Pong Fest, the Final Degree Project (TFG) in Interactive Communication by Cesc Grau, is a point and click graphic adventure computer game that explores an historic moment in gaming culture: the creation of Pong. 

The game puts us in the shoes of Allan Alcorn, engineer and designer of Pong, on his first day at Atari, the company that developed it. The aim of Pong Fest is to find the inspiration that led the engineer to design the iconic video game through a series of serendipitous events. This interdisciplinary proposal combines historical documentation, video game design, narrative and script, graphic design and programming and launches a debate about issues such as how video games should be designed.

This game, which is about video games, has immense informative and educational potential as a non-formal tool in education and means of introducing secondary-school and university students to gaming culture and interactive communication. And it does so by recreating a crucial episode in the medium’s history, while also reflecting on video game design.

This project is still in prototype phase, with the programming completed for one of the puzzles and the other three pending implementation.

 

TEAM: Cesc Grau

MENTOR: Anna Guxens, video game designer and DTIC-UPF researcher

 

An #In Residence in the Tallers Area project.