another day another post

not that i'm committing to any sort of daily post thing, i tried that once and it really didn't work out for me.

i almost abandoned it out of some childish auto rebellion.

day two of my residency went well, a bit more bitty from me, have set myself some small creative tasks, the fruits of which i hope to show back here. one which i had hoped to have completed by this evening was simple 'chose your own adventure' 6 step story that players can engage with purely via email and entirely constructed using gmail's inbuilt filter and auto response feature.

it works sort of but is a bit buggy and need ironing out in terms of some settings and the fact that google seems to get all of the emails that i'm sending it and process them in an absolutely arbitrary fashion, skipping the order about revealing answers to clues to early ect..

i've used the auto responder to simple effect in the minigame above towards the end, and was hoping that i could extend the functionality. although i'm sure i can with some more attention.

the game itself is interaction light, closer to Zork, responding to cue words sent by players and offering pieces of mysteries that are mainly resolved by simple google searches and a brief scan of search results.

i hoped that the game itself would take players into some content that is suitably weird and a little bit disconcerting, which thankfully already existed on the world wide web. i have been thinking more and more about the wealth of material content and resources that exist on the internet and the potential for piggy backing onto that content to weave a narrative and an experience for an audience. Using free gmail accounts, free twitter accounts and free flickr and blogger accounts its possible to begin to build a large narrative web on the net, all for completely free. Lots of ARG s have done this already or simulated this if not actually done it, but expect more of this creative piggy backing from me as i hopefully get this mini email game working.

i could of course respond to the emails myself, but it makes it seem less 'game' without the standardized mechanic. i think there is room for a live more performative response in a different project. perhaps this game in a different guise.

looking at the structure of game, i allowed for a series of binary decisions that ultimately led you to the same ending including a binary decision that led to the same event in its next step only with the text prefixed with "left it is" or "right it is" to denote a response to the player's decision of left or right.
seems like a cheat and in a way it is, but it was an attempt to allow for the player to feel that he was somehow engaged in a more richly responsive feedback loop that he truly was, if the appearance of binary choice is in fact not a choice but a tool for immersion is that cheating or simply a device?

As an exercise in design it was interesting to undertake, and although i came up with it this afternoon it took me about two hours to plan it out, write i out, build the filters in email and test it to realise it doesn;t work. but still a short amount of time as is the point of these 'quick makes'. Although i had the idea planned out the 'adventure' proper didn't really take shape untill i drew out a map of the imaginary space of the story. Although i didn't want to descend into Zorkian territory of " you are standing in a field and can see a white house..." i found it almost impossible to formulate what i was doing untill i had constructed the imaginary site of the adventure.

I found this today which is a fully realised visual map of Zork:




for those who don't know Zork was an early computer game, what is known as a 'text adventure game' and was as the genre name suggests entirely text based.
The computer told you for example: " you are stood in a dark clearing in murky wood, there are low branches and rustling in the undergrowth." You as player would then type "investigate the undergrowth" or whatever until you hit upon a series of commands that the program recognized and progressed the story.

The geography of these stories was then never visually witnessed by its players, and these fan made maps of imaginary worlds which although never visually realized will have existed in the minds of the thousands who have played the game since its inception. There is something about this imaginary geography that i find fascinating, creating a map of a space that is so heavily subjective seems like chasing shadows not to mention an act so whimsical it almost comes fall circle and becomes academic topography, or perhaps simply in a game where you played in effect blind, a map is the clearest way to find your way to the end. i certainly found that out today in my as of yet unnamed and unfinished game.

i don't want to abandon this mini game but ideally in my head i want to do one quick make a day, and having picked up a sorely incomplete "classic game compendium" from a charity shop for two ponds i was planning on creating rules for games i've never played such as chinese checkers:




loads of colored plastic pawns, dice and other bits and pieces i think will make for something fun.

also toady i watched this :

http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/

and if you've got half an hour to spare its really worth a watch (that and being interested in games, their psychology, and a pervasive culture of casual gaming in society)

although it is a great presentation the ending is a bizarely dystopic take on the future as soon through some strange reverse-orwellian glasses where the conclusion is that a pervasive culture of gaming and reward will lead us to be better people because basically in that future we re being watched and therefor more likely to be better people because we're suddenly made accountable for all our consumption. Sounds rubbish. Although i think game and interactivity can absolutely serve to make us better people i hope it won't be through the coercion suggested in this talk, Big Brother as browser cookie.

for a good response check out:

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/2/22/external-rewards-and-jesse-schells-amazing-lecture.html

tomorrow a new quick make, some stuff on board games and tangible media, as well as 'games that make you feel something' not my words theirs and perhaps some more in depth thoughts not just "sounds rubbish".