Week #7

Last spurt at recruitment

Finalize and submit the formal research proposal

Test the test before the test

Thoughts

So at the end of this week we’ll be doing our first experiment.  It’s taking place in Trinity Bellwoods, a great park area in the west end of Toronto, near Ossington and Queen.  Our big challenge for this week is getting everyone “recruited,” and making sure we get most of the edge cases figured out.  Kerem’s been doing some great work on defining a safe and accessible place for us to hold the experiments, and we’re looking forward to this Friday.

If you haven’t already signed up as a tester, I’d suggest you head over here right about now, and sign up by filling in the survey.  We’ll get in touch with you ASAP and get your iPhone’s unique ID (UDID) from you, which will let you join on as a alpha tester!

Next up

After this week, we’ll be reviewing our findings from the experiment.  One of Andrew’s goals is to write some software in either Processing or Python to visualize the movements of the testers, seeing how people move in those spaces and what kind of commonalities might emerge in terms of movement, angle, etc.

We’re also going to be working with the visual designers at Normative Design, Ayla and Genco, to really start defining an aesthetic foundation for the application.  The work they’ve done so far is incredible and will be changing as we add more games.  None of us interns have a formal background in visual design, and all of us are excited to see creation and research process in that space.

Week #6

Completed initial wireframes

Writing report for MEIC

Finishing up recruitment phase

Reformatted video Blog post

Thoughts

It’s been a busy week. We’ve had the final revision of the wireframes to finish up, a report to write for OCAD’s Mobile Experience Innovation Centre, recruitment issues to sort out, blog posts to be written, and naturally, the glaring issue of how we’re presenting our videos and what we’ve been doing.

We’re trying out a new layout with this. So we’ve a quick checklist of what we’ve been doing, a broader description in this “thoughts” section, and finally some of what we’ll be doing next week. These will be accompanied by blog posts and other media.  The videos are changing too: we’re doing the first and last days of the week as a group status update, and in-between individual videos will serve as both commentary and thoughts on the project and what we’re individually taking from it.

Next up

We’ve a lot to finish for next week. The experiment will itself likely be next week, and we’re hoping to finish a lot of the recruitment by the end of the week itself.  Another goal is to get a more dynamic version of this post structure up and running, but Andrew’s skills with jquery have yet to measure up, despite a very nice vimeo API.

If you’re interested in the RedRover project, we’re looking for people to help us test the first version next week, so go to this site and take the survey! http://redrover.normativelabs.com/

(by @Readywater)

Games are very natural for us.  Ernest Adams describes the fundamentals of a game as a “type of play activity, conducted in the context of a pretend reality, in which the participants try to achieve at least one arbitrary, non-trivial goal by acting in accordance with rules.”  He also describes game reality as enclosed within a “magic circle” where participants mutually agree to abide by the value and constraints of that game.  It doesn’t take a big leap to extend this description outwards, looking at life, institutions, politics, etc. as extensions of the same principal; the value of that being a support for our natural inclination to create and to imagine.

Geospatial games aren’t new, but they’re becoming a lot more interesting thanks to ubiquity of mobile devices with awareness of space and location.  Foursquare and Gowalla are great examples of services built around those features, and games like Mob Zombie leverage those services to inform the game environment.  Problem is, Foursquare and Gowalla aren’t games, but instead services which use game-like principals to motivate.  Foursquare takes the action of “Check ins” as its primary interaction, we want to see what the next steps are.  So what can we do to build upon the amazing work in this space?

One of the big questions I’ve had from this project has been how to control the magic circle in a geospatial context.  The whole concept of the fourth wall in video games feels like an extension of this, where we need to very consciously control the flow between the “real-world” and the “game.”  Whether it’s Max* chiding us for breaking Sam’s spirits or Metal Gear Solid trying desperately to convince us that we’re in a video game, there seems to be a lot of leeway in how video games and reality blend.  I’ve begun to think that in the geospatial context, any kind of game needs to look to its interface to be that fourth wall: neither opaque nor wholly transparent, but instead filtering our view into (and out from) the magic circle.  Whether it acts as a lens or a stained glass window is up to the designer, provided that it serves a role as filter and not sandbox. 

Many mobile games use the “Sandbox” (More this sandbox than that sandbox) principal, keeping the magic circles within the device itself.  Geospatially aware games necessarily break from this: the game can’t exist within a sandbox because the sandbox precludes external awareness.  By making a mobile game aware of the world, the scope of the magic circle can extend indefinitely: the source of the game’s rules and value are no longer the device, but instead something on top of the reality we know.  And in the same way that the introduction of electric lighting drastically altered our perception of architecture and living space, we’ve the opportunity here to drastically change the way that players perceive their surroundings.
 
Red Rover is a research project and we’re keeping it simple out of necessity, but it’s also something that we’re quite passionate about, and become more so every day.  I’ve worked in the new media space before, but it’s the early childhood gaming on my dad’s Apple IIe, 3D studio max in middle/highschool, and video games from Police Quest (Still remember the Jessie Bains code to get in) to Rez which have informed how I interact, create, and play _through_ computers.  It’s hard coming from consuming rich, developed, and complex media to trying to making something as parred down, simple, and polished as possible (Simple is really, really hard).  But to be honest, we’ll have failed if we don’t succeed at simple and failure in this first step is like not getting the Chrono doll at the beginning of the game, right?

* Was it just me, or was discovering Sam in Jedi Knight (Dark Forces 2) just about the weirdest fourth wall break ever?

Hi there,

The team at Normative are looking for some capable and intuitive minds to partake in an outdoor experiment for iPhone location-based gaming.

The experiment would involve three phases including a game of tag, and ultimately something special in the third phase.

There will be beer, pizza, and prizes. So If you’re curious come drop us a line or fill out this little survey so we can get to know you a bit better.

http://nrma.tv/bpHh0e

Thanks,

The Normative Interns

kerem@normativedesign.com

murat@normativedesign.com

andrew@normativedesign.com

We’ve been hard at work here at Normative Labs.  There’s been a reason for the coffee consumption.

First, you can keep up with some of our secondary source reading through our reading list on Mendeley, RedRover.read.

Second, you can follow us at @NormativeLabs to follow our twitterpation with mobile applications, UbiComp, and other exciting developments in the digital and physical realm.

Developments to which we’re hoping to add!  Our research will be revealed to the public through the MEIC and this blog, and we encourage you to make use of it in your future game designs!  We will.