The Adventurers!

Our poster for this afternoon

Today is the last day of the Opposites Attract challenge, and this afternoon Nashwa and I will present our prototype game and see what the others have done. Nashwa was up until the early hours debugging and tidying up the prototype and we created in MS Visual. But she still had time to record this YouTube runthough, so you can see it in action:

The sound on this isn’t brilliant I’m afraid, and its quite hard to hear Nashwa’s narration. But hopefully you’ll get the gist of what’s going on.

To find out about some of the other collaborations, check out the Opposites Attract blog.

And now for something completely different

After a number of posts related to either Opposites Attract or Chawton, its time to write about something else. On Tuesday, for work I took a number of Visitor Experience managers to the South Bank Centre to explore The Wondercrump World of Roald Dahl. No photos were allowed so I can’t share any, you will have to visit the website. Well, you will have to visit, because the website can’t do it justice.

It’s an experience designed for families and children aged seven to twelve, so our guide did well to deal with seven heritage professionals and two other adults. We promised to be on our best behavior, to do as we were told, to stay close and not to run off, and then the red velvet curtain was drawn back and we were invited into Roald Dahl’s world. As we loved from space to space we were drawn into immersive environments, from a room filled with boxed memories of Great Missenden, into a boarding school classroom, the North African desert, deep dark woods, and progressively more surreal spaces.

As we went we were accompanied by an enthusiastic guide, and the mysterious, ominous and occasionally very silly disembodied Narrator. Between them they gave us a potted biography of Dahl, illustrated by just enough reproductions and original objects from the collection of The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre. It was a masterclass in storytelling, not cluttering the visitors’ perception with too much stuff, but drawing attention to key moments, and creating a mythic significance on how these turned a gangly boy into an extraordinary writer.

I said we weren’t allowed to take photos, but I remember that in fact they did say we were allowed to take them in the last room, a space where visitors could get creative. But when we got there we were having too much fun – personally I spent all my time with the wall of self-inflating whoopie cushions. Then a short trip in a (not) Great, (not) Glass elevator brought us back to the real world.

It runs until the 3rd of July. Its definitely worth a visit if you have kids who’ve read the books, or even National Trust staff to take on a development day!

What I meant to say was…

Back at the University for the second day of PGRAS, the post-graduate archaeology symposium which I spoke at yesterday. My talk didn’t go brilliantly well. Despite my preparation last weekend, producing a script as well as my slide deck, I went off-script about a third of the way through, and didn’t get back on it, so I feel a lot of what I had meant to say went unsaid. I often find this when I a script myself, it’s seems I stick more to what I plan to say when I only use bullet points and ad-lib around those. When it’s a full script something in my mind rebels and I end up saying nothing in the script.

So, here’s what I meant to say:

1. This is a session about storytelling. So I’m going to tell you a story, and like all good stories, its going to have a beginning, middle and an end. Given the audience I feel I must warn you – I can’t promise that this will have much archaeology in it. But I have included one piece, so keep an eye out for it
2. Last time I was speaking in front of this forum, I explained that I was researching what cultural heritage interpretation might learn from digital games. Those of you that were here may remember that I’d was interested in eight “emotional triggers” (adapted from (Sylvester, 2013)) that engage players in games. You can ask me about these four afterwards. Right now I’m interested in these four, where I think cultural heritage may have more to learn from games.
   1. Generally we don’t like people Acquiring stuff from cultural heritage sites. But actually the “Can you spot ?” type sheets that heritage sites have for decades given to bored children, are using the acquisition trigger.
   2. Challenge is an interesting one, many games are at the best when the degree of challenge matches the player’s ability and they get into “flow”, but seriously how much challenge are cultural heritage visitors looking for, on a day out? We’ll briefly return to this in a while.
   3. Here’s a tip from me, of you have any musically minded mates looking for a PhD subject, then the world of music and cultural heritage interpretation is an open field. There is nothing published. Zero, Nada. Having done my literature review, its what I’d be studying, if I could play, or … er … tell the difference between notes, or even keep a rythym.
   4. But I can’t, so storytelling is the focus of my study.
3. Before me move on to that, I’d like to pause for a small digression. Those of you who are still listening to me – take a moment to look around the audience. No I don’t want you to point anybody out. I don’t want to shame anybody. But just put your hand up if you can see anyone who isn’t looking at me, but rather looking at their mobile device.
   That’s OK. I know I can be boring. But it’s a demonstration of the secret power of mobile devices. They are teleportation machines, which can transport you away from the place you are physically in.
   And most cultural heritage visitors don’t want that. They have come to our places (they may even have used their phones to help transport them to this place – with on-line bookings or GPS route-finding) to be in the place.
   Of course, that doesn’t stop all sorts of people using mobile devices to “gamify” cultural heritage interpretation. This game at the National Maritime museum, is an example of one that adds new technology to the classic acquisition trigger. You co round the world, collecting crew and cargo from various ports. It adds the challenge trigger to the mix, because you can only SEE the ports if you look at the giant map through the screen’s interface.
4. There’s a lot of research currently looking at interfaces for cultural heritage (Reunanen et al., 2015) considered for example, getting visitors to make swimming motions in front of a Kinect to navigate a simulated wreck site. But the more I read, and the longer I considered it, I’m more and more of the opinion that there is an interface for cultural heritage that technologists are ignoring: (click) Walking around, looking at stuff.
5. Now, when it comes to storytelling, “walking around looking at stuff” is not without its problems. People like to choose their own routes around cultural heritage venues, avoid crowds, and look only at some of the objects.
6. What that means, is that sites often tell their most emotionally engaging story, the beginning, (click)middle (click) and end ( click) towards the beginning of the visit, with a multimedia experience in the visitor centre, or if they can’t afford that, an introductory talk. Then, everything else (click). Which is what game designers call a branching narrative. And what Aylett (Aylett, 2000, Louchart, 2003) calls the “Narrative Paradox … how to reconcile the needs of the user who is now potentially a participant rather than a spectator with the idea of narrative coherence — that for an experience to count as a story it must have some kind of satisfying structure.” (Aylett, 2000). We can learn from our games address with paradox.
7. Imagine then, a site where the visitor’s movements will be tracked around the site, and the interpretation will adapt to what they have experienced already. Museum and heritage sites consist of both physical and ephemeral narrative atoms (“natoms” after (Hargood, 2011)). Persistent natoms include the objects and the collection but also the spaces themselves, either because of their historic nature, or their configuration in relation to other spaces (Hillier, 1996). Ephemeral natoms are media that can be delivered to the visitor responsively including, but not exclusive to, lighting effects, sound and music, audiovisual material, and text.
   All of these natoms comprise the “curated content” of any exhibition or presentation. The physical natoms are “always on,” but the others need not be (hence the “ephemeral” designation). The idea of the responsive environment would be to eventually replace text panels and labels with e-Ink panels which can deliver text natoms specific to needs of the visitor. Similarly, loudspeakers need not play music or sound effects on a loop, but rather deliver the most appropriate piece of music for the majority of visitors within range.
   To reduce the impact of the narrative paradox (Louchart, 2003), the natoms will be tagged as either Satellites (which can be accessed in any order) or Kernels, which must be presented in a particular order (Shires and Cohan, 1988). Defining which natoms are satellites or kernels becomes the authorial role of the curator.
   Here’s comes the gratuitous piece of archaeology – does this diagram remind you of anything? (click) But in fact it seems somehow appropriate. Because, this is the Apotheosis moment. I want to make the visitor the “God” of his or her own story. Not quite putting them in the place of the protagonist, whose choices were made years ago, but both watching and controlling the story as it develops.
8. I’m no technologist, so my plan is to “wizard of Oz” a trail run, using people following visitor groups around, rather than a fancy computer program. My intention is to test how people respond to being followed, and how such a responsive environment would negotiate the conflicting story needs of different visitor groups sharing the same space. I have a venue, the Director Chawton House has promised me a couple of weeks worth of visitors to play with, next year. This is where I am at so far, having spent a couple of weeks breaking down the place’s stories into Natoms.
   There’s a lot more to do, but next year I hope to tell you how Chawton’s visitors were able to explore the place entirely freely, (click) and still manage to be told an engaging story from (click) beginning, though (click click) middle (click) and end.

Gamifying MS Visual

Its been a busy week at work and university, with Chawton and preparation for a presentation at school. And my work for Opposites attracts has suffered, first pushed beyond last weekend, when I had planned to do it, and then made ineffectual by tiredness after work.

So I only finished what I’d planned to finish last Saturday, today, moments before going into to my presentation (which probably wasn’t a good idea as it turns out, but that’s another story.)

Nashwa an I had started off by sketching out a quick flow diagram of the parts of the game that we actually planned to create for the prototype:

Nashwa had already started to create some of the basic functionality in MS Visual Studio. She zipped the project over to me and gave me a brief tutorial when we spoke last week. My job was to add the story, both visually and in narrative.

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My digital drawing Fu wasn’t with me this week, so after a few disappointing attempts to create icons digitally, I scanned some of my preliminary sketches, cleaned them up a bit and shrunk them down to 100×100 pixel bitmaps, with transparent backgrounds. I want to flip the first mate image, so that I can have him facing left when he is a button, and right when he illustrates the timer. I’ll do that this weekend.

The other thing I want to do this weekend is fettle the achievements screen (not pictured here) to create greyscale images of the rewards you have not yet earned, which become colour when you earn them. I also want to add some indicating the higher levels that we are not actually creating.

That took longer than expected

At the natoms of the Chawton Guide book

I’ve finally broken the Chawton House Library guidebook down into it’s component narrative atoms (or natoms). I’ve got plenty more to do this weekend. In order:

• prepare my presentation for Thursday at the University (in which I really wanted to include the above image);
• do all the design work I promised Nashwa for our collaboration project (Nashwa, if you are reading this, I don’t think I’m going to meet the “Saturday Night” deadline I set myself); and.
• create a first draft Gantt chart for the rest of the Chawton project up to Easter next year.

But right now, my Gero has just pinged that its time to stop work, so a walk is in order.

Looking for emotional triggers at Chawton

Just a short post to share this image of a natom network that is slowly getting more complex as I break the stories from the Chawton’s guidebook down. I’m about a third of the way though.

As I go I’m looking especially for natoms with a certain emotional resonance, that might become some of the emotional triggers that really hook people into the place’s story. So far a few things in particular have had the effect (on me) that I’m looking for: a message to the future from Montague Knight, the nursury rhyme, Lucy Lockett lost her pocket, and the tragic death of Eleanor Verney.

Lots more work to do though…

“Breaking” Chawton’s story

I’ve been disassembling Chawton House Library’s guidebook and handout down into Natoms, as the very first stage of my project there. Natoms are not my idea, but a concept from Southampton colleague Charlie Hargood. However, for my purposes I’ve distinguished between Persistent natoms (or P-natoms) which are physical and thus, for the a heritage visitor, stay in one place and do not change, and Ephemeral natoms (or E-natoms) which are not tied to a particular place or even form, they are any media which can be digitally transmitted and shared, such as text, video or music.

To break the guidebook that Chawton supplied down, I’m currently using Scalar, for reasons I explained in an earlier post. It took a little time for me to work out how I should best use it, and to be honest I think I might come unstuck when I start distinguishing between kernels and satellites, but right now I’m getting into the flow of it, so before I went too far, I thought it would be good to share.

First of all I wanted to to some of the P-natoms in place. These are the rooms that our visitors will be exploring. It was very easy to list the rooms, and soon I had that list of rooms, each tagged as a P-natom, looking like this in Scalar’s useful “connections” visulisation:

But I had a slight crisis of confidence about how best to illustrate the links between spaces, or as Bill Hillier puts it, the permeability. Scalar allows simple hyperlinks, but doesn’t visualize them, or make them reciprocal. It also has a Path function, but that is only one way, really for stringing natoms together into a long-form text. So in the end I went for the program’s tagging function, which is quite sophisticated in distinguishing between items “being tagged” and “tagging”. Once I’d tagged the transitions betwene the listed spaces, my visualization looked like this:

I added the gardens at this point. I plan to keep my experiment within the walls of the manor house itself, but some doubt, or fear that I wasn’t future-proofing the model, made me put them in, as the exit form the gift shop.

These spaces are by no means all the P-natoms. More of the the collection will go in later. Next however I wanted to try adding some E-natoms. And that meant starting by breaking down the guidebook text. The first part of the guidebook was an essay, a brief chronological history of the place. Broken down into its constituent parts, and tagged as E-natoms, this is what that essay looked like:

As you can see, at this stage there is no connection between the the new E-natoms and the P-natoms, or between the story and the place. However, already some (but at this stage surprisingly few) of the e-natoms were suggesting engaging stories: which I’ve tagged “Literary Women” and “Jane Austen”. But look what happens when you start adding in parts of the collection, in the spaces in which they are displayed, and their associated stories. To two P and E-natom “solar systems” start to join together:

This is after the collection in just one space, the entrance hall, has been broken into the natoms. Its going to get a lot more complex as work progresses.

The Community, telling the tale

I said I’d return to the subject of text. Over the weekend, I’ve been wrestling with the words that we should use in our app. The challenges are threefold:

1. We want the text to be an adventure story, that motivates the user to want to discover more through completing the game
2. We want the text to be minimal – our tutors are not going to want to read a thesis, and it has to fit on a mobile screen
3. We want the text to be accessible, and that includes not being a barrier to play. All sorts of things might prove to be a barrier, for example the tribal metaphor that I was worried about using when first brainstorming our idea.

So, instead of building a tribe, I’ve to exploring an inhabited island. (Yes, it is still rather colonial, but lots of communities around the world have reached new lands by sea.) Thus, rather than gathering the tribe on the first level, we’re getting to know the crew, and building our ship.

How about this:

Title screen

The Adventurers!

Welcome Captain! Are you ready to gather your crew, build your ship, explore the seven seas and built a new settlement, your Community of Practice?

Time is short and there’s so much to do.

Start screen

Your backers have hired you a crew, and given you money enough to build a ship. But time is tight, you must discover land and build your community before the rations run out.

Name your ship (course name):

Count the crew (total number of students)

When you set sail (course starts)?

When must you finish?

Alternatively, we could have a plain English input screen, and then translate the input data into something like this:

Your backers have hired you a crew of <total number of students>, and given you money enough to build a ship. But time is tight, the good ship <course name> must set sail on <course starts> and the rations will run out buy <course end>.

Check the [ship’s papers: link to task list screen] to see which tasks you must complete before you can properly start exploring.

VARK screen

You need to get the measure of your crew. Do you have people who can be look-outs, depth sounders, navigators, riggers and jacks? Get them to work out their [preferences: link to VARK questionnaire] and share their preferences. Tally the numbers of each here:

Look-outs (visual)[]

Depth-sounders (auditory)[]

Navigators (Read/write)[]

Riggers (kinaesthetic)[]

Jacks (multimodal)[]

(if total <(numbers of students)) Have you got the measure of ALL your crew?

(if total =(numbers of students)) Task finished! Your crew manifest is complete. Now its time to plot your voyage.

What do you think Nashwa? Should I continue in this way?