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.
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.
