News
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.
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.
