Panel notes:
- History Unwired -
Neighborhood in Venice
Travel guide, veers into film and multimedia
Organized into “Characters” and “Paths”
- Hear character steps
- Video of individual characters telling stories
- Some interactive elements: interior tour of a building you can’t enter in reality
- “The more you explore, the more intimate it gets” – movement into people’s homes, private spaces
- Building in a timer (sensitive to location) – you get 30 minutes, but the more you explore the more time you have
Tech Specs:
- Delivered on PocketPC right now, planned to port to mobile phones
User testing
- Interaction b/w virtual and real (people running into locals in person whom they’ve seen virtually)
- “Local explorers” – people who try to race through as fast as possible
- Digital Street Game -
Michele Chang, Intel
Interested in “mobile culture in the space of urban environments”
Use of a game as a way of exploring mobile practices
Location-based game accessible by web
- Goal is to take over as much turf as possible by “tagging” street intersections with “stunts”
- Stunts: “Actions”, “Objects”, “Themes”
Questions:
- Hybrid spaces
- How to design a game in which participants are actually engaged
- How do people in different cities react to same task?
Effortful play: some players used tasks to jump into self-directed play (that might last for hours)
Audiences: lists of registered players, tools for facilitating connections between players
Lessons:
- Create systems that account for user creativity
- Conversational Design
- Physical and Social design constraints
- Harvey Smith -
Comes as games from a more traditional writing/interactive narrative standpoint
Drawn to moral and social creativity enabled by games
“Deus X” (?)
- Emergent gameplay dictates player’s path in a more “analog” way
- First test: player played around on initial dock, chased a rat around, rolled a trash can around, etc. – User: “This is great”, Designer: “Play the game!”
Spaces that were created that were more mundane were more compelling to users
Key difference b/w embedded and emergent narrative: former is more interesting to “audience,” latter much more interesting to “player”
“Gaming platform of future will be handheld” (provided advances in tech)
- Wiley Wiggins -
Comes from film, traditional narrative
Early adopter of Nokia’s “Lifeblog“
Difference that mobile media brings is one of context, rather than content
Standard perspective on mobile media is almost like a “little TV you hang around your neck”
Sees killer app for mobile tech as documentary narrative
Format suffers from small screens, bad sounds – can overcome limitations with more interactivity
- Discussion -
We have to be careful about how much of a “free for all” we’re going to allow; it’s my tour that I’ve built – instinct toward controlling narrative rather than opening it up. [ME]
Wiggins thinks that you can have your cake and eat it too, sees games as an example.
Interesting to think about the use of game design as a lens through which to think of interactive mobile narratives; Epstein seems to be thinking about what he’s doing in a very different way, much more along traditional narrative methods.
Chang raises notion of “problem solving” as a key activity in the social space of a game…
Games shouldn’t just be diversions, they should engage people, connect people [WW]
Real benefit of mobile media is “enhancing where you are” [MC]
“Trying to design an interface you don’t have to look at too much”; use antireflective screen [ME]
Difference between “games” and “toys” is fundamentally that the former are structured around a narrative of some sort [HS]
Question: Who’s out there pushing the boundaries of storytelling and narrative using mobile media?
- Swedish company (It’s alive?) with game targeting teenage girls
- Steve Benford, Nottingham
- Users who use game engines to create new experiences; large component of “The Sims Online” is creation of stories behind game screenshots.
