was the UK that eventually took over and successfully found the cure. In the later stages of the game, when things started to get scary, I recorded particular dramatic events in yellow, such as government collapses and nuclear explosions.

The result here is a very complicated and chaotic map of how a disease affects the world.

I might try another one of these at a later date, and perhaps make it a bit more comprehensive. I had a lot of fun with this one, and am eager to try and win this time!