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No Talking Video | Simon | Simon Evans | Simon Johnson
Swarm Toolkit games at iglab | Simon | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonSo we finally go play our SMS games. The two we played yesterday were Scramble and RGBargy. Actually we played RGBargy with some people at the PM Studio during the day, we did play Scramble at iglab though. The game went well but im pleased to be moving away from this area of testing. Moving now into testing using urban games and mScapes. Me and Duncan had two other games we were play testing at iglab too. HipSync (Previously called LipSync) and HollaLuLu both got their first outing last night. Both were pretty successful. It was amazing to see how quickly people developed a visual language to communicate with each other in HipSync. For the first few rounds infact I thought we'd made it too easy. The tracks we selected were all from pretty distinct genres, Rock, Electronic, Celtic and er Chris Isaak. We played it for about 5-6 rounds decreasing the duration each time till the last round when people had 5s to get into thier groups *and they could do it…*. HollaLuLu was a winner too. The spectacle of a city square filled with people hollering and running and trying to find the others in their group was truly beautiful. But for me the greatest strength of this game was the feeling of insurgency. The way the players took ownership of the public spaces they entered and the palpable presence they had in each of the spaces they entered. This is a lot to do with the numbers. We had 16 people playing last night so there were a mix of moments when people were safely wrapped in the blanket of the crowd and moments when people felt exposed and foolish. I think games like this function best when the density of the playing population allows people to experience both these social relationships. Perhaps feeling just a little foolish at some point helps to enhance the pleasure provided by the crowd and its legitimacy. Like Melvil's Ishmael says as he lies in bed "because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast".
anyway here's a short vid duncan made that captures the feeling of the game loud and hectic…/simonJ
No Talking | Simon | Simon Evans | Simon Johnson
photo Liz Milner
Still having problems with the SMS game tests. We had an attempt at the drinks evening but a bunch of co-coincidental bugs thwarted us (our fault for not resisting the temptation to tweak between software testing and launch). Luckily Simon J had cooked an idea up with Duncan Speakman that gave us a chance to actually try something live. Duncan was keen to test out a few ideas we had in common and his insight was to keep it simple and to follow our instincts. Good advice. No Talking is an mscape experienced in a group and was first run with various PM Studio residents and guests on 27th Feb.
The piece strung together a series of tasks which players were invited to perform at given locations around the PM Studio. The objective of the piece was to encourage group coordination out of simple instructions given to individuals and without verbal communication. Feedback from players was positive, they enjoyed the collaboration and the cheeky instructions. The development team had their own highlights: Simon J the marching in step across the Pero's bridge; Duncan the pointing at the most beautiful building; Simon E amused by Ben Templeton counting the group in carrying out the instruction: 'No one else knows it but you are the leader. Lead the group to the falafal stand'. Sadly everyone immediately sussed out that each had exactly the same instruction.
photo Liz Milner
Of course, specific insights into swarming were hard to come by but the value of No Talking was probably more to do with the practicalities of staging group experience. It also confirmed that our conviction that pervasive media experience has to be mediated over audio channels. Any screen based media simply gets in the way of interacting with the physical environment.
Finally, No Talking was a first chance for us to get to grips with mscape. We are working with HP labs on this project, specifically with a prototype version of mscape which includes network comms; Tom Melamed from HP Labs has been holding our hand with this. We didn't get into network data with No Talking, we wanted to keep it simple for our first outing. That will have to wait for the next stage of the project…..news of that here next time.
Game tests | Simon | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonThe aim has been to create some quick game experiences to test out some of the concepts we outlined in the first weeks of the project. We wanted something simple that would involve individual agents and objectives but also the possibility of ad hoc collaboration. These were not scientific experiments but intuitive investigations into game play and social groupings.
The tests were supposed to be low tech, paper based trials that we could knock out quick and run at the IG Lab's inaugural meeting on Feb 12th but when we sat down and really thought about it we realised we need computer mediation in order to generate and record test data. Then, thinking about interfaces that could be experienced socially, we decided that to save us time we would use SMS messaging as a way for people to interact and play the game. Before we knew it we were designing databases and coding server scripts. So much for a quick and easy.
We now have three games, presented in Flash movies that we will use to test for and observe emergent swarm behaviour: Scramble, RGBargy and 'More Than I'd Care to Reveal'. These games are designed to be run simultaneously with two groups of players, some in a social setting alongside other players and some alone, in front of desk top monitors. Behind the Flash movies we have constructed a system that manages game initialisation and player registration as well as recording all player interaction with the games. The idea is that we can observe differences in game play between the group and solo players, and see this reflected in the data. We also want to closely observe how the group players interact in their social setting, how they negotiate game strategies. The upside of all the work is that we now have the beginning of a game management engine that we can use for more elaborate game experiences in the future.
All this took a fair bit longer than we bargained for and we missed the opportunity to test at the IG Lab in Feb. Our plan is now to run a first test at the Media Sandbox drinks evening Feb 26th and then at various schools and universities the following week.
Book work | Simon | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonWe met for the first proper day's work back at the beginning of January at the Evans Studio farmstead in the Forest Of Dean. After dealing with the practicalities - setting up a work schedule, responsibilities and objectives - we started in on the theory and boy is there plenty of that. We are looking at non-linear dynamics within pervasive media systems, specifically swarms. It sounds a bit dry but it is about enabling intuitive cooperation amongst people and has loads of potential in gaming, social action, low carbon economies - all sorts of areas.
Simon J is the project partner who has done the backgorund reading on the area and he had a go at explaining some of the ideas in Manual De Landa's book One Thousand Years of Non Linear History. Simon J is keen on De Landa, whose work tries to cross breed concepts from the Natural Sciences with those more familiarly associated with the Social Sciences - for instance the notion of historical processes in geology, rock strata forming over time, and geological processes within history, social classes forming through sedimentation. Of course, this approach is not without its critics but it does offer a usefully formulaic approach to social dynamics, suggesting that the embodiment of these processes within computer systems would be possible. Again, it raises the familiar question of computers not becoming more human-like, but humans being invited (compelled) to become more machine like.
Alongside this general reading has been a more specific research path that we have followed over the last month. There are a number of applications, demos and toys online that use swarm dynamics to generate graphics, such as levitatedTentacle1 and Swarm Box We are analysing the code of these programs to find out how other programmers have have understood swarming and realised it in code.
An early objective of our research has been to identify the fundamental components of swarming. We started out with an idea that three areas would be relevant:
space/proximity - the geographic dimension.
communication - between agents
persistence - time.We then realised that persistence (ie. time) was really a property of the other two components and not something in itself. So we arrive at:
Communication is optional or compelled/controlled, but never absent or forbidden.
Geography - size of game world has as yet undefined relationship with number of participants.But isn't geography really another way of discussing communication? Swarm behaviour involves a range of relationships between agents; chemical messages between ants, for instance, or spatial awareness between fish in a shoal. In many cases communication is indirect, the fish merely try and stay within a certain distance of a given number of others. The key principle, however, is the communication of information, in the fish example it is a visual clue at offers the relevant information. What matters is how far the given form of communication can travel, so geography (or extent of swarm space) is a property of communication. We can see this with Seekers - changing the call radius (range of communication) and number of seekers (agents) has a powerful affect on swarm efficiency and stability.
Clearly, modern technologies of communication will have an impact on the potential of swarm applications in social groupings, enabling swarm like behaviour over extensive geographic space. Pervasive media will enable highly dynamic groupings out in the world. It is in this intersection of ubiquitous communication and physical space that we want to work. We are both very keen on creating networked experiences in varied geographic space, to get games away from the desktop or console in the way the Blast Theory have so successfully done.
So there we have it: communication. Does this insight help much? It is a huge area and without an exact philosophical definition, impossible to explore. However, we have decided to accept a very broad definition of what human communication is and to focus not on the content but it's effect. A swarm is the manifestation of emergent behaviour from within the relationships of a group of individual agents. The behaviour is not dictated from any top down control but emerges out of communication, direct or indirect, between agents. Our goal is to establish what is needed to create emergent cooperation between people and to use these insights to build a pervasive media tool for other people to create games and experiences based on cooperation between people.
