In 2004, Mark Shufflebottom worked on an Interactive Art Project called “Isolation” with Helen Jackson. The project was entered into Europrix 2004 Multimedia Top Talend Award. The piece was awarded a Quality Seal Winner 04.

The project is a continuing cycle of life exploring themes of birth, life, death and has a recursive nature with no starting point or ending point. The project is a real-time 3D environment which was created in Shockwave 3D. There are several paths through the project and the user can spend some time exploring these different paths.

In 2006, Another piece of work named “A Dark Matter” was entered into the BEA Festival of Media Arts. The project won the Best of Festival for the Interactive Media category. The award was collected in person at a prestigious awards ceremony held in the Las Vegas Convention Centre.

A Dark Matter is a cross between a game and a story. Ever been to the cinema and come out with a completely different take on the film? This game is all about finding the story. Everyone will interpret it differently.

Navigate through a first person 3D environment using traditional first person controls of WASD to move forward, backward, strafe left and right, while the mouse allows you to look around. Littered throughout this environment is a whole host of devices that you can interact with. Pressing the space bar allows you to interact with these devices.

Fragments of story will be given to you, which you will collect in your invetory. Pressing ‘I’ on the keyboard will open your inventory and you will be able to view again any story segments you have collected. Some segments will go straight into your inventory depending on where they are found.

Once you have collected enough segments of story and you think you know what is going on, then you can place your story segments in order to make a narrative.

You have the option of explaining what you think happened and to submit this, which will connect your computer to the internet (always-on broadband connection required). Following this you can watch other people’s take on the story and read their explanation.