jbsh

Dan Such bags a netbook

A variation of igFest’s Moosehunt came to Bristol yesterday in the form of Vodafone’s LiveGuy, his mission (which it looks like he accepted with eagerness):

I’m travelling from the north to the south of Britain, laying down clues to my whereabouts. Your mission is to find me - and maybe even bag yourself a netbook. You’ve got two ways to win. Either Find LiveGuy in person or Find LiveGuy online.

<plug>All with the help of a very cool looking Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook connected to the Vodafone network and with a GPS chip giving location updates (delayed slightly for the purposes of giving LiveGuy a fighting chance).</plug>

Sam Machin catches up with LiveGuy

Through the wonders of social media, Mike Coulter met with with LiveGuy at the start of his journey in Edinburgh. It was his blog & twitter stream that alerted me to the project. Mike then dm’d me to see if I wanted help drum up some interest around Bristol.

A few txt messsages, phone calls and emails led to an early morning rendevouz at a top secret location before the day’s excitment around Bristol. As well as bringing Liveguy and his support team (Alastair) up to speed with some of what’s going on around Bristol in the creative use of mobile & locative technology we also had a really good discussion over the future of such technologies and what you can achieve with them.

Obviously the creative and pervasive media projects going on around the Pervasive Media Studio were of interest along with the robotics research between the Universities, but what struck me was the genuine interest around communities, engagement and ways in which technology, and the service providers, can help facilitate that engagement.

Bristol has as checkered a history at public engagement as any other city but in recent years a number of really good initiatives have shown what can be achieved. The flagship is probably the Knowle West Media Centre with a huge and expanding range of community programmes covering pretty much all aspects of digital media. These are so good they’re now running a social enterprise with clients including blue chips and local community companies. They’ve also engaged in a number of innovative mobile and locative technology projects exploring the ways in which civic engagement can be facilitated by technology.

Tom Dowding also spotted LiveGuy

We also talked about the Connecting Bristol project which came out of the Digital Challenge. This is another area where creative use of technology is being applied to wide civic challenges. Under the wing of the City Council, but operating independently out of the eOffice on Wine St, Stephen Hilton and Kevin O’Malley are part of 10 city collaboration. As well as news about the DC10 grouping of cities, Kevin regularly posts about other initiatives and news that is of interest for those at the intersection between technology and civic change (environment, education, planning, transport, are just some recent topics).

With that it was nearly time for LiveGuy to fire up twitter and hit the streets of Bristol, and for me to head off also. I’m staying in touch with Alastair so watch this space for more announcements.

Congratulations to Dan Such, Sam Machin, Tom Dowing and the online winner, Ruth Bailey.

Disclosure: Although I knew where Liveguy was starting his day in Bristol, I didn’t know the itinerary and chose not to take part in the Find Live Guy challenge. There is no business relationship between jbsh LLP, Vodafone or the agency behind LiveGuy.

Update: the picture links to Picassa didn’t seem to work - so I’ve copied the images to jbsh.co.uk and linked to them here.

Last night at the Pervasive Media Studio we gathered for the second iGLab.

The (by now usual) silliness ensued with various games organised and played in the interests of research. If there was a comment for the next Lab it would be for a bit more reflection between games on strategies, game play, ways of improving.

There was a return of scramble (this time played with SMS) with emerging words displayed on a projected board in real(ish) time. A couple of audio games involving dancing to try and find other dancers with the same random tune as you were listening to on headphones, and running around Millenium Square calling out sounds (mine was a police siren) and trying to find your team mates making the same sound.

And of course there was a game of Werewolf. The wolves won, easily.

Werewolves at iGLab.

Originally uploaded by Poo Bar.

This is one of a serious of posts about the Culture, Heritage & Tourism Technology Workshop at the Serious Games Institute on Tues, 4 March.

The last session had two moments that really stuck in the mind, the first was Kevin Williams (KWP) talking about kid vending (aimed at 6-9 years olds), basically charge cards for toddlers to play arcade games and use with vending machines for toys, as being a really good idea.

On a more positive note was Andrew Caleya Chetty (The Public Gallery that is due to open in June 08). Andrew was benchmarking the new gallery space against Ars Electronica & some UK entertainment venues. It will be a paying attraction and is looking specifically at the family demographic as their “target” & value for money as the differentiator. What was interesting was that each visitor has an RFID tag so that visitors can then receive personalised art exhibits.

The first activity in the gallery is ‘choose’. Visitors make curatorial choices that then tailor the other exhibitions. This is a kind of profiling, visitors get to sort colours, textures, etc and these then influence the presentation of the digital and dynamic artworks. A couple of examples that Andrew shared were “Flipme” - make your own stopframe animation and save to personal portfolio. Another was to save secrets and thoughts as ‘flowers’ and collect on way out (not quite sure how this one worked, might have been a paper flower based on your thought/choices. The final installation was an agumented reality flying - dancing - fighting game called Flypad from BlastTheory. This looked a bit like a cross between VirtuaFighter and …, actually it looked like VirtuaFighter but overlaid on a background that was fed from a webcam behind the screen looking across the atrium. So your fighter/dancers were flying around the atrium in VR. When you leave the gallery you can choose to take away a personal exhibition of the art as influenced by your choices and activities.

And that was our lot. There was a short jazz gig from SecondLife and a couple of mohijtos that the catering staff whizzed round the room and then disappeared with before anyone could really call it a drinks party. Mind you most of us were at such a level of information overload that I was quite glad of a beer and 3 hrs on the train to work through it all.

This is one of a serious of posts about the Culture, Heritage & Tourism Technology Workshop at the Serious Games Institute on Tues, 4 March.

After lunch Graeme Duncan from Caspian Learning launched into a very comprehensive drill-down into ‘what do we mean by Serious Games’ and when should we use them? Graeme proposed a 3-way Venn diagram of 3D worlds, simulations, games. Caspian locate themselves in 3D worlds but with informed input from games & simulations. This wasn’t meant to be a formulaic or constraining model, but it did help in understanding the contributions from each circle to any one example of a ‘Serious Game. In particular Graeme noted that games speak to our cultural guardians (the young), not in a dumbing down kind of way but perversely in a upping the ante as they were expecting very high fidelity game experience.
Graeme went on to suggest 5 situations (as identified by the ‘learners’0 that should point to a need/benefit for Serious Games;

• Dull dry content
• Context is king (or more accurately a lack of context)
• People oriented interactions
• Exploration & familiarisation
• Decision making & problem solving

As a quick demo and example Graeme described a client (major publisher but not allowed to say who yet) that had asked Caspian to look at Rome in Danger (14-16 years). Everything was based on their core proprietary technology, Thinking Worlds. What Caspian did was to build in a graphic fidelity that matches the zone of tolerance for learners. What was far more important were the very detailed briefs with learning reasons for having particular game-like features. On a last technology note, the game runs in Realtime 3D Shockwave in the browser.

I’ll skip over a couple of presentations that weren’t quite up to par and get on to…

Dr Esther MacCallum-Stewart (Post-doc researcher, SMARTLab). Esther was specifically looking at MMORPS’s and stealth learning (a term introduced by Prof Henry Jenkins from MIT). In part of the description of games as learning experiences, Esther noted the huge discussions around Civ II sequence of technology advances (did alphabet lead to code of law?). While these are slightly artificial (its only a game) the arguments, research and competing theses of how civilisation really did advance were evidence of learning. Esther also noted that because they were games, there was a very diverse mix of realism & fakery (or fantasy to be more generous). This is clearly an issue for people trying to use off-the-shelf games for teaching and has been the cause of Sid Myer back tracking in recent years on the historical veracity of his games.

Esther also noted that players hate thinking that they are learning. If people are told they’re being taught then its not a game, if its a game then its not learning. However, the online games are now so big that players have to take different roles in order to advance past the most lowly of levels. At this point we moved fairly solidly into WoW. Here there were examples of structured, reflective in guild learning and sharing of knowledge. I asked about authority and reputation in the Q&A and Esther pointed out that there were very strong social & peer forces that managed to an extent, they were also very unstable within Guilds and across worlds. There is a wiki but there didn’t appear to be any emergent structure for learning or teaching or sharing heritage other than a (very traditional) guild based one.

Esther also touched on RuneScape as having gameplay around knowledge rather than slash’n'burn. This led to some notes about grinding (or doing small repetitive tasks for an incremental benefit as part of a larger quest or character improvement). The clear message was that players enjoy learning - even if they don’t admit to it. These games often have unexpected outcomes - learning about machinama and YouTube are technically quite advanced and yet many people are learning these skills in order to present their character in a story.

A huge amount to take in, and I’m still working through some ideas that have been triggered but definitely a highlight of the day.