Chick2Go
GPS enabled East End Walking Tour
Tower Hamlets' Cemetry GPS Workshop
Dockers' Dilemma
A location-based game developed on the mscape platform with a flash interface.
Some first impressions having viewed the five selected entry presentations:
It is interesting to see (and I think also good to see), that none of the finalists are professional game designers - there are three new media artists, a graphic designer and a lecturer. OK, so the competition is "exploding narratives" but all but Hazel chose to incorporate an element of competition into their work.
4/5 entrants were male. This surprises me as at the last mscape conference there seemed as many female delegates as there were male.
I wasn't bowled over by the designs. There were lots of nice ideas here and throughout the competition but none of them were especially innovate or made me feel especially excited. None of them challenged my concept of narrative. I feel as if the medium is capable of more.
Finally a big THUMBS UP (and I know I'm always banging on about this but...), all the winners had designed experiences that could be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of their physical ability. Hooray!!!
A really exciting opportunity to get some media coverage for your location-based gaming ideas and have the chance to win a £10,000 in development grant!
Sometimes big news can be delivered in the most unexpected of ways....I stumbled upon this tantaslising post today...from someone looking for a logo designer. But not any old logo...a logo for the first shop in the world to sell location-based games!
http://www.projectslist.biz/freelance/Logo-Design/logo-design-shop/
I'm intrigued....
Mscape Fest 2007 followed on from a far more low-key, one day event held at HP labs in October 2006, which marked the end of the Mobile Bristol project (funded by Bristol university, Appliance Studio and HP Labs), and the point where HP were looking to the user community (primarily KS2, secondary teachers and artists), for feedback on how to move the project forward.
At this event, following the successful launch of the new Mscaper website in May 07, there was a real buzz about the potential of the new version of the tool, which is significantly more functional and easy to use for developers and players; with wizards, guidelines, dedicated support and a growing user community. The conference had also doubled in size; a 2 day event with 120 participants which quickly sold out. It included evening entertainment, a packed programme and a far more diverse audience than previous events, with attendees from across Europe and the US, (comprising game developers, new businesses, heritage, theatre (including the highly acclaimed Punchdrunk), arts, education at all levels, broadcasters, and others generally interested in locative media).
The primary aim of the conference: to build community, communication share practices, help the medium grow and kick-start the development of a much needed business model for those wishing to make money from the work they’ve up until now only been able to do for free on the educational licence.
I was particuarly heartened to hear about the opening of a Pervasive Media Studio; a cross-disciplinary, cross-community, cross-industry teaching and research studio affiliated to the University of West England, HP and the University of Bristol. Located at the Bristol Watershed it will pioneer new digital media through socially engaged practice and world-class research, providing infrastructure (ipaqs, editing facilities, workshops, work-spaces) and opportunities to apply for small project grants.
Day 1 focussed primarily on the designer and developer community, providing workshops around game, experience, community, content and tool development. In the evening there was a networking event at the Watershed bar and a chance to try out some of the mediascapes in Queen’s Square.
Day 2 comprised a series of presentations from a wide range of experienced locative media designers from around the world including Teri Rueb, a landscape artist whose work engages digital, architectural and traditional media, Jon Williams, Creative Director of Licorice Media, and Steve Coast, Founder and Chairman of theOpenStreetMap Foundation.
The event was enormously enjoyable and I left feeling inspired and excited about the future of locative experience and game design.
Photos of the event can be viewed at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/mscape/pool/ and the majority of the presentations can be accessed from the Mscape Fest page.
me and some floozie. 8.5 x 11 ink drawing by Honoria, circa 1991
Referring back to my last post on locating emotions...there's the potential to create quite an interesting game that might support bonding or at least the practice of empathy.....
Player 1 walks round an area - Ideally somewhere quite dramatic..perhaps personally meaningful in some way. Physiological arousal is tracked...(other things could also be tracked...facial expressions for example and levels of stress).
Player 2, who either already knows Player 1 or is provided with some context as to player 1's personality, personal history, likes and dislikes is then asked to follow exactly the same path around the location. As they go around they must try to walk as if in the shoes and mind of Player 1....trying to emulate the kinds of reaction Player 1 might have had to the changing environment.
The winning team is the pair that can most closely emulate one anothers' emotional reaction to place, in other words the most empathatic team, or perhaps the team most skilled at emulating emotion....and possibly most control over their own emotional responses!
Celine LJ's biomap tracking levels of arousal during a walk along the ExCel Dock. Just coincidence that it's purple but very apt ;-)
I've always been fascinated by Christian Nolde's BioMaps so I jumped at the chance to have a go at making my own map a couple of weeks ago when I attended the Mapping Change for Sustainable Communities Workshop held on the Sunborn Yacht Hotel, Docklands.
Hooked up to a sensor measuring the moisture given off by my index finger (in other words sweat), I wasn't quite sure what was being tracked and apparently that's just the point - it's impossible to really map emotion or get an exact reading so the best you can do is measure arousal...which might be caused by anger, exertion, excitement, happiness.....and half of the fun is trying to work out afterwards how you were actually feeling! I did the mapping along the dock and for the whole way I chatted to another particpant - Gordon...Comparing visual maps, it's clear that even on the same walk it's impossible to assume the reactions of participants. Our maps were entirely different. Maybe it wasn't the walk at all and just the conversation....
This isn't exactly hot news to anyone already using the msapers site, but for me, it's a big step for location-based gaming that's worth a mention here.
This is probably one of those times when I should think before I write......but I never listen to my own advice...so I'm just going to ramble this evening....
I've been thinking again about passing location-based data into Second Life....Is there are point? Well some of the newest SL mash-ups use location-based data fed in from the real world...you can walk across a map of the united states in SL and see live information about the US weather system directly over the top of your avatar...using SL to be able to play with the scale and then experience that data in a 3D embodied, ALMOST physical but certainly immersed way.
And then thinking about the SGI plans..I definitely think it'd be interesting to walk into the Virtual SGI and see avatars - like strange ghosts representing real people walking around the virtual building...why? I think there's an element of voyeurism there...getting to see what everyone's up to...even behind the closed doors. Or at least seeing where they are - like a security guard sitting behind her surveyance cameras. But more fun because you can walk amongst them...and they'd be totally unaware...unless there's some way using projectors or sounds to let the people in the real building know there are virtual visitors nearby.
I can see the potential for a simple "collision" game. Come to think of it, Blast Theory's "Can You See Me Now" uses this kind of model - but in a less pervasive, more event driven way.
I can also see the potential for cross-breeding style games in which virtual SGI is filled with primordial soup....the real-life people who work there are all represented in the virtual world as amoebas (I don't mean that to sound rude!) outside visitors bring in extra cross-breeding material and new exotic genes to add to the pool...maybe the structure of the Amoebas DNA is somehow related to something simple like where someone has travelled from, or the letters in their name.....and then as people's paths cross, day in and day out, the amoebas are cross-breeding, maybe inbreeding...and of course some activities in real life will be very repetitive and lead to very distinct breeds, less frequent activities would introduce new strains...and just like Spore, the amoebas are developing into races, complex beings....
OK, that's not so much a game as some kind of odd experiment or simulation but it'd be fascinating to watch the beings develop as an SLer and equally curious to see how your actions, habits, everyday behaviour as a real-life-er is effecting the development of a species...I have a feeling you'd learn something about social networks through this.
SL is always aware of every movement that every avatar makes as my last post testifies..that information is easy to get hold of. Is there any way to make a game IN SL out of THAT information? I think a better question might be...what kind of game could you create if you sometimes REVEALED data about everyone's location to everyone else in SL? And even more interesting, if you sometimes hid or offered incorrect information...
Linden Labs have created this simple mash-up that allows you to track the location of your avatar in Second Life. Haven't quite worked out how I'd make use of the info yet but for the moment - it's all up on Delicious. I can see it would have applications for social networking, tracking, tag and stalking games (I'm thinking in-world "Can You See Me Now" style), strategy becomes easier because you've got much more scope for god-like perspectives. And suddenly there's an infinite level of focus, just like google earth - rather than the usual toggling between 3rd and 1st person....
What I like the best is my tracker doesn't look like the latest bit of black, shiny geek-tech - it's just part of my hand-bag!
I'm crossing my fingers that I can get the time to make it to the Serious Mobile Summit this Friday...I'm especially excited about the virtual discussion panel!
© 1994-2007 Proboscis.
A term used to describe a variety of different approaches, but I like the one offered by Proboscis.
"Bodystorming is similar to brainstorming except it involves physical interaction and engagement with the system through a playful acting out of the issues, techniques, interface and interaction possibilities".
Giles explains that "our particular use of it as a technique is as an 'experience' for working with people in communities - giving abstract ideas a physical presence and sense of interaction that are often remote and difficult to grasp"
It is exactly the idea I was searching for in my last post but I would never have come up with such a clear and beautiful explanation. Funnily enough I already knew of Bodystorming, but I'd never have made the connection between this experience and my clumsy ideas about location-based learning and idea generation without google.
Something has been nagging at the back of my mind since I wrote about PerplexCity. A feeling of deja-vue. Now I've worked out why... When I was a kid I used to visit a friend who had a beautiful book called Masquerade, published in 1979. It was a children's book (but with a huge adult following), with fascinating illustrations containing clues to the location of a golden (18 carat) jeweled hare with a ruby eye created by Kit himself and buried "somewhere in Britain." The puzzle was solvd in 1981 but it sparked a huge number of further "armchair treasure hunts".
Searching for information about the book today I discovered, with pleasure, that PerplexCity was indeed inspired by Kit Williams' book. Bedtime reading then, for any budding Alternate Reality Game Designer!
For anyone lucky enough to get to GDC this year, I'd recommend the Location-Based Learning with Mobile Games workshop run by Karen Schrier. And if you do go, please blog it and send me the link!
Here's the slides from my at IAS workshop three "What do location-based games do best" at Bristol University last Wednesday.
And here's the audio!
Two new location-based game pilots ran recently that are clearly designed with the affordances of the medium rather than traditional streetgames in mind. Both were developed by HP (and partners) and were created using the MobileBristol authoring tool.
iMagick is a game that requires players to trace shapes into the landscape in order to cast spells.
Escape from the Tower of London is a history game played as you might expect, in the Tower of London. Visitors can meet virtual prisoners such as Guy Fawkes and Anne Boleyn and must help them escape using historically correct methods such as bribing guards and sneasking past beefeaters.
It's great to see that HP, who seemed to have let MobileBristol languish for a while, are really starting to put their weight behind it.
Made by Mrs. A. E. Reasoner, New Jersey
Pieced and embroidered silk and velvet, 1885
Purchase 1970 Frederick P. Field Bequest Fund
70.25 88" x 90"
My first shot at creating a game based on the following requirements:
1. a game for learning
2. a location-based experience that encourages thinking rather than running
3. a game that does not require speed, or long distances to be covered - maybe even penalises long distance or fast movement
5. a game which challenges our standard notion of maps
Mad Maps
The aim of this game is to master what initially seems like an entirely fictional and loopy game map. The winner is the player who masters the map having walked the shortest distance.
The game relies on a map that does not instantly seem to reflect real world street or paths. For example in the real world a player standing at a cross road in the real world might only say a road bending to the left on the game map, or wiggling in a fantastical manner. In fact the map is generated from real world information but NOT the usual navigation routes that we expect. Instead, it may have been created based on a variety of other location-related materials (e.g, a game-map street may turn left if there is a church en route, wiggle if the road has cobbles, stop if the street name that the player passes starts with a vowel). The map might be automatically generated based on a variety of these rules and could potentially be different every time.
The player must follow the generated game-map by navigating the real world and search for visual or aural clues as to how the game-map relates to the real-world. Crucially, the player who walks the shortest distance in order to break the code wins, an able-bodied player might explore more quickly but slower movement is much more likely to lead to clues being discovered and the puzzle being solved.
It may be that in order to prove the player has mastered the game map, she must navigate to the treasure.
Players learn how to look more critically at maps and their objectivity, explore the relationship between maps, information visualisation, navigation and location, maybe. I haven't mocked up the game, but it conjures up an amusing, Dr Seuss style game board.
As far as I'm aware there are only two commercial location-based mobile games that have gained a mass following: Mogi Mogi, a collaborative treasure hunt game only playable in Japan (mainly because no other country has the handsets yet to support it!) and Botfighters, a shoot-em up which I think is available in Russia, Dublin and Sweden.....
Here is a new adventure-style location-based game which, despite having been in development for what seems like years and hyping the GPS element (which I suspect will only have a minor role in game-play), is worth keeping an eye on an eventually playing! http://shroudgame.com/ . The most signficant update is that it's being sponsored by SONY BMG ENTERTAINMENT
This great podcast interview put together by my lovely mate Shlair is a great intro to the Dockers' Dilemma game I've been building for the Museum in Docklands.
Dockers' Dilemma Interview