#cringetec

I met with @archolabs and @iamyoureye this morning to discuss our transmedia fable, and how ridiculously unviable it is. We came up with a few more doable ideas, some ways we could keep most of our idea but produce small parts of it, and also discussed the backstory of our metaphorical tortoise and hare.

I listed every single technology/medium we planned to use and assessed our ability to actually use it. I figured it was more or less like this:

Social media/real life advertisements building up to the race: still totally doable.

Street performance with the tech CEOs launching their drones: doable, but would be kinda dumb without actual drones.

Actual drone race: we’ll see. We need two drones and permission from the council to do that.

Live GPS tracking and video from the drones: slightly less doable than the drones, seeing as we’d need to actually get the drones first, but still po-o-ossibly doable.

Pre-filmed drone footage: Slightly more doable than an actual drone race.

Watching fake drones through AR: yeah, nah.

Fake GPS tracking: still doable, provided it’s a live-streamed video and not on, like, Google Maps or something.

Live social media race updates: 100% doable.

Continued user engagement and exquisite-corpse continuation: we’ll see… that may have to be the point where we leave the project to its own devices and come back when we take Transmedia Narratives 2. What do you mean that’s not a real paper shut up man

So yeah. Most of it’s still doable, just not the main bits. We can definitely fake GPS-tracking of the race and social media updates, but that might be the closest to an actual race we can do.

Other than that, we elaborated on our tech companies’ backstories.

The basic idea is that their CEOs used to know each other and were on good terms with one another. When they competed for startup funding, one of them (the Hare) stabbed the other one (the Tortoise) in the back (not literally), ruining their relationship and starting a rivalry between their firms. They’re having a competition to see which company can engineer the fastest drone.

I basically envision the H-AR CEO as the most obnoxious Silicon Valley stereotype possible: he’s arrogant, tries every new productivity trend that comes along (microdosing, anyone?), thinks his company is disrupting enormous industries all at once despite the fact they’re barely profitable, etc. Then I envision the Tort-OS CEO to be a whole lot more down-to-Earth, running their company out of their garage, hiring a tiny amount of people to produce something truly valuable to society, slowly but surely.

I’m pretty proud of the idea we came up with for Transmedia Narratives, considering. Pete liked it, Pete’s friend liked it, it was good. So good you wouldn’t have thought it was put together in less than an hour by 2 people who weren’t planning to work together until less than 24 hours beforehand.

I can’t remember exactly how we got to our idea last Wednesday, seeing as the brainstorming session lasted a whole 20 minutes and we barely wrote anything down. I do remember that @archolabs suggested using an old fable as our narrative base and that I suggested the Tortoise and the Hare. We pretty much liked everything we came up with from there. Two tech companies racing drones instead of animals? Awesome. A street performance where two people pretend to be the CEOs launching their drones? Love it. AR representations of the drones? Live social media updates? GPS tracking? An exquisite-corpse style continuation of the narrative, based on community engagement? Why the hell not.

We actually have to produce it, is why the hell not

Our idea, as we pitched it on Wednesday, would have gone like this:

Build-up to the drone race with social media posts explaining their backstories and real-life posters to get people interested and engaged in the story

Street performance where the two tech CEOs are portrayed as launching their drones at the start of the race

One of the following approaches to the race, each with a significant drawback: An actual drone race: two drones race down Queen Street. One goes faster, but stops due to its driver’s arrogance; one goes slowly but steadily towards the finish line and only just beats the faster one. People can watch the drones in real life, watch live-streamed drone footage online, or track their position online. This approach had the possibility of the drones not acting properly in some way, compromising the narrative – however, the drones would be real. Or... A virtual drone race, simulating all 3 aspects of the real drone race: AR allows people to use their phones to see where the drones would be if they were real; live-streamed video allows them to see what the drones would see (and would be overlaid on live footage of Queen Street); people can still track the drones’ GPS positions, but they are now pre-programmed. This approach had the drawback that people would not be able to see actual drones, compromising the reality of the story; however, their behaviours would be certain.

Live social media updates from the fictional companies, and engagement between them and users; make the narrative real, and allow people to interpret it however they want, providing the fable’s moral

Users continue to discuss the story after it’s over, continuing the fictional narrative however they want to

Exquisite-corpse continuation of the narrative based on users’ social media posts, creating a running storyline with a crowd-sourced plot

Hopefully, that makes sense.

Today I presented my main presentation to the ITS Gang, and I’m pretty pleased with how it went. Not only did I feel that I confidently delivered some pretty solid definitions of ITS in the video game realm, Laurent said that everyone’s presentation was either at an A or B level, so I’m not that worried about this course.

Here are the definitions I ended up presenting:

System: a set of rules or structures that control the way the player progresses

Technology: any physical or digital object that controls or affects the functionality of a game 

Interaction: the way that the player affects the game’s systems, and vice versa

ITS:  objects that act according to a given set of rules and structures to create a particular experience through interaction between the player and these rules/structures

Or what are they with regard to vidya gaems?

Maybe we can start with saying what they aren’t.

Firstly, they need not be technological, as I’ve already discussed. Board games and card games have technology-free systems, as do sports and games like Mafia. These games have systems that control what players do and how they interact with other players and other objects in the game.

Actually, that doesn’t seem right. They don’t have systems, they are systems. Once you get what the pieces on a chess board are for, the only thing separating a game of chess from a couple of peeps moving some wood around on a bigger piece of wood is the system that both players agree to abide by. The game of chess is really just a system people agree to.

Video games, however, don’t have this kind of system - they’re systems in the same way sports and board games and such are, except for the fact that the things keeping track of the system and its variables and such is not the people playing or a ref, but the technology itself, which is kinda meta.

So I guess when it comes to games, a system could be a set of rules that all players try to act within as well as they can to try to achieve some sort of goal.

But rules aren’t what people think of when someone says “video game system.” We think of pieces of technology used to play games, which, as I’ve said before, also forces certain interactions between the player and the game. But I guess that that only matters as long as it influences the game itself, and games are, at their core, systems of rules (albeit often dressed up so that people don’t pay attention to the rules). So I think that so-called ‘video game systems’ can influence the kind of system that makes up a game, but don’t define them.

Like a lot of the CTEC602 crew, I’ve been largely focusing on the ‘technology’ side of ITS and less on the ‘systems’ side.

To be honest, I feel like it’s pretty similar to the technology side - for game development, they’re very closely intertwined.

Gaming technology and gaming systems are pretty much the same thing, really.

I guess if I had to articulate a difference, I’d say that gaming systems can avoid using any electricity - games themselves are systems, as are the ways they teach players how to play. That’s a system that can be devoid of technology, as evidenced by board games and card games. Those can have incredibly intricate systems while having very little technology behind them.

But for video games, the systems are often deeply intertwined with the games themselves. The controllers can force certain interactions between the player and game to happen in certain ways and the processors can limit how many on-screen assets a developer has to work with.

When Laurent first gave us the task of defining the word ‘interactivity,’ I was a bit sceptical, as I probably all too often am. “Isn’t it a bit of a simple word to define?” I thought. “Seems like a really, really basic concept.”

I still think that, actually. It’s a really simple thing to define.

I liked the Oxford Dictionary’s definition: “The process of two people or things working together and influencing each other.“ Or, as it relates to computers, “The ability of a computer to respond to a user's input.“

Perfect. Done with that, then.

But wait, we’re supposed to define it as it relates to our practice, right? I guess I can’t copy and paste from a dictionary site for that.

Well, if video game development is my practice, I guess you could say that interactivity basically IS my practice. Interactivity between the player and the game is what needs to form the basis of basically everything I do professionally.

We’ve begun Interactive Technology and Systems. Exciting stuff*

We’ve been set the task of defining ‘Interactivity’ as it relates to our practice. Given that I want to make games, this seems a little bit superfluous but maybe it’ll help to have a concrete definition. I don’t like it when an idea is only referred to by a single word and that word is never defined.

I’m not 100% sure what I’m going to get out of this paper, to be honest, but I’m looking forward to experimenting more with interactive tech installations and stuff. Can’t really go wrong with that.

Y’know that thing where if you say a word too much it stops having any meaning and starts just sounding like a weird sequence of syllables?

That’s happened with the word “prototype” for me, except it’s not just the association but the concept itself that’s just gone.

I used to just think of prototypes as early versions of something - a version of something that you improve until it’s a finished product.

Now, anything that gives you information on a concept can be a prototype for anything to do with that concept. Which is to say, anything could be a prototype.

Which makes lots of sense.