#interactionandplay

Week 4 for InP was mainly based around research for me as other members of my group (Max) worked on creating our program for our next playtest. We spoke to Ben on Monday and he gave us a few things to look into:

One was a board game that focused heavily on roleplaying, creating a narrative between different characters. He wanted to us to have a look at how they controlled the theme of the session which allowed participants freedom but still kept the story from devolving too far into random madness. 

Another example we looked into was work done by a previous BCT student Jenna Gavin. She had two projects that were useful to us as precedent for our idea. Cut And Paste was and interactive work that allowed participants to create a written work by selecting quotes from various authors and adding them to a larger script. Word Wars was another idea that caused players to fight over letters in order to create a longer word,  it showed a competitive take on the collaborative story telling we had been looking into so far.

Finally Ben also briefly mentioned Exquisite Corpse.  Exquisite Corpse is a drawing technique were participants would each draw part of a creature without looking at each others and combine them to create something weird. This idea might be used in our project to create a unique story narrative.

It’s been an uphill battle getting our I&P project to a state where we’re happy with it. This has largely been due to the conflict I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, where it’s nigh impossible to solve the tension between ultimate freedom of expression and creating depth and meaning easily in the format of a quick public interaction. The pieces just don’t fit here.

So what we’ve done is redesigned the pieces, effectively. In order to provide meaning we identified that we need to add some constraints, so we moved away from writing and towards memetics. Our initial idea was for people to iterate on a short story in written form, but in favor of shortening the interaction time and cost, we’ve opted for something much simpler, yet with meaning.

Legends of heroes have been passed down for millennia, and we emulate this practice by allowing people to quickly create their own legends to battle it out in a public arena. We’ve designed our new project to allow people to generate a hero with a unique name and power (we write these, which inserts some comedy and interest easily). They can re-roll if they’re unhappy with the hero they have, which makes it very quick to iterate on their legend until they’re happy. Once they submit the hero it goes into a hero pool, where people can click on any hero to vote for them. The biggest hero is the ‘villain’,  and when the second biggest hero is the same size as the reigning villain they battle it out (via coin-flip). This adds some drama to the interaction and enables multiple different sorts of people to interact with the project (e.g, passive observers, jokers, those with not much time, etc.), which is something we wanted to work on after hearing the relevant feedback from our prior critique session.

In Week 5 we presented ‘The Freyberg Novel’ to our Interaction and Play class and received feedback on how we’re going, as well as ideas for future directions.

A lack of clarity around how we wanted people to collaborate yet remain anonymous in their writing was identified from our feedback. Here, we discovered the inherent tension between total freedom of expression and the amount of given agency in public writing. 

The skinny of what we learned is that it’s nigh impossible to design a game that allows total freedom of expression and still provide depth and meaning in said expression. There’s just too many variables and not enough constraints to make the system work cleanly, so we will begin to investigate allowing expression while decreasing the amount of agency that participants have.

Blogs

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/186775551240/beginning-playtesting

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/186943965530/interaction-and-play-week-4

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188491703775/ip-critique-feedback

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188491860570/freyberg-heroes-lite

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188491887880/ip-reflection

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188491895505/ip-overarching-blog

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1OslPwJysci7kltnolerA5stSqL_Ayx1AFvcQE-lp_hs/edit#slide=id.g5d31ec324e_1_41

Videos

https://youtu.be/tJg-uk-i5GU

Week 1: https://krouxbct.tumblr.com/post/186451994042/interaction-and-play-week-1

Week 2: https://krouxbct.tumblr.com/post/186614103147/interaction-and-play-week-2

Week 3: https://krouxbct.tumblr.com/post/186775655792/interaction-and-play-week-3

Week 4: https://krouxbct.tumblr.com/post/186939795272/interaction-and-play-week-4

Week 5: https://krouxbct.tumblr.com/post/187102332772/interaction-and-play-week-5

Week 6: https://krouxbct.tumblr.com/post/188028711552/week-6-interaction-and-play

Week 8: https://krouxbct.tumblr.com/post/188055660327/week-8-interaction-and-play

Week 8 was quite eventful week for our group. We had been struggling to come to a version of The Freyberg Novel which we thought would be successful in portraying our envisioned idea. Eventually we came to the conclusion that The Freyberg Novel has a few fundamental issues that we would not be able to overcome. We knew that getting a written piece to work in a public space would be difficult and were not able to solve the issues of collaboration, moderation and participation in the scope of this paper. Rather than just leave it there however we attempted to adapt our idea into a more confined and guided concept.

With it we came up with a Hero Generation Game were the participant would be given a random character and two powers to choose from. They could used this character or go for an entirely new re-roll thus leaving some aspect of expression but also allowing us to control the outcome. This character would then be displayed on the big screen allow with other participants creations. Passerby's would be able to vote on which Hero they thought was the best and the top voted would be come larger and the “Villain”. When another Hero reached the same number of votes as the Villain they would “fight” and the victorious character would be the new Villain.

Week 6 consisted of responding to Bens feedback from the previous week:

“Possibly through lack of clarity I inferred a conceptual tension between anonymity and collaboration in the presentation. This however was resolved before the end of the session. Identify and formalize both the internal aesthetic and extrinsic goals of the play experience? Be as specific as possible but as vague as necessary with your elevator pitch. This is your design pillar. The thing that you use when, for example, your team is not together. Everything you do should guide you towards that goal. If you truly believe it’s not your goal any more - you need to, as a team, agree to any changes you make. Without a guiding vision it’s too easy to get lost. “

Ben made a valid point in that our elevator pitch has been shifting quite frequently. We have lacked a strong indication on whether we want to have the tension between collaboration and self moderation. To solve this we will be trying to discuss where we plan to go with the future of the Freybreg Novel.

“Be wary of your interpretations of your current tests. I would argue that the experiments are too complex to extract focused feedback of any true value. There are so many elements (UI, placement, duration, phrasing of the instructions) to the installation and so many factors about the testers (the BCT student cohort) that may mean you’re not receiving feedback relevant to your target audience (more on user profiles below). As discussed in class, it is paramount that you do as close to an on site test before week 9 as you can. You may be able to ‘get away’ with doing something on AUT campus pre week 9 and then something straight after week 9 in Freyburg, but aim for the former.” 

Our initial plan was to test in Freyburg from the get go but we have had issues with finalizing an idea to test. The data we gathered from the “in-house” tests might not be as accurate to our user profiles however has given us an insight into how collaborative writing might take place.

“It would be very useful to formalize some user profiles (‘verticals’) and create some assumptions around them and select one or a few to design for as a scoping exercise for the project. E.g. We talked about: the luncher, the vaper, the walker, the wanderer, the meditater, the skater, etc already being in the space. But Auckland Live have indicated they want to bring people who live Auckland down from their apartments, so you should make at least one profile for that too. You will be able to test your assumptions around different profiles in weeks 6 - 9 but many will go unanswered and that’s just an extension of the project scoping you will need to formalize. Also interrogate the graduation threshold for the current user profile’s state and the desired state in The Transtheoretical Model (Stages of Change). You might also want to have a look at Will Wright graduation of players through game ecosystem it might not be applicable to this project but is still interesting for looking at product/service longevity.”

We have decided to focus our user profile on mainly the luncher and walker as those are more common in the Freyberg Place. We plan on designing the project with these two ideas in mind

“My advice regarding the factors affecting testing (UI/UX etc) is to use as many commonly used interfaces/languages as possible to lower the barrier to entry. Only re-invent the wheel with the parts of your project that need it. It’s fine to make some assumptions about, for example, using a keyboard being relatively accessible in the context of a 15 point paper. Start with easily recognizable mechanics: (we discussed some of these during the week 6 class) madlibs, those fridge magnets, a keyboard. Also try borrowing from other intuitive/popular products: Gloom, Once Upon a Time spring to mind.”

This is something we have a group have discussed quite extensively as we wanted the experience to be available to anyone to use. We thought that the familiarity of a keyboard was worth incorporating despite the technical difficulty to keep it operational.

“We did discuss the lock out mechanic being part of the allure of the interaction and the spectacle. But I would like to de-emphasize that feedback as it was just a specific example that popped to mind. Focus on testing the high level concept using as many existing mechanics/interfaces/languages as you can.”

Lock out was one mechanic we did focus on however it did adapt and change as the project moved on.

“Management of this project, making sure everyone is contributing efficiently, will be a challenge but if done well this could be an easy final phase of the project. I will try keep you in check with this during the class but you could, for example, as you approach the week 9 deadline, assign the power of veto to someone at random just to stop arguments from slowing you down (if they even occur).”

We have definitely come to notice that our team management has become a bit of a struggle. At the very beginning of the project we assigned Oscar the leadership position; giving him power of veto and the intent to organise our group. Despite this we have run into the issue of some members rarely making it to class and contributing very little to the group. We plan to talk to Ben in an effort to solve this

“As with the music project, you are in a position to define what kind of stories this project creates. I would advise not making it totally freeform and, if it were me, I would find a concept to ground the aesthetic. You could even select different concepts if you can’t agree (i.e. share the mechanics but see how you can bend them for different types of stories). You will undoubtedly have unplanned incidentals and players who deliberately subvert the aesthetic intentions but, taking a page from Thatgamecompany’s Journey, you can reduce the interface to the point where, although you probably won't be able to entirely prohibit ‘off-brand’ stories being generated, you will, for the general population, make it both obvious of what is expected through encouragement using aesthetic signifiers (themes, starters, words, colours, shapes, examples) or make it at least difficult to go ‘off-brand’ through restricting the system mechanics and interface (may limiting the type of words they can choose to some degree). I’m also reminded of this talk by Jessie Schell.”