Digital Worlds - Interactive Media and Game Design

In Have You Got a Second Life?, I introduced the 3D social network Second Life, and hinted that this was just one of many such virtual worlds.

To see just how big the universe of virtual worlds is becoming, the Association of Virtual Worlds recently published a directory describing over 250 virtual worlds: The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds.

Download a copy of The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds. What categories does The Blue Book use to classify each world? For a consumer guide, what other information would you find useful to know? Identify three or four combinations of category that interest you, and see if a virtual world is listed that matches those categories.

Several other sites also offer comparison charts for the increasing number of virtual worlds that are now in existence. For example, virtualenvironments.info provides a comparison matrix of fifteen or so of the larger virtual worlds.

Identify two or three different scenarios in which it might be appropriate to visit a virtual world (for example, a business meeting, a school ‘geography field trip’, or a ‘night on the virtual town’). To give you an example of how such worlds might be used in business, for example, read this article from Business Week: The (Virtual) Global Office.

Now identify a virtual world that looks like it might provide an appropriate setting for each activity. Now visit each virtual world (or at least its website). In what ways do the worlds meet - or fail to meet - your expectations? Feel free to write a post about the scenarios you chose, the criteria you used to select an appropriate world, the worlds you selected (and why), what you expected to find in those virtual worlds, and how those worlds met your expectations. If you can find a demo video, or video review, of the virtual worlds in question, embed it in your post.

How should I behave in a Virtual World?

As with all social situations mediated by communication technologies, there is often a right way and a wrong way to behave when entering a virtual world.

Many organisations have a code of conduct that regulates their employees’ behaviour. Suppose that you work for an organisation that makes use of 3D virtual worlds. Write down five areas of personal behaviour, presentation or activity that might be addressed by a code of conduct for working in virtual worlds.

Now read the IBM Research IBM Virtual World Guidelines. Did you identify similar issues in your own list?

Read any typical game review, and it’s quite likely that it will provide you with a quick summary of the plotline or storyline of the game, a comment on its playability and the actual gameplay (as well as how easy or difficult it may be), mention of any improvements over previous versions of the game, a quick take on the graphics and fluidity of the animation, and maybe a recommendation (or not) about whether you should go our and buy this game, NOW! And it will probably have a rating as well (5 stars, or 3 out of 10, for example).

These reviews serve a useful purpose, of course - they help provide consumers with a ‘third party’ recommendation about whether or not to purchase a particular game - but in the short form of 200 words or so, (which isn’t a lot of words!), there’s not a lot of space to provide a detailed critique of the game…

So it’s quite rewarding to find an ‘unreview’ that takes the time to “examine[s] the game design of [a] title and consider[s] some of the implications that these design choices had on the game’s audience”, as the post Super Mario Galaxy (from the Only a game blog) does.

The post assumes some knowledge of the game, so if you haven’t seen or played it, watch the following video review:

Read through the “review” (”Super Mario Galaxy“), paying attention to the following questions as you do so; feel free to search the Only a Game blog, or use the Digital Worlds custom search engine, to explore the questions a little more deeply.

• What genre of game is Super Mario Galaxy? “Rushgames” and “virtual tourism” are also mentioned in the post in this context; what are the defining characteristics of “rushgames” and “virtual tourism”?
• What is “kinaesthetic control” and how does it affect the gameplay?
• What camera viewpoint is used in the game? What is a camera viewpoint anyway?
• To what extent is two-player gaming supported in Super Mario Galaxy?
• How is the notion of “lives” used in the game, and how does this compare to a normal use of character lives? What is the “normal” use of character lives in a game, anyway?

Another take on the “Super Mario Galaxy” development story can be found on the wii.com website, where there are a series of interviews with the Super Mario Galaxy development team.

• According to the director of the game, what new move was created for Mario, and how is it initiated with the wiimote controller?
• How was the music for the game recorded?
• How does Shigeru Miyamoto, who was in charge of the design of Super Mario Galaxy, describe the gameplay of the Co-Star mode?

If you have a Nintendo Wii console and fancy trying out the game, you can find “Super Mario Galaxy” on Amazon.co.uk (game guide); there are also several walkthroughs available - for example, check out this walkthrough from Gamespot.

Going through some old notes I’d collected about potential ideas for exercises in 3D worlds, I came across the following checklist I’d scribbled down at some point that seemed like good things to know about when exploring a 3D digital world.

If you can think any other ‘need to know’ skills, please add them as a comment.

Can you:

• zoom in and out;
• tilt the view to a desired perspective;
• rotate a view;
• navigate to a particular location;
• search for a particular location;
• bookmark a particular location;
• add an information layer in a “mirror world”, such as one of the following:
  • Google Earth;
  • NASA WorldWind;
  • Virtual Earth 3D.

When it comes to controlling 3D avatars in a digital world, can you move around as easily as you can in the real world?

Give yourself 5 points if you get the joke ;-)

In All the World a Game? In introduced the idea of alternate reality games (ARGs) that merge fictional game world events with real world interactions. In this post, we’ll look at at how communication between ARGs and their players can be managed, and the different ways and levels of engagement people can have with them.

This post is essentially a summary of two sections of the IGDA 2006 Alternate Reality Games white paper. (The paper is also maintained as a wiki: IGDA Alternate Reality Games White Paper wiki).

Read the following sections of the IGDA 2006 ARGG white paper: Methods and Mechanics and Understanding your Audience. As you do so, try to answer the following questions (feel free to ‘augment’ your answers with information from outside the white paper wiki):

ICT in ARGs

A wide variety of media (particularly ‘new media’) can be used within the context of an ARG. Blogs are ideal for relaying information from game characters or “agencies” (fictional companies, for example) in a ‘broadcast’ way to the audience at large, although sometimes care needs to be taken that information is not divulged through a public blog that should be unknown to other characters within the game (who would also be able to read the blog….). Video sharing websites such as YouTube might also be used to release video elements into the game.

Players can communicate with the game through ‘point-to-point’ communication channels, such as text messaging or email. (The game may also ‘broadcast’ material via SMS and email). Instant messaging/chat may also be used to allow the player to interact with game characters. IM conversations may be handled by the actual people running the game (who are maybe living out the life of an in-game character) on a one-to-one, or group chat/chatroom basis, or by ‘chatbots’, artificially intelligent software programmes that can respond to messages on a particular topic.

Wikis and online forums provide another way of supporting group discussions. Wikis are particularly useful for maintaining a ’story so far’ walkthrough of a game in progress. It is likely that ’social network’ sites (such as user created social networks on Ning) will increasingly play a role in supporting ARGs.

Some games may even make use of live events, often reminiscent of “happenings“.

The Games within the Game

Many ARGs make use of cryptographic puzzle games, where the player must try to solve some sort of code-based puzzle. (A good recent example of a cryptographic game, albeit not an ARG, is this recent Guiness “Dominos” advergame.)

Others require the player to ‘manipulate’ in-game characters to try to get them to divulge a certain piece of information (this approach may also be used with respect to getting information out of a chatbot, for example).

Some games may make use of geocaching - hiding physical artefacts at particular locations in the real world. Increasingly, with powerful 2D and 3D mapping tools like Google maps and Live Virtual Earth, game clues may be hidden on map overlays. With many user-contributed content sites, such as flickr and Youtube, supporting ‘geotagged’ entries (that is, photo or video uplaods associated with a particular geographical location).

Levels of Participation

The white paper identifies participation at four levels:
Devotees: the ‘hardcore’ players, devotees will likely know the minute an update has been posted, and will be the ones to find the new sites associated with a game first…
Active Players: dedicated to the game, they are likely to engage in the community aspects of the game and communicate with the game through whatever communications channels it offers.
Casual players will wander through the game, but not necessarily engage with the community around it (though they may lurk in the forums, for example). Casual players will not be receiving information through ‘active’ game channels (such as SMS/text messaging, for example) so they rely on second-hand sources (such as walkthrough or catch up sites) for this information.
Curious Browsers & Information Seekers
Curious browsers are peope who wander by the game, maybe once, maybe a few times, and dabble with bits of it without actively engaging, or even engaging to the extent of becoming a casual player. Curious browsers have no real intention of playing the game, though they may be interested in seeing what it has to offer.

It is interesting to compare this breakdown with research into more general uptake of online “social technologies. For example, in the “Social Technographics” approach developed by Charlene Li of Forrester Research: “We group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.”

See if you can find a way to map each step on the social technographics ladder of participation for social web technologies maps onto the levels of engagement suggested by the IGDA ARG white paper. Is there a correspondence between the two approaches? Try to explain your answer.

Player Roles

The white paper suggests that players of ARGs tend to take on different roles in the way they consume - or help further - the game. The roles identified are:

• Character Interactor and Story Hacker
  Character interactors like to become a part of the game by interacting directly with the characters involved. Some of they may even aspire to being mentioned in the game directly as player participants. Story hackers fully engage with the game story and may attempt to extend the game story, for example by crreating fictional websites that complement the ARG world. Story hackers are the sorts of player who may well engage in the creation of ‘fan fiction’ based on the game.
• Community Support
  Community support players help the game scale by looking after game forums, for example.
• Information Specialist
  These players help catalogue the game, building wikis, and so on. Information specialists are the people who are most likely to pick up on ‘continuity errors’.
• Puzzle Solver
  Puzzle solvers may see the game purely as a source of puzzles and interact with it at the ‘micro-game’ level, rather than necessarily buying in to the whole ARG experience.
• Reader
  Readers follow the game to a certain extent, and may comment on it, but they are not necessarily engaged in activley playing the game or helping further the story of it.
• Story Specialist
  Story specialists are interested in the overall shape and direction of the game, and may fill the role of ‘conspiracy theorist’ based on their predictions of the direction the game may go in, and for what reasons.

To what extent do you think that the level of participation is likely to reflect the player role favoured by a player? That is, do you think that certain player roles are more or less likely to be fulfilled by devotees or active participants, for example, and if so, why?

Keeping Players Engaged

As many ARGs last for several weeks or months, growing the audience and maintaining participation over an extended period may present significant challenges to the game designer. When an ARG is used to extend a television series, the series itself will help drive traffic on a regular basis from the programme to one or more website entry points to the ARG.
The level of detail expressed by the ARG miust be enough for the ARG world to be plausible - if large companies are mentioned in the game, they should have a website, for example. Since ARGs are played in part through the medium of the real world, game constructs must be plausible within the context of the real world.
The real time nature of many ARGs can make them difficult to maintain, and difficult to keep up with as a player. It is therefore no surprise that blogs are an important component of many ARGs, because they offer an element of ‘fractured real time’ publication on a daily or weekly basis that is faithful to the way blogs are used in the real world.
Maintaining engagement across players with a wide variety of skill levels and experience of ARGs is another important factor in the game design. To a certain extent, the game playing community may be used to provide hints, explanations and even walkthroughs of the game, but within the game itself, hinting strategies may also be used. Where a communication channel is available to a registered player, their progress may be monitored and hints provided on a personalised basis e.g. through the use of hint condition email or text messages that might be sent if the system identifies the player is not making progress through the game.

By considering the possible communication channels between the game and the player, what ways are there for offering personalised hints to individual players, and on what basis do you think those hints might be offered?

The web is big, very big…

…but whilst Google indexes a large part of it, it only manages to search over a tiny fraction of all the content that’s available on the internet. (If you want to know why, then check out the Open University short course TU120 Beyond Google: working with information online;-)

Even so, what Google - and other search engines of its ilk - do search over can be bewildering at times. Unfortunately, a lot of the pages that get returned as hits can be quite poor quality at times (in the sense that the pages are not very informative, may be badly written, ad filled, or contain content that is just plain wrong!).

So to try and help matters, I’ve created a custom search engine that searches over a tiny corner of the web that only includes the Digital Worlds uncourse blog and hopefully relevant parts of the websites that are linked to from here.

Searching on the Digital Worlds custom search engine (the DW CSE?!;-) will only return results from parts of websites that have been linked to from one or more posts on Digital Worlds.

In addition, you can choose to refine a search further so that it only searches over the the Digital Worlds uncourse blog itself (essentially providing an alternative to the search engine contained on the blog itself) or the actual pages that have been linked to from the blog.

You can find the Digital Worlds uncourse custom search engine at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/digitalworlds/search

At the moment, advertisements are enabled on the blog (as an experiment to see what sorts of ad appear, as much as anything!) - if you find them intrusive, or irrelevant, please pop a comment here and I’ll disable them.

Just as many films now feature a soundtrack music album, typically a compilation by the prolific ‘Various Artists’;-), game soundtracks are already starting to be released as compilation albums, or as ‘composer’ works. For example, soundtracks for several releases of the Final Fantasy game franchise have been released as orchestral works: Music of the Final Fantasy Series. Game soundtracks also seem to be establishing themselves as a bona fide musical genre. For example, the Rhapsody download service already features Video Game Soundtracks as a subgenre of its soundtracks area.

Where the music track provides backing for an inevitable story point, perhaps as the soundtrack to a cutscene, then it can be scored much like a score for a film sequence. In the case of a cutscene, the length of sequence is known, the action fixed, and the lead in and lead out from the scene known in advance.

But if the music is tied to the action, and the action is interactive, maybe even helping drive the creation of an emergent story, things are maybe a little more difficult…?

Skim read through the four page article Defining Adaptive Music and find out how the author defines “adaptive music” (by “skim reading”, I mean: do not read every word - glance through the article looking for appropriate keywords and headings…). How does “adaptve music” compare to a more traditional musical composition?

Now look at this second page of the article Design With Music In Mind: A Guide to Adaptive Audio for Game Designers. To what extent does the design of adaptive audio resemble the design of an emergent narrative structure? What additional constraints must the designer of the adaptive audio track contend with compared to the narrative designer?

If you want to keep tabs on the world of video game music and interactive audio, and maybe find out more, the music4games website and the Interactive Audio Special Interest Group are both worth a visit.

To see a wide variety of examples of game audio, the prettyuglygamesound blog has a growing collection of game audio critiques, with embedded video examples courtesy of Youtube.

From the blog’s ,em>About page:

PrettyUglyGameSoundStudy (or PUGS) is an experiment to gather as many examples of audio in games that people consider either to be ‘good’ (or ‘pretty’) and ‘bad’ (or ‘ugly’). On one hand we wish to get a better understanding of game audio that people consider to work well in games and on the other we would like to get an overview of (typical) game audio blunders, from which the field can benefit. We hope that eventually this archive can grow out to be an inspiration (as well as the occasional good laugh) for those working in the field of game audio.

We are Sander Huiberts and Richard van Tol and we are currently doing PhD research on game audio. For the past three years we have taught a course Game Audio Design at the Utrecht School of the Arts (Netherlands), in which we gave our students an assignment similar to the idea behind PUGS.com (”gather 1 minute of footage of what you consider to be ‘good’ game audio and 1 minute of footage of what you consider to be ‘bad’ game audio”). We ended up with lots of interesting footage as well as discussion points. Through this website we wish to share this footage.

The prohject is a work in progress: “Please feel free to contribute to this website either by uploading your favourite example of good or bad game audio, or by commenting the uploaded examples of others!”

If you do join in, let us know via a comment back here ;-)

One of the reasons I wanted to write Digital Worlds using a blog was to explore some of the various ways that the the content of the blog could be consumed.

If you the same websites day after day, Digital Worlds among, haven’t you ever wondered whether there’s an easier way? Well, for many websites there is, and it often starts with an icon like this, either on the web page itself, or by appearing at the side of the browser address bar:

Icon’s like this - “RSS feed icons” - typically link to a version of the web page that can be read - or consumed - in other websites, or displayed on other web pages. How? Watch this…

To view an RSS feed, you can subscribe to it using an online feed reader, such as Bloglines or Google Reader, display it on a “webtop” (web desktop) like Pageflakes or Netvibes, or read it directly through your browser (most browsers will now allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed, but I find Flock to work the best:-)

(For a quick video tutorial on Pageflakes, check out the Pageflakes tutorial on Youtube. For a quick video tutorial on Bloglines, check out the Bloglines tutorial on Youtube.)

There are many web feeds available from the Digital Worlds blog:

• The full feed:
  http://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/feed
• Game maker only posts:
  http://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/category/game-maker/feed
• Game Maker free posts:
  http://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/category/GM-free/feed
• Friday Fun posts:
  http://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/category/friday-fun/feed

You may have noticed that each post is associated with a particular category, and one or more tags. Each of these has its own feed.

For example, here are some tag based feeds for some of the Game Maker posts.

• Catch the Clown game posts:
  http://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/tag/clowngame/feed
• Maze game posts:
  http://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/tag/mazegame/feed

To show you how these feeds can be used to provide different views over the content from the Digital Worlds blog, I have put together two example Pageflakes pages:

• Digital Worlds Overall View on Pageflakes
• Digital Worlds Game maker posts on Pageflakes

Event the comments for each post have feeds (as you can see on the Game Maker Pageflakes page.)



(You can read about the rationale behind the two views over on my other blog: Disaggregating the Notion of PLEs #1 - PCVs: Personal (Portable?) Content Views.)

So - if you find yourself visiting the same old, same old web pages, day in and day out, never sure whether there will be new content there or not, why not subscribe to them instead, and have the content delivered from multiple websites to you, all in one place, via an RSS feed subscription? :-)

One of the things I meant to mention in the previous post when I referenced a famous quote from Johan Huizinga’s Home Ludens (”Play is a voluntary activity…”) was how to view this quote in its original context using services such as the online Google Books service. (I’ve actualy done this “in context” in one of the comments to that post, with a link to Live book search.)

This passage is is quite widely cited in a range of other books on the subject of game theory. If you click on the Popular Passages link, you can gain access to references to some of those books that have cited (that is, quoted and referenced) Huizinga’s view:

Microsoft’s rival service - Live book search - http://books.live.com - also allows you to search within books for that famous quote, although you do need to log in to see the quote in context to comply with copyright licensing matters…

I’ll have bit more to say about copyright, and its enforcement using digital rights management in the computer games industry, in the next week or two…

There are two three (!) main reasons I wanted to bring your attention to these services (and I guess I should add a third, the Amazon’s Search Inside this Book service, to the list, too).

Firstly, they demonstrate how the interface provides an interactive way of searching the full text of a book whilst online. (Note that not all books have been digitised yet, and copyright reasons mean that you can’t necessarily see all the content of those that have been, but the trends would seem to indicate that the content of books can increasingly be googled!)

Secondly, they are something you can play with, which leads back to the question of just what a game is, and in particular what’s its relationship with “play” is….

(If nothing else, I’d like to try to get you think about how having a playful attitude can often help drive a positive learning attitude to a particular problem, such as learning how to make the most of new technology…)

Thirdly, they provide a way in to finding out more about what people have had say about the notion of games through the book literature.

If any of the books take your fancy, be warned - many of the academic publications can be quite expensive. However, you might be able to find them in a library near you using a service such as WorldCat. For example, here’s a WorldCat library book search around Milton Keynes for a copy of Huizinga’s book:

Okay, that’s enough of that aside… (unless you can think of a WorldCat game we could play, such as a booksearch-cum-treasure hunt involving a hunt across UK libraries for a set of books that all cross reference each other, perhaps?! ;-)

If you haven’t already done so, watch the first part of the interactive tutorial on “Understanding Games”.

As you do so, ask yourself the questions what does the character identify as the key features a game must have? and how is the publishing medium itself (i.e. the animation) being used to communicate the message it contains?.

I’ll post my answers to those questions tomorrow, along with the first Game Maker tutorial…