I might post up some more of the talk here after the event, but I thought I would use this post to show some of the tracks I created over the summer. In July I did a roadtrip from the UK to Sweden. As it was only planned a few weeks before we went, there weren’t any boats from the UK to Denmark which would have made for a shorter journey, so the track starts in Calais after taking the Eurotunnel from Folkestone. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t start the journey in the UK. I think part of the reason is that I still have ‘location-paranoia’, in so much as although I love the idea of geo-locating things, I’m still not happy about that being within my immediate home life area. The route from my home to Folkestone and across the tunnel is also one I have made on numerous occasions and know well, therefore I think in the back of my mind I always had the idea that I could add that detail in at a later date if I decided to.

So here’s the route we took in mapped form. As a written descitption, the main stop-over points were: Brugge (Belgium), Dötlingen (Germany), Nyborg (Denmark), Ystad (Sweden), Karlskrona (Sweden), Lund (Sweden), Göteborg (Sweden), Aalborg (Denmark), Neumünster (Germany), Mulheim an der Ruhr (Germany), St Omer (France).

As well as tracking the entire journey, I also tracked side trips taken at certain point. On a day out near Karlskrona we had read about some rock paintings. Their location was shown on tourist maps as a rough estimate as to the area they could be found in, but there were no road signs to them as there were to other sites. We eventually took a risk down a side track and ended up in a small parking area that showed the walk to the stones. Using the GPS devices I managed to capture the path I walked to the stones, and I now have it saved as a location within my own personal database of journeys.

That’s something I’ve learnt from this project, I really love creating my own maps and then seeing the end result after the experience has ended. The GlobalSat 100 is a small black box with 3 lights. One shows the GPS is supposedly working, the other one shows the internal battery charge and the last one tells you if the memory is full or not. There is no display and no way of knowing if the device is actually capturing any GPS data until you download it onto the computer.

On our way back from Sweden we took the boat from Goteborg to Fredrikshavn in Denmark. Half way between the two places the boat stopped as a fishing net became caught in one of the propellers. The boat felt as though it was drifting and when we finally got going again, the wake showed a curved path as we started to get back on course. Later when I downloaded the track it shows a small loop at the moment that we stopped as shown here (with some images of people on the boat wondering what is going on, and a lovely view of the sea)

It’s experiences such as these that I will be talking about next Saturday. My personal journeys now digitally captured through tracks and imagery, viewed against a backdrop of other mapped information, a growing database of information about the places and spaces we are living in.

Last weekend I went over to visit some friends. In between a game of Agricola and lighting the BBQ we decided to watch the SMG2 dvd. We were greeted with a similar opening to the Wii Motion Plus start up video. It reminds me of an airline safety video when they explain how to fasten and unfasten your seatbelt as if it’s the most complex set of actions you’ve ever encountered. After watching how to insert the nunchuck into the Wii Remote, the DVD started to explain how you could actually move the Mario character around by using the control stick on the nunchuck. “Pressing forward on the control stick (actually) moves Mario forward within the game”. There was a good couple of minutes just explaining how to move Mario. We fast-forwarded the DVD. It continued to show each move possible within the game. These were shown with run-throughs of different levels within the game playing in the background. Having already played the first couple of levels I was shocked at how much of the game was given away through the DVD. We all commented that it should have come with a spoiler warning. The other point was that you can actually find out these moves as you progress through the actual game. As with any other Mario game, there are signposts throughout the level(s) that you can press A to read and it tells you what to do. There are even quite a few moments when you are forced to read an explanation of a new item you’ve found, especially when it changes Mario’s abilities.

So I’m left questioning the purpose of the DVD. I’d be interested to know how many players watch this from start to finish (or even throughout playing) in order to learn how to progress through the game. I usually learn how to play the game through actually playing the game. That’s what tutorials and pop-up text boxes are for. I realise you could technically watch the dvd and pause and play side by side but what’s the fun in that? For me, playing the game usually allows me to explore the gamespace, test the controls and learn through my mistakes. I like the gameworld to unfold as I progress through them, otherwise I may as well read a walkthrough and not even bother. It’s not as if this DVD even replaces the need for a walkthrough as on a quick google search (as expected) there are many available. Considering the Wii console doesn’t come with a tutorial DVD, I find its inclusion slightly confusing. It’s not as if SMG2 is a console release game. Whatever its purpose, for me I guess it’s just another thing to gather dust.

Monday 19th April 10am (UK airspace closed)

Wednesday 21st April 10am (UK airspace open)

The most interesting tracks for me that I managed to capture were those British Airways flights that wanted to land even though UK airspace was still closed at 8pm on the Tuesday evening. You can see how the planes were circling parts of the UK and Ireland obviously waiting for clearance. Shortly after capturing this, the news announced that most of the BA flights would be allowed to land at London airports and the airspace was allowed to open. I really like how the plane tracks depict a story of the flights in a standoff with the authorities. I’m glad I was able to capture this moments through screengrabs, as that’s the beauty of some of these tracked journeys is that like the trails of planes in the air, they are shown temporarily, and then all memory of that flight and it’s flight path is then gone for another track/trail to take its place.

BA Flight from Vancouver to Heathrow (Tuesday 20th April, 8pm)

BA flight from San Francisco to Heathrow (Tuesday 20th April, 8pm)

I wasn’t going to buy Heavy Rain. I waited for the demo to download from PSN weeks ago (I’m sure it was something like 5gb but please correct me if I’m wrong). I was really looking forward to it, I’d heard so many great things and I was left with a massive sense of disappointment. I didn’t relate to detective character and I was unsure of the backstory. Weirdly these things are never top on my list of things I immediately think about when playing games (although narrative may sometimes impact on my playing, I’m never always consciously aware of it), but in this demo it felt more than necessary. The controls annoyed me as well. I had a massive dislike of having to hold down a trigger button to make my character move. It felt clumsy, awkward and unnatural compared to just moving the analog sticks by themselves. It’s funny how these things effect you, but controller design is something that has always been important to me. That’s why I prefer the PS3 to the Xbox360 a lot of the time, I prefer the neat, small design of the controller and the way my fingers jump between the buttons with ease. So I dismissed Heavy Rain temporarily. I was adamant I wasn’t going to buy it, until I had a conversation with someone at work. They had felt the same thing about the demo but assured me the game was worth buying. I was tempted, so I took a chance.

How wrong could I have been? From the moment I started playing the full version I was hooked. Sure, there are still a few things I don’t like about it but these somehow outweigh the positives. After playing for a while the controls start to feel more intuitive. As some of them, such as opening doors, or picking things up, start to feel more natural, the learning curve from the beginning actions of the game ease you in. I no longer begrudged having to hold down a trigger button to move my avatar across a room, it soon became second nature. Swapping between different characters and different scenarios kept my interest, and even the short play sessions and seemingly longer, frequent cut-scenes didn’t seem to bother me as I was intruigued as to where the story would take me. I wanted to know how everything fit together, I wanted to know if I would get to the end on time, and although I didn’t always hit the controls in the right order, I never had a sense that my avatar was going to die and I would be pushed back to an earlier part of the game. The lack of dying through inadequate control kept me going, as I felt I was continually progressing even though I often made mistakes.

I did however spend most of the game questioning whether how much this really was a game. Sure, I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it in so far as I kept playing as I wanted to find out who the killer was. It was an ‘interactive drama’ in many ways, as much as that feels like a dated term for it. Although I could control a character, there were extremely freuqnet cut-scenes and some of the action was very much driven by the outcome of the different narrative threads as opposed to me (although I guess games can be like this too. Even though the player is felt to make like they’ve made decisions, many actions are consequently driven by design. Not many worlds can be ‘infinite’ if at all). I kept playing as the narrative kept me wanting to play. Sometimes it felt like the story would continue in the same way no matter what button I pressed, but I carried on regardless. It is the first game I’ve really felt a connection with the story, as an outsider viewing the action, and as an interacter effecting what was possibly coming next.

From a game point of view there were many things I didn’t like. The way the characters acted like Sims frustrated me slightly. Although it was interesting that you could use the bathroom, shower, brush your teeth, etc, each action involved a timed animation of the event, wishing that I could fast-forward and carry on with the story. The AI was similar, with each interaction with another character at a designated point in the narrative feeling like I really didn’t have any control over the moment. Some points felt inconsistent. I could brush my characters teeth but I could only go under a certain section of the police tape, and I could only leave some buildings when the narrative allowed. I know this is down to the mechanics of the game, and it isn’t possible to have every scenario but sometimes these inconsistencies stood out too much, especially as soon as the game promised to be user-driven, you, as a player, were bought back with a bang to having to follow what the designers intended. This sometimes meant the narrative sequences skipped like a movie DVD and on a few occasions the sound and action didn’t sync up as the PS3 struggled to keep up with loading the data.

Despite all of this I was hooked on ending the game. It took me 8 hours, which is one hell of a movie, but cost for cost, it is more expensive than a movie. The ending didn’t turn out like I wanted, but I wasn’t disappointed, probably because I knew I could play again. Which is what I am doing now. I’ve gone back for a second run, and I’ve already discovered a few new things that didn’t occur before. I guess that’s the explorer in me. I love to explore what more a game can offer, I love a good glitch, and in this case I’m keen to explore the other alternatives to scenarios I had played previously. That is why this is titled ‘Part 1′ as maybe I will blog again about Heavy Rain, maybe my attitude to it will change again on another playing. I’m not in so much of a hurry to finish it this time. I’ve had one ending, and even if it turns out the same with this new playing, I will have still discovered new things, and experienced a different narrative a second time round.

‘Can You See Me Now?’ is played through virtual spaces as well as tracking real world spaces in and around where the player’s are located. The aim of the game is to spend as much time in the virtual space as possible, without the real-world runners catching you. The tate foyer was filled with about 12 Macs, with 2 sets of headphones attached as players could have another person listen in on their game. You are asked to type in your name, we made one up. Then you are asked to type the name of someone you haven’t seen for a while, again we made one up. Then we were in, our avatar was placed within the virtual world representing the buildings in and around the Tate Britain. I was controlling the character but negotiating with my friend as to where we should go, so we turned it into a co-op campaign with one avatar. Our avatar was first placed near a courtyard within the game so we spent the first few moments figuring out where we were and where the runners were in relation to us. This meant we were trying to stay behind walls or at least up against them before venturing out into the rest of the world. In doing so, we found a few glitches such as walls that we could accidentally move through, so that became another part of our mission, trying to find out what other areas were mysteriously available.

After realising that the runners were far away, we ventured out into the surrounding spaces around the Tate. It seemed as if it was possible to be in full view of the runners and still get passed them on a few occasions. All the while you are playing, information is being relayed about people’s whereabouts on the runners walkie talkies that you can listen to via the attached headphones. On the moment when we decided to stop and hide for a moment, listening to the action was an interesting way of finding out who had been caught and where they had been caught, but some messages were muffled and often hard to decipher. We managed to stay in the game for what felt like a long time, many players were caught within minutes, yet we were still navigating around the grounds, trying to match real world spaces with virtual ones, and were sometimes left wondering if the paths were that bounded in the real space. Many paths around the buildings seemed to have collision detection attached so you couldn’t always go where you think you should be able to go, but that was part of the learning process in being able to move around the gameworld.

After being in the game for a while we started to get restless, and made the decision to hunt down the runners and turn the game around. This took a little while as the avatars movement in the gameworld seems to be rather slow. I’m not sure if this is deliberate or some kind of lag. Either would make sense, as in the virtual world the avatar has no obstructions such as traffic or other people which the real world runners would encounter, therefore maybe the avatar movement is deliberately slowed down (or maybe it is just a technological constraint). We finally found 2 runners together and moved our avatar directly up to one. If we could have tapped them on the shoulder we would have done (our only option was to communicate this action through a chat screen). Nothing happened, so we moved up to the next runner, and at one point were situated between 2 runners. Still nothing happened. Then after about a minute delay we were finally caught. Our position was spoken to the rest of the playing community, we had been found. Then the runner had to say the name of the person we hadn’t seen for a while. Ours was ‘Yoshi Poopypants’, and in saying it, the runner muffled a giggle over the walkie talkie. It was a perfect ending to a mixture of real world and virtual world activities.

On a separate note, I managed to catch most of the talk on ‘Video Games: design, narrative, gameplay’ chaired by Ste Curran (creative director of Zoe Mode), with a panel including Charles Cecil (creator, writer and artist), Kieron Gillen (game critic and writer) and Dave Gibbons (co-creator of Watchmen). The talk was interesting, discussing topics such as the design of gameplay, the importance of narrative and engagement with characters in relation to gameplay and how different types of narrative and gameplay techniques were constructed. It was definitely driven towards a gameplaying audience, with references to games commonly encountered within gaming communities. Having spent the last few years surrounded by academic game research, it did feel like the age old narratology/ludology debate raising its head again, but was a worth-while event for those that engage with games and were interested in their production processes.

All in all it was a great evening. Games seem to be growing more within UK galleries. Seems the next V&A late night is themed around games and play too, hopefully I’ll have something to say about that at the end of the month. Watch this space.

I guess the point of this post is to comment on my uses of FourSquare so far. I know I can’t comment on it in full as I’ve used it for approximately an afternoon, and even then I forgot about it and the logs didn’t become a true representation of every place I’d been that day. I forgot to log Victoria bus station, the other tube stations I went through, and the pub I went to after the Tate. Maybe it’s just another service to remember to use, like a pictorial logging of my daily life, rather than commenting on it through the text-based descriptions of Twitter. Maybe I will never be into achievements enough to worry about it. Maybe I will learn that it does something so amazing that I will integrate it into my everyday life. Watch this space…

Now, I love Tetris as much as the next person. I grew up with it, but it’s not a game I instantly think of playing when I want a quick play fix. The blocks reach the bottom of the screen and you had limited control of where they can go. Chime has solved this problem. Not only can you rotate the blocks, you can place them where you like, as long as there is spare space on the grid. I love the freedom of placing that first block, knowing that it could set the pace for the rest of the game, or turn into a mistake and force repositioning the next blocks further away in the hope new blocks will come in other sequences to solve the problem. More blocks appear and the momentum of the game increases, with the soundtrack to the level growing with each block placement and the expanding quads I’m now forming out of the joined up block pieces. It’s this combination of events that keeps me coming back for more. I actually enjoy the timed element. The 3, 6 or 9 minutes can grow as coverage bonus’ reward you and extra seconds are added to the clock. 3 minute games can turn into 2 hour gaming sessions, as the desire to press A and continue with the next level takes over in an attempt to beat previous level coverage and/or highscores.

The game itself is perfect escapism. For the moments the blocks are appearing, that is all I care about. Nothing else matters, but I would question whether I’m in a ‘state of flow’[1]. Although I’m never bored or anxious, I am aware of my fingers moving across the xbox controller, pressing buttons to rotate the blocks, position the blocks and place the blocks. I’m aware of my brain processing the information, and my eyes quickly scanning the screen trying to find the next best position to create another quad. I think it is the combination of sensory information that keeps me playing. It’s like a strange sensory addiction that draws you back wanting more.

Chime has also, for me anyway, removed the title of being a ‘casual gamer’ by playing a puzzle game. Whereas flirtations with Tetris may see me playing for an hour or so (if that), then turning it off, Chime continues to entertain me. Opening up new sound combinations, beating my highscore and finding new block configurations keep me playing again and again. Even though I’ve unlocked all the timed levels, there is still enough to keep playing. There is nothing casual about this, it requires as much dedication as playing a platform game or an RPG, but maybe that’s the beauty of it. For me it’s become a new challenge amongst my pile of games, but for others it may just take the edge off a hard day, and a quick play in amongst life’s other challenges. It appeals to both ends of the spectrum, not defining the gamer, but creating new experiences for different types of players.

So I think it’s for all of these reasons (and maybe more to come) that I <3 Chime.

To find out more about Chime go here: http://www.chimegame.com/

[1] Csikzentmihayli, M., (1992) Flow. London, Rider

‘Decode’ links together artworks that deal with ‘code’, ‘interactivity’ and/or ‘networks’. From generative pieces created in flash and custom software such as Lia‘s ‘Arcs 21′ and John Maeda‘s ‘Nature’ to interactive pieces such as Simon Hiejins ‘Tree’ and ‘Lightweeds’ to a mixture of the two such as ‘Videogrid’ by Ross Phillips, the exhibition displayed a range of digital artwork based on code and/or user-generated pieces. It was these works, that integrated the user into their design that interested me in relation to the next exhibition ‘Identity’ at the Wellcome Collection. Ross Phillips’ ‘Videogrid’, Daniel Rozin‘s ‘Weave Mirror’, and Fabrica’s ‘Venetian Mirror’, all allow for the viewer to become temporarily integrated in the work. ‘Videogrid’ in particular allows the viewer(s) to capture themselves in a three second movie, that is then played on one of 25 small screens within the piece, until someone else comes along and erases in to place their own new image sequence.

In contrast to this, the ‘Identity’ exhibition was about the curating of 9 peoples ‘identities’ within 8 separate rooms. The issue of identity was discussed in different scenarios, from people changing their gender, to keeping diaries and logging thoughts and memories, through to the use of fingerprinting and DNA. Each room was filled with objects, notes, photographs, and press clippings relating to their work and lives, solidifying this idea of ‘identity’ and its various meanings. Each object such as diaries and photographs were unedited and offered a glimpse into the person’s life at a particular moment. This contrasted to the temporal nature of the interactive works I had previously viewed in ‘Decode’. Although the audience of the exhibition could leave their mark in certain pieces, these were time constrained and faded away slowly over minutes, hours or in some rare cases possibly days. Were these people’s identities also being captured even though there was no remnants of their existence a short time later?

Social networking in particular, such as blogging, twitter, facebook, etc allow for people to construct different identities for various purposes, be it work, socially or somewhere in between. We can now delete or untag photos, digitally edit online diaries, create new websites and delete or forget about old ones. It is now possible to constantly update and edit our lives through what we do or don’t want people to see or read, not only to a wider audience, but also on a more local level through the use of PIN numbers and passwords only known to ourselves. This is part of the world we can now live in and choose to use if we so wish, which made me wonder about what would an exhibition like ‘Identity’ look like in about 50 years from now? Would there be screengrabs of blogs, airbrushed photographs, lines of old twitter feeds, encrypted data not possible to find? How will this data be displayed and will it hold the same meaning?

The point of this entry wasn’t to question the morality of social media, but to question as to how this may be displayed in future work. How will our lives journeys be documented in years to come? This issue of how ‘identity’ and how it may be portrayed in a different light through technology is one that is no doubt continuing to be answered, but I think it may be more interesting to see how we will then document this in say 2060. Not only is the way we create data ever-changing but the objects/software, etc associated with how we create that data are also changing and I think it is this documentation, how it has evolved and may possibly be curated that may prove to be even more interesting in years to come. Happy New Year everyone!

The days of seeing the game instantly load, often appear to be getting fewer and fewer and I think this is part of the appeal to what can be seen as the ‘casual gamer’. The Wii is probably a successful platform for casual games as it doesn’t demand long system updates in order for the user to play. Any updates required by the machine are generally not linked to the type of game you are playing and can be performed as and when the user wants, they are not a necessity of play.  I don’t know if Juul covers this in his book; I know he does comment on the flexibility of time in relation to casual gaming within the opening chapter(s), but to me this is part of the casual game appeal. Being able to launch into a game session in a more sponatenous way allows for the fun of play that separates it from our other everyday activities. Inflicting updates in many ways exposes the workings of the game system to the user, forcing the pressing of various sequences of buttons and moving through screens of data before they are given the rite to play.This may turn off players that are not used to playing newer consoles and do not want to read through reams of data in order to play. Not only does the Wiimote feel intuitive in the way it acts, the console itself allows for reasonably fast load times and access to a variety of different games comparable to the way someone would change a CD in a music player. It is these familiarities that may see it linked to casual play more easily.

In writing these brief comments, my PS3 has updated now, and I am free to play my new game. I hope it was worth the wait…

Today, after logging into my wave account for the first time in a few days, I saw that I had been added to a text adventure wave by a friend. The wave involves a bot called ‘Bardbot’. He/She/It has an avatar which in many ways is ‘normal’ as so do I and my friends on it. It feels a little bit strange having a bot with a face, it felt like an extra character guiding me along. It’s like having a third person carrying out the commands I type and realise them within the game, it’s like ‘Eliza’ having a face after all these years. The avatar intrigues me, which is why I thought I would mention it but it’s not the reason for this blog post.

So, there I am, looking at the wave, my friend had already started playing the text adventure ‘Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy’. It contained a message asking if i’d played it before (i hadn’t) and that he hadn’t played it either, and was using the wave to play around to see where the text adventure would take him. I caught up on the story, and had a look at the various commands that had been used to see what had and hadn’t worked so far. It seemed fairly straight forward, with the usual commands such as ‘go north’, ‘pick up object’, ‘examine room/forest’, etc. I began to see myself wanting to get involved, trying out new commands and maybe progressing the story a little bit. There I was playing away, not able to go north or east, or look for cups of tea (i thought i may be pushing it with that one!), then all of a sudden the following dialogue appeared (CONTAINS SPOILERS!):

My heart stopped. I felt awful. I had only played/experimented for 5 minutes and I had ended the game! I suddenly felt really guilty, an emotion I don’t usually associate with playing text adventures. I felt like I had intruded on someone elses game. Although I had been deliberately added to the wave (presumably with the notion that I too could have a play), I’m not sure the consequences were ever thought through. We were now playing a co-operative text adventure. This isn’t something I had experienced before. I had sat and played ‘Zork’ and ‘Adventure’ many a time, enjoying mapping out where I was going, reading the consequences of my decision making, and progressing through the game, but it had been my game. If I made a mistake, no one else was affected, it didn’t really matter, I could try again.

To make matters worse, part of ‘end of game’ message asked whether I would like to restore the game from a previously saved position. I tried, but obviously it had never been saved (I think part of the trying was to log that I had made an attempt to resurrect what I had killed off). The wave had saved the narrative sequences but not the played out actions. Although the narrative is captured within the wave, the game only allows for a certain amount of turns per player. Again, saving the game hadn’t occurred to me (especially as I had a log of the game events onscreen), but is something I’m now a lot more conscious of when I attempt to play again. This is true of any game, learning to play the rules, learning the mechanics of what is and isn’t possible, and negotiating shared spaces with other players in a multiplayer co-operative environment. In thinking about this today, I was trying to work out what type of player I was in letting this happen. Whereas I have previously written about ‘aberrant players and purposeful players‘ , I had separated them into those players that deliberately seek to disrupt the game, and those that seek to contribute to the game through the hidden extras they might find. Here I was in a different play situation. Although I had disrupted the game state, it was not a deliberately act. At the same time I had not made a conscious effort to contribute to forwarding the game in any way.  My original play had been purposeful, yet I had unintentionally disrupted future play for another player, and this is something I haven’t experienced before. It did however provide me with a new appreciation for co-op play. In playing a multiplayer game, with all the characteristics previously associated with a single player experience, the social space of the gameworld needs to be re-evaluated. Therefore I ended my game with a message to the other player, and a new lesson learnt, so that when he came to play, he could see my distress of (what appeared to be) prematurely ending the game: “i broke the game! i’m so sorry! there i am playing around for 5 minutes and i died…damn it! …..I want to play again though, i didn’t have a chance to go south…. “