News
New York New York! | Simon | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonWe're putting the finishing touches to Comfort of Strangers before it's outing at Come Out & Play festival in New York in early June. Ok, we're ironing out the bugs that made the game frustrating to play at the Media Sandbox Showcase. There is some urgency here as the game is opening the festival on June 6th.
We are really excited by the opportunity visit Come Out & Play, all made possible by Clare Reddington and the PM Studio, who are covering travel costs and HP Labs who are lending us the ipaqs we need to run the game. We will be blogging here throughout the festival, so check back for news of how Comfort went and the other great games we get to play.
Final Showcase But A New Beginning | Simon | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonThe Media Sandbox Final Showcase event was a great opportunity for us to trial the game with the numbers of people for which it was intended but the scale threw up some issues. Some of these were pretty straightforward and to do with device management – keeping 40 devices charged, making sure the game mscape didn't crash out waiting for players to begin – others were more interesting.
For the first time we began to glimpse the kind of dynamics thrown up by large game populations and swarm like behaviour. These manifested themselves in periods of highly fluid, fast moving game-play alternating with periods of stasis. Clearly we need to find a design grammar that can accommodate these characteristics. To do this we have to refine the game so that it is stable and engaging enough accommodate the numbers of people needed to create the effects . Sometimes we feel its a bit like observing events at a sub-atomic level, you haveto build a massive apparatus in order to glimpse tiny elusive phenomena.
One aesthetic issue is proving telling. We added music to the beginning to the piece, to create a mood and to give players an indication that the piece is actually running. Feedback from players at the final event was that they wanted the music to continue throughout the piece. As Duncan Speakman pointed out this would work against the whole premise of the work, which is to encourage people to interact. This is a contrast to his work, where he explores the experience of listening to music as one wanders the city, viewing the environment as if you were in a movie. This is the opposite of what we want to achieve. We want people to engage with each other, the technology being the facilitator of this. The music became a seductive insulator of the 'real' world, behind which people felt safe. So we need to work on this area, re-assuring players but also opening them up to interacting with strangers.
Finally, the conclusion of this year's Media Sandbox might be the end of swarmtoolkit, but the research continue with a new company we are forming to exploit commercially swarm game dynamics in education and HR as well as entertainment. We are calling the business……Simon! No website yet, but we have a logo.
We already have a couple of business opportunities, more news on this and what we are aiming to do in our next post.
From SMS to mscape games | Simon | Simon Evans | Simon JohnsonLooking back through the blog I realise there is a bit of a hole in the story of the project. I'll have a go at filling it in now.
Just before the Media Sandbox mid-way event on 31st March we sat down and looked back over the various experiments and trials we had undertaken over the last couple of months. One immediate conclusion was that gaming was a way to study swarming, not the other way round. Our initial goal, on beginning the project, was to try and understand swarm principles in that we might use them in designing street games. In practice, the only way we could assemble large enough groups of participants to test swarm principles was to offer an attractive game experience (something we failed to do with the SMS tests.)
Next we tried to see if we had observed any swarm effects in the games we had run. Our conclusion was that the only time we had observed an actual swarm effect was in Magnetise, an acting exercise where you choose two people and attempt to keep equidistant from them at all times. Here, an individual could control the whole group simply by shifting position slightly.
However, there were plenty of other observations that were relevant. From these established three principles of human based swarming in game contexts. Just to clarify swarming is the behaviour that emerges out of the interaction of individual agents acting autonomously and individually:
- - Game space formula – the relationship between physical space and game population is critical.
- - Tension – game play must entail a risk or a cost. Simply being required to achieve a simple objective (collect points by going to certain locations, for instance) creates linear behaviour, as well as a poor game experience. A risk or cost environment generates feedback within the system, both between players themselves and between the environment and the players.
- - Cooperation threshold – the tension in the above can lead people to consider and enter into cooperation.
Our next step was to come up with some games based upon these principles. Our first idea was a game based on having to keep close to members of your team (benefit), with the need to keep away from members of the other team (cost). This tension creates the necessity for players to cooperate in order to win. We have called the game 'The Comfort of Strangers' and we've published a rule set and video here. We are currently developing this in mscape for play on HP ipaqs.
No Talking Video | Simon | Simon Evans | Simon Johnson
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.
