Wits School of Arts (ETDs)

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A Beginner’s Guide to Puzzle Design: Creating an applied guide for effective puzzle design in videogames
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-06) Prinz, Erik; Flusk, Timothy; Reid, Kieran
While a vast collection of information exploring effective puzzle design exists, it is riddled with conflicting opinions and inconsistent formats, making it arduous to engage with. This research aims to curate this collection, organizing its knowledge into an applied guide for puzzle design in videogames. This will be accomplished through an amalgamation of design principles offered by selected works of oundational literature, and the insights contained within the design philosophies of three industry professionals (Jonathan Blow, Kim Swift, and Arvi ‘Hempuli’ Teikari). The synthesis of these two families of information will be aided by the simultaneous development of a puzzle platforming videogame. Through a process of iteration and playtesting, this game will be used to assess the value and accuracy of the developing guide. With careful consideration of useful structures present in the foundational literature, the plethora of existing information can be reformatted to be user-friendly and appliable by novel puzzle designers.
Analysing the player's involvement in video game character animation
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2021) Ponde, Rugare; Whitcher, Ray
This dissertation investigates the impact of animation on player interest in an existing video game character. There is high demand and expectation regarding character animation quality, yet understanding and achieving this standard is complex and challenging. The quality of a character’s animation is often derived from its direct appeal to the audience and how its representation informs their impression. However, there is a gap in the literature where there is little on how style representation plays a role in character perception and identification in video games. A practice-led approach was used to understand the relationship between player involvement and the player-character's appeal. The process involved the creation of an animation reel to demonstrate how a popular video game character's acceptance can change based on a player's perception of style in the character's animation. I used Link from the video game Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (Nintendo, 2018). The reel was presented to adults between 18 and 35 to review the animations. Using the process of creative exegesis, the theories and concepts about character appeal, animation design, and player involvement were combined to analyse and critique the contributing factors that inform the perception of the creative work. The results from this study indicate that a change in movement style impacted the perception of Link and the participant's demonstrated interest to play him. This study confirms that style representations are an important design consideration to improve a character’s appeal. This topic may benefit the art and technique of character design and how to improve on it.
Bridging the Digital Divide: Afrocentric Approaches in the 2021 My Body My Space Online Arts Festival for Rural Emakhazeni, Mpumalanga
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-08) Khathi, Nomfundo Linami; Ntombela, Nontobeko
The attempt at online arts festival for a rural community seems to be executed in ways that do not consider issues of digital dissemination in historically marginalised spaces. Those organising events requiring internet access in rural communities overlook that rural areas are not very ‘well’ developed. The study does not reject online arts festivals for historically marginalised areas but suggests that the approach taken should take into account rural issues related to resources. The hindrances with online access for rural communities have not been adequately addressed. The theory of Afrocentrism emphasises that Africans need to make Africa the centre of their own problems and solutions, by advocating that Africans need to locate themselves historically and culturally. They need to acknowledge their context and situation so that they can provide solutions aligned with their problems. The study notices a paradigm shift in South Africa, as the MBMS festival is now being held in the rural Emakhazeni community, moving away from the ‘traditionally known’ urban festival locations. This shift includes moving from an in-person MBMS festival to an online format in 2021, which has been affected by data and internet coverage issues in rural Emakhazeni. While the festival is accessible online by anyone, its original intention was to serve the Emakhazeni rural community. Through a predominantly qualitative research approach, primary and secondary data were examined, exploring the 2021 MBMS online arts festival hosted on WhatsApp for rural Emakhazeni. The stakeholders in this study include the organisers of the MBMS festival, the Department of Arts and Culture, the Emakhazeni community members, and the performers of the festival. I engage d with multiple sources, to explore how these paradigm shifts could be envisioned or executed differently with an Afrocentric perspective. Although the MBMS online festival is curated in a way that appears to respond to the modern discourses on accessibility and audience development, it simultaneously forgets that rural areas are not very well developed in many parts of South Africa. Through an exploration of the 2021MBMS festival, I unpack the way it established online accessibility and address the implications of this for the rural Emakhazeni. This research contributes to the investigation of what was silenced during the colonial and apartheid eras in South Africa, when many individuals were marginalised and denied access. Both practical steps and policy-oriented approaches are suggested by the study.
Constructing the Afrocyborg in VR 360 Cinema: A Critical Investigation into how Two African Women Filmmakers Collaborate to Construct Prosocial African Science Fiction in Virtual Reality Filmmaking
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-10) Passchier, Shmerah; Koba, Yolo; Sakota, Tanja
The Afrocyborg semiotic construct is a neologism inspired by cyborg scholarship, beginning with Donna Haraway’s 1985, A Cyborg Manifesto, which materialised at the zenith of the Third Industrial Revolution (3IR), and the appearance of the domestic personal computer (PC) in the late twentieth century. This contribution to cyborg discourse re-focuses the Western science/fiction gaze of “cyborgology” by foregrounding African cyborg realities at the centre of the new zeitgeist of 4IR-driven XR technologies, specifically the VR HMD as an immersive computing device, which is a cyborg prosthetic extension of human ocular abilities (Gray 1995: 1). Moratiwa Molema and I formed the Afrocyborg VR Collective as an Afro-technofeminist coalition, and solidarity support group for collective womanist filmmaking. This methodology foregrounds the technological empowerment of women in relation to VR as a medium while focusing on prosocial subject matter in the domains of eco-justice and racial-gender-justice (Ogunyemi 2006: 21). For this reason, the Afrocyborg VR Collective make Prosocial VR films in the genre of African Science Fiction, which is a counter-hegemonic narrative lens through which to generate “cyborg consciousness” about “oppositional consciousness” (Sandoval 2020: 408; hooks 1992: 264). Cyborg oppositional consciousness is expressed as “Fourth VR” (Wallis & Ross 2020: 1). An Afro-technofeminist, technopolitical framework advances filmmaking discourse and praxis by autodidactic online learning of how to operate VR equipment, thereby overcoming our tech-inferiority complex with a thought experiment we call the “Dora Milaje mind trick” (Coogler 2018). As we learn, we also teach VR skills to our students and communities of youth to share knowledge of 4IR tools, specifically with women, to empower them with 4IR STEAM skills as a technopolitical, educational and future-proofing empowerment strategy. The Afrocyborg Collective has made two VR films in the genre of Prosocial VR as part of the creative praxis of Quantum Botho/Ubuntu in the making of The Cosmic Egg, which is a call to elevated environmental consciousness, and The Eye of Rre Mutwa, which confronts “white fragility” about the technological developments of the 4IR (DiAngelo 2018). By experimenting with new gaze regimes offered by the exponential medium of VR, with its multiple lenses that create 360-degree spherical story worlds, we demonstrate how the “medium is the muthi” when used in the mode of Prosocial VR. Therefore, the construction of an expanded prosocial gaze in VR, in the genre of African futurism, contributes to the decolonial undoing of oppressive power structures by generating representations of Africa that seek to apprehend the stereotypes of Hegelian racial prejudice and “poverty porn” that persist in global media representations (Kahiu 2017).
Mapping the Ethnographic Expedition: A Re-Configuration of the Frobenius Archive
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-06) Boshoff, Janus Jacobus; Wintjes, Justine
This dissertation considers the building and dwelling (archiving) activities of researchers working within archive spaces as intrinsically connected to the treatment of pictorial material as a primary archive source. The report focusses on the cumulative work of a group of researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand, called the Frobenius Working Group (FWG), in relation to the historic activities of and archive material produced by a German archaeological and ethnographic expedition group under the direction of Professor Leo Frobenius that visited southern Africa between 1928 and 1930 (known as the 9th Expedition). By exploring past and present tensions and connections between the landscape and archive, and the activities and working practices of the FWG and the Frobenius expedition, and by closely studying pictorial archive material, the aim of this research is to interrogate whether the archive can be re-configured as a space where active participation can lead to new and alternative interpretations and understandings. The paper is written in a theoretical, reflective, first person narrative and processual style which reflects the researcher’s personal journey and the thinking processes inherent in the work of research, and explores the contents of and access to the physical and online Frobenius archive, the geography of the landscape and the archive, and the modes of research of the 9th Expedition and the FWG. The research project is thus situated within a physical and a conceptual landscape which suggests that research activities can be considered dwelling practices. The application of theoretical frameworks of landscape, place and space, dwelling and building, provides insight into the complexities and possibilities of generating new interpretations of and additions to the archive, and makes a case for archives as spaces of dwelling where activity bridges time and space, and the researcher can become both active viewer and contributor. The dissertation postulates that the archive can be a field of discovery where active participation can generate new material and insights which deepen our connection to landscape and social activity. The archive as dwelling place is considered not just as an external entity but also as dwelling in us. The emphasis is on configuration and dialogue as the mode of dwelling through which we not only make the archive a dwelling place, but ourselves a dwelling place for the archive. Archiving is a dynamic process in which the sources are considered in order to be configured into new orders. This dynamism requires the bridging and fusing of horizons into productive and co creative partners. This research report finds that the archive does not require re-configuring for it is already a re-configured space. The archive marks the beginning of the researcher’s journey which does not only look at history but, through the research activity, contributes to the constant and continual re-configuration of the archive. This journey conforms to processes of living which are temporal and shaped by social interaction and the continual formation of the landscape. In turn, these life processes contribute to the constant re-configuration of the landscape and archive space. By contributing new material, knowledge and understandings, the researcher forms part of the making of history, thereby ensuring the continued growth, life, and relevancy of the archive.
South African restaurant reviewing: a changing landscape?
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Stiehler-van der Westhuiz, Adele
This study investigates the changes that have taken place in the South African restaurant reviewing landscape between 2000 and 2020. Changes in society’s relationship with food, together with a changing media landscape and the end of apartheid, have combined to create a colourful cocktail of cultural changes in South Africa, which is currently academically underexplored. A historical methodology was followed to track these changes and included the compilation of an archive of 426 reviews published about three restaurants chosen from Eat Out magazine’s 20th-anniversary issue. Through a close reading and content analysis of the archive and by drawing on public sphere and cultural consecration theories the study found that the food reviewing field was neither inclusive, not particularly professional if measured by the guidelines set out by the legendary New York Times reviewer, Craig Claiborne, and that there were two distinct decades in the archive. The first was dominated by positive reviews in traditional media written mainly by professional reviewers. The second decade represented the “democratisation” of online reviewing with a significant increase in reviews (positive and negative) written mainly by amateurs on rating sites. The fact that white females dominated the reviewing space throughout the 20 years under study is evidence of the legacy of apartheid and confirms that privilege and power still shaped the foodscape. This study also tracked the tensions between players in the restaurant reviewing field and confirmed that amateur reviewers did not reject culinary capital but rather reinforced it, and professional reviewers embraced rather than avoided the digital media platforms. Amateur reviewers applied different reviewing criteria and wrote consumer assessments focused on lived experiences, rather than cultural assessments, like many professional reviewers. This study therefore suggests that their reviews are complementary to professional reviews, not competing. The arrival of Web 2.0 and mobile phones also changed the form of reviews radically during the 20 years, with commenting and sharing functionalities turning some reviews into vibrant conversations and photographs and videos becoming the new way to review.
Stumbling on Hybridity’s Playground: Exploring Design-Centric Thinking, Media Boundaries and Limitation in A Hybrid Text Space.
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-07) Goldberg, Peta Nicole; Reid, Kieran
This research posits an experimental thesis statement; “creative hybridity is a boundary-making event”. The dissertation takes place through an active narrative of experimentation playing with the ideas of how creativity engenders itself through hybridity and identity of medium. Using a design-centric outlook as well as a practice rooted, and at times spatio-visual thinking, the research posits that creative production (that is hybrid) bounds itself to patterns and structure to be recognized. The dissertation uses the case study ‘S.’ by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst (2013), a multimodal literature case study to explore hybridity, more specifically design production, through the lens of the thesis statement.
Wayfaring stone: Learning to think with stone, as vibrant matter, in the post-extractive urban terrains of the Witwatersrand ridgeline
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-02) Stone-Johnson, Bridgitta; Le Roux, Hannah; Andrew, David
Johannesburg is a stony city that exists because of endless interplays between below and above. Johannesburg is a city of earth, rock, rubble and dust. It is a mining city in a state of post-extractive fragmentation. The fragmented wildness troubles all of its materiality. The smooth and inert bubble over exposes the decomposition created by what has been taken/extracted from it. As its infrastructure weathers and fragments, the city is often read as a wasteland or ruin, where human agency has failed to smooth over and rebuilt in ever increasingly short cycles. The local and global environmental implications of such material attitudes are threatening the long-term ability of the earth to sustain human and other life. The issues of the Anthropocene are as much material attitudes as they are issues of extraction, consumption and waste. Suppose shifting perspective: from imagining humans as separate from the terrain toward thinking of ourselves as an aggregation of matter, and stony matter as an independent actant, co-labouring in urban terrain formation. In that case, these weathering, fragmentation and aggregation processes can be viewed as vital agencies of stony matter. This shift in perspective would enable us to remain present within the extractive terrain. It enables us to think of the post-extractive urban terrain not as a ruin, but as a feral urban ecology growing and entangling vital stony agencies with other than human matter and human actions alike in the ongoing process of making the becoming-urban terrain. In many ways, Johannesburg exemplifies the 'Anthrop' in the current Anthropocene age. It is the triumph of culture over nature; testament to the planetary impact of material extraction. The consequences are exemplified in its urban terrain, dotted with urban archipelagos of residue that are toxic to the bodies that inhabit them. These islands span in scale from the small sites of waste dumping in urban parks and open mining lands, to the vast scale of scarification left by gold mining and industrial decay within the city. Unlike many cities, where such industrial ruination and extraction are far removed from the city, the location of the gold-bearing reef acts as the catalyst for the formation of the city. Sites of mining residue and industrial decay are situated in close proximity to the city centre and drove the romanticisation of the northern slopes as urban forest, and the use of southern slopes as wasteland. Besides its extractive material past, the city of Johannesburg is located within one of the oldest sections of the earth's crust, the Kaap-Vaal Craton. The central Witwatersrand ridgeline, which runs east-west within the centre of the city, has outcrops of some of the oldest rocks on earth and forms the continental watershed between the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Its extractive residues and material attitudes have significance within a broader discussion concerning city-making as human geo-writing, and its climatic impact is of interest within the Anthropocene. Despite its deep geological and mineral context, the city of Johannesburg has, within the post-apartheid spatial discourse, often been framed as if its geological and atmospheric terrain did not exist. The language used in writings about the city includes descriptors that frame Johannesburg as an immaterial city composed only of its human inhabitants, such as 'the transient city' 1, uitval-grond (remainder, non-place) 2 , the restless city 3 , necropolis and elusive metropolis 4 . These descriptors stem from a dualist material perspective of urban terrains and take a centrist humanist position suggesting that humans are the only agents for change in an inert material terrain. Spatial discourse applies philosophy to the built environment practices including built form and design in architecture, together with urban, town and regional planning, and urban design. Within the context of Johannesburg, through writing in the post-apartheid space, spatial discourse has become critically entangled with the social sciences. Within such spatial discourses, issues of urban terrains, extraction, degradation and materiality are often relegated to the margins, despite their impact on urban inhabitants and epoch-altering consequences for climate and future geological strata. Research risks becoming increasingly abstracted, and ungrounded in the living and active world in which the city's inhabitants move through and touch. In this work I respond to issues of surface, materiality and our human impact on urban terrains in the age of the Anthropocene, and question how spatial thinking contributes to issues of material denial and the degradation of urban terrains. Given Johannesburg's mining and deep geological context, I have chosen to work with the materiality of stone as a representative of human/material dualisms, which I see present here. Stony matters’ contribution to human societal formation is one of the most complex material alliances of the anthropocentric age, and connects momentary human actions to planet-altering effects produced by the complex web of alliances, traces, and matter flows facilitating modern city-making. In framing humans and stony matter as co-labours in terrain formation, I consider stony matter to be a trans-corporeal material, spanning in scale from granular to geological. The term trans-corporeal derives from feminist posthuman theory that says matter exists in multiple states and scales5 that span between bodies (collectivities) of human and other than human alike. Applied to the materiality of stone within this context, I considered stony matter to include the geological terrain as a biosphere. I imagine an urban, geological and ecological whole that includes wild stone in situ within 'urban archipelagos', which protrude into the city grid, filled with human-made, connective infrastructure, rubble and piles. I suggest that the stony matter present here collaborates as agglomerative agents in the formation of urban terrain. Furthermore, I consider weathering, rubbling and aggregating as agencies of stony matter that act in the ebbing and flowing process - rather than being static, or moving towards an ultimate ruinous end. I consider the process of weathering and gathering as relational processes for knowing stones' agency, accessible to the human temporal range through bodily encounters with the materials. I draw on the field of environmental humanities in this work, as it also incorporates feminist posthuman theory and new material theory. It emerges from a trans-disciplinary discussion that questions the human/matter and nature/culture duality implied within a cartesian understanding of matter. Creating a theoretical divide between living and non-living things. question this duality with their work on the posthuman. These collective theoretical positions critique the centrality of the human to act within the world and to forward a bio-centred egalitarianism that seeks to hold human and non-human social relationships as equally relevant in forming a response to issues of the Anthropocene. Posthuman studies propose a non-dualist understanding of the nature-culture binary and emphasise the self-organist forces of living matter. The defining features of Posthumanism take as their starting point, after Braidotti, that all matter is one (Monism), and that all matter is agentic and self-organising. The subject is not unitary but nomadic, and subjectivity includes relations with non-human others10. This implies that thinking is not the prerogative of humans alone, but includes non-human 'others', including stony matters subjectivity. I use the theory here to frame the relationship between humans, stony materials, and terrain. The focus is the nature and culture of stony materials as a vitalist material agent in city-making. I favour an understanding of stony matter as a social collective or social grouping, so framing city-making as a collective act of ongoing making between human and non-human actors. The idea of matter as a 'social agent' suggests that stone is capable of acting independently of humans. Stones may form alliances with other non-human entities or collectivities without human consent or intervention. Within this research, I pose the following questions: How can Johannesburg's urban terrains be considered post-extractive urban terrains? What are the vital agencies of stone in post-extractive urban terrains? How can creative practitioners learn about them through bodily entangled creative practice? How can stone agencies be used as a creative practice methodology to become co-labourers with the living matter as a tool for troubling anthropocentrism in extractive terrains? I explore these questions through an embodied creative practice approach to research, examining these questions within philosophy, literature and artistic practice. I use these questions to develop tools for thinking and practising with the stony matter as ways of relating that enable us to live well with other than human oddkin within post- extractive urban terrains. Furthermore, I explore possibilities for re-imagining posthuman ways of thinking about cities. The ultimate aim of the work is illustrated in the diagram below. In this research, I aim to thicken the conversation around the post-extractive terrain by thinking, acting and practising in stony ways. The work aims to aggregate multiple approaches to thinking through and with the stony matter found within the central Witwatersrand ridgeline, naturally occurring and human-made alike, along the path to understanding post-extractive urban terrains as vibrant and feral sites of becoming. As such, the work situates itself between histories and theories of architecture, urban and material practice, balanced against a creative practice project, which can be considered iterative.

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