Picture the Impossible - Meaningful Play 2016
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This document outlines the design process for a city-wide alternate reality game (ARG). It discusses that the process involves learning about ARGs, exploring location-based games, and giving back to the community through socialization. It also notes that designing large-scale games is labor intensive and requires extended face-to-face time, collaboration across leadership, and financial support which does not have to come as direct cash funding but can include donations of supplies, consulting services, student pay and individual prizes from local organizations. Contact information is provided for those wanting to know more about designing and deploying city-wide ARGs.
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Picture the Impossible - Meaningful Play 2016
- 1. Picture the Impossible: Designing & Deploying a City-Wide ARG Elizabeth Lawley Rochester Institute of Technology School of Interactive Games & Media • MAGIC Center lawley.rit.edu
- 2. Let’s get some programmers together and put on a game!Let’s get some kids together and put on a show!
- 11. Location Games
- 29. Extended F2F Time is Critical
- 30. Large Scale Games Are Labor Intensive
- 31. Financial Support Doesn’t Have to be Cash on Hand
- 32. Financial Support Doesn’t Have to be Cash on Hand • Design Consulting: $4,000 (Newspaper) • Supplies & Gala Party: $13,000 (Bing) • Summer Student Pay: $10,000 (RIT) • Individual Prizes: $5,000 (Kodak) • Donations: $17,000 (2 local foundations) TOTAL: $46,000
- 34. Want to Know More? lawley.rit.edu liz@lawley.net slideshare.net/mamamusings PTI Videos: bit.ly/ptivideos
Editor's Notes
- Like the kids in Babes in Arms, we had lots of enthusiasm, but not a a lot of knowledge of what we were undertaking. That’s a good thing, because if we’d known we probably wouldn’t have done it!
- So, I panicked.
- Told RIT if they wanted faculty to work on this without compensation, they’d need to allow us to run some seminar classes where students worked on the project with us. Told the newspaper that since RIT was donating the time of multiple faculty members, and allowing us to run classes where students were working on the game, they should pony up for consulting with Elan Lee (one of the creators of the ARG genre, and an RIT alum) Told RIT that since the newspaper was paying for the consulting help, and hosting the web site and providing staff resources, we should provide summer pay for two co-op students. Went to a local foundation that regularly donates to local charities, and asked them to give us $14,000 that we would in turn donate to three local charities as part of the game. (Foundation still gets the write off, RIT gets to count it as a donation, and the charities still get the money.) Talked to Microsoft, offered to highlight some of their technologies (mapping, photosynth) if they donated to the project—used that money for supplies and the final gala. Talked to Kodak (based in Rochester) and convinced them to donate cameras and printers as prizes for weekly challenges. Photo credit: Flickr User Theresa Thompson, https://flic.kr/p/8FiM4h
- The newspaper really wanted to target “young professionals,” and that shaped a lot of our early design of the game. With Elan’s help, we identified the kinds of activities we wanted our players to engage in. Later, based on Jane McGonigal’s input, we focused in on the VERBS that we wanted to associated with our game play.
- Working with the chair of our history department, we brainstormed key figures, events, inventions, and locations associated with Rochester’s history. We also looked at events and activities scheduled for the fall of 2010, so that we could arrange our weekly themes to coincide with as many as possible. Design meetings to map out the themes, activities, and narrative included technical and content people from both organizations
- Newspaper stories and public tv/radio spots before the game began, and during the first week, also told people about the charitable tie-ins.
- The ARG narrative was that a secret benevolent society had existed in Rochester for decades, but factions within the group had emerged and were fighting for control. In addition to the “surface” activities that were obvious to any player, there were hidden puzzles and content that revealed the narrative over the course of the seven weeks. The three factions were also linked to specific charities, and we got a local foundation to provide the $14,000 for our charitable donations. $2K a week for 7 weeks. The foundation donated to us (which was a writeoff), and we then gave checks to the three charities at the gala event. (We could have skipped us as the middle man, but it made development happy that the money came to us first.) Then a second local foundation gave us an additional $3000 for the same purpose. Tree faction raised $7,600 for Golisano Children’s Hospital; Forge faction raised $4,800 for a local food bank; Watch faction raised $4,600 for underprivileged kids
- Each week had a specific theme; arts & crafts, Rochester firsts, local food, famous figures, etc. We had three types of activities each week: local activities, which included creative challenges and scavenger hunts, newspaper puzzles like crosswords and image assembly from multiple editions, and web games. The newspaper took the lead on the web site. They used Drupal as a content management system, and worked with our students to add in a custom interface for assigning achievements to users.
- Here’s an example of one of the creative challenges.
- The number of submissions we got for the creative challenges really surprised us. Hundreds of photos, dozens of videos, almost 100 people who cooked dishes for the local ingredients cooking challenge. RIT took the lead on collecting and organizing submissions and assigning achievements; the newspaper took the lead on judging (photo editors, food editor, etc)
- We convinced SCVNGR, a mobile game startup, to provide free access to their system. We used Bing maps city images to show people the starting point (their high-quality images are actually provided by a Rochester based company, Pictometry, so it wasn’t *just* about the donations.)
- We averaged over 300 players a weekend for the scavenger hunts, and got great feedback from players on these. We didn’t get numbers from SCVNGR on SMS versus app users, but we saw many people using the SMS interface each week. One of our players, a senior citizen, told us in her video at the end of the game that it was what finally pushed her to learn how to text with her phone.
- One of our master’s students, Joe Pietruch, developed the flash-based web games, and he also worked with the newspaper to integrate the games into the drupal site so that achievements would be properly assigned. Each weekday we released new themed content for a specific web game. Monday was the slider puzzle (my least favorite)
- Tuesday was the video quiz
- Wednesday was the map game
- Thursday was the jigsaw puzzle.
- And Friday was the gears puzzle.
- There are several NYTimes crossword puzzle authors in Rochester, and we had one of them create weekly crossword puzzles. We also include other puzzles that were developed by an RIT faculty member who’s a Google puzzle champion. One newspaper puzzle required players to assemble a 16-piece image over four weeks, with different pieces appearing in each of the four different regional supplements published on Wednesdays. This resulted in a lot of coordination among players in each faction! Most puzzles involved entering an answer on the web site, so that achievements could be automatically assigned. Some, however, like the image assembly puzzle, required human evaluation and assignment of credit.
- We ended up with far more players than we expected, which created a serious logistical load, particularly for things that required human evaluation and achievement assignment (like local challenges, or photos from the scavenger hunts) Amazingly (to us) 14 players tied for first place, having gotten EVERY available point available in the game
- The forums were a core part of how factions communicated, and how people got help with challenging puzzles.
- This was unheard of in ARGs.
- Our final creative challenge was for people to create a video of up to three minutes in length, talking about how they’d ”pictured the impossible.” The results were spectacular, and we collected them in this playlist, with some of my favorites near the top. There’s also an overview video at the beginning that the newspaper made after the game was over.
- Trying to do design work asynchronously is almost always unsuccessful. And short meetings aren’t a whole lot better. We got our best work done during meetings that lasted at least 3 hours, and that included design and development staff together.
- Do NOT underestimate the amount of time that community management and real time game admin requires!!
- Most of our support was in-kind donations rather than cash.
- Most of our support was in-kind donations rather than cash.
- Projects that bring together staff from two different organizations can be really challenging. Ours only worked because we modeled collaboration at the highest levels, with project managers from both RIT and the newspaper working as partners rather than seeing one of the organizations as in charge and the other as secondary.
- I’m always happy to answer questions about PTI or other work that I’ve done.