Ok first off some apologies: sorry this has taken a week to get up here, sorry it’s so ridiculously long and sorry for any omissions or misinterpretations.
Last Friday I attended a conference organised by Adrian & Dan Hon, co-founders of Six to Start with Channel 4 generously donating the screening room hidden underneath the giant 3D “4” outside their building. All the proceeds from the conference went to Cancer Research UK.
The people attending seemed to come from a fairly varied area considering the niche area for the talks. There were the obvious academics and charity bods but also people from Channel 4, the BBC, marketing companies, and corporate fields.
The first talk of the day was that of Juliette Culver from Open University and Law 37, the team behind the Cancer Research UK ARG Operation Sleeper Cell. Law 37 were the winners of a competition organised by Adrian Hon to create an ARG design for the charity. Juliette presented some interesting figures on the game, and given that the team were all volunteers running with a very small budget, they managed to triple the charity’s initial investment, raising over £3000.
Some key advice I took from Juilette’s talk:
· Try not to take on too much, it’s easier to add stuff than to take it away
· Don’t have too many developers, keep the team tight and have regular face to face meetings where possible
· Nail the design early on in development
· Make sure to aim at your end user
· Get your difficulty curve right, start easy and build up from there.
Next was Alice Taylor from Channel 4 Education, who talked about some of the things that the Channel are trying in order to reach 14-19 year old British children. Although she couldn’t talk in specifics about the upcoming projects they are working on I will definitely be keeping a close eye on them in the new year to see what crops up. Alice also has a great personal games related blog called Wonderland which I’d really recommend checking out.
Alice was then followed by Philip Trippenbach, a journalist with BBC Current Affairs, who talked about the splintering audience and how to reach those people and have them reach the BBC. He touched on citizen journalism and how with todays technologically minded audiences it is possible to get more of the story, showing the BBC pages for the recent Mumbai attacks and the facility on there for the general public on the scene to input their views and information on the developing story.
Something that Philip was interested in that I also find quite intriguing was ARGs as a model of communication and social media. He talked about the ability of ARGs to create networks and to develop a challenge structure that can be used for more than just games and how in the environment of viral media perhaps the likes of Superstruct and World Without Oil are “inoculation media”.
Philip also blogs on games and the media at trippenbach.com
We then moved into the academic section of the conference with three talks on the use of ARGs in education, one that is used as the basis for an assessed unit and two that were used as means to help student induction.
ARGOSI
The first of the three talks was given by Nicola Whitton, Project Manager on the JISC funded project called ARGOSI (Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction) which as the name would indicate was focused on supporting the induction process Manchester Metropolitan University.
Nicola discussed the active learning experience and how it should be contextualised, collaborative, experiential and enquiry based, with scaffolding supplied though increasing difficulty as the student progresses.
The idea of ARGs being able to provide the advantages of more traditional game based learning but at a lower cost was one that I remember mentioning to Simon when we were discussing the idea of doing the ARG in Portsmouth, as well as making it a reusable model so that it could be rolled out to the new intake each year.
Nicola also summarised the six motivators for students within the game:
· Completing
· Competition
· Puzzle solving
· Storyline
· Community
· Creativity
I hope we will be able to cover each of these motivators in some way, shape or form within our own ARG, although we will probably replace puzzle solving with challenges as we are not intending to have any real puzzles as they wouldn’t really fit into the context of our game.
The difficult of making challenges fun was something that Nicola mentioned and I have also thought could be an issue with our game. Nicola however observed that as long as there was fun in the mid to long terms goals then having some of the short term goals be not so fun wasn’t too much of an issue.
Something that I also thought might be worth implementing in our ARG which came out of Nicola’s talk was the idea of giving the players a number of challenges to pick and choose from at the start, even if they have to do all of them this could give more of a perception of control and influence on the part of the player. There also needs to be real motivation for real world events, which I’m hoping we will be able to provide preferably using the carrot rather than the stick.
Towards the end of her talk Nicola provided the following questions which should be asked of any educational ARG. How do you:
· Provide motivation
· Provide inclusivity
· Provide accessibility
· Develop autonomy
· Build in reflection on learning
Next on the bill was Alex Moseley from the University of Leicester. Alex used an ARG based game with similarities to Perplex City to teach an assessed History unit on Research Skills.
The game provided 50 puzzles at varying levels of difficulty, allowing students of differing ability to be able to play the game at a level suitable for them. This is combined with the University’s VLE forums to encourage collaboration in the completion of tasks. The successful completion of the puzzles and participation in the forums were then scored and these scores were the basis of a leaderboard that seemed to act as a strong motivational factor. The idea of the leaderboard intrigued me, especially when combined with my own experiences of things such as Xbox Live where people compare Achievements and Gamer Points in order to gain “bragging rights”.
The figures were pretty encouraging from the unit, with 181 (90%) of the students passing the unit, and 92 of those getting 60%+
Who is Herring Hale & What Is GG?
These were two ARGs run by Katie Piatt from the University of Brighton, used as a means of general induction to university life.
“Who is Herring Hale?” was the initial ARG followed by “What is GG?” a year later, using the lessons Katie had learned. Unfortunately Katie’s ARGs did not meet with a lot of uptake, perhaps due to the sheer amount of stuff going on during the induction period. Talking about her experiences with ARGs it seemed that they were very much based around the traditional rabbit hole/TINAG type of entry into the game. I wonder if whether if the game aspect were more overt whether there would have been more of an uptake. This could perhaps be reflected in the success of her current project, which is an induction version of the Facebook game “The Never Ending Movie Quiz” which is obviously a game, is immediate in its feedback and doesn’t requite much in the way of time investment on the part of the students. Katie reaffirmed the comment made by Alex about the leader board being a strong motivator for students.
This is not to say that her games were not interesting and certainly looked quite fun but perhaps the use of such a traditional (if you can use that term with such a new media form) design was not inclusive enough for the general student population.
Something that the day to this point had got me thinking about was having our desing start with low effort, high reward tasks and them changing the ratio until it was a more even balance as a means of pulling students in. I’m not really sure what form the rewards should take as yet though…
Breakout Session
The panel of academics had us split into groups and consider how to combine industry, games design and education in a way that benefitted all parties. The group that Simon and I were part of seemed to raise more questions than answers but it definitely let me explore how ARGs could be applied in different ways and different fields.
Out of the many things that were batted around the table were the following:
· The need for collaboration, not just between students but also between industry and education in order to ensure its relevance
· Make the most of the industry expertise. This really ties in with the above point
· Have an assessment article that is relevant to the industry or individual business you are working with
· The possibility of having local industry members set a problem to students who then come back at the end of the game/unit to present their findings (a variation on our game)
· The power of the community was raised and how their discussions on forums could serve as quite a powerful piece of documentation to industry in its own right, for example as a record of what teenagers think about varying fashions it could be quite valuable as market research.
· The end artefact needs to be complex enough to make large group work a necessity.
There were more sessions following on from this, a potential charity endeavour called GameRaid, which in all honesty didn’t really appeal too much to me but good luck to them.
Nicola Smythe from the BBC then talked about the more theoretical side of things with her background in experience design and how to break down and analyse the experience. While interesting from a theoretical point of view, I was looking for more practical advice so didn’t make much in the way of notes.
The day was ended with a talk from Dan Hon, who pretty much pulled ARG design as it stands apart and put forward what needs to change. I really thought this talk summarised what I hoped to gain from the day with what not to do and what I should be doing when creating the design for our ARG.
The day was followed by a few drinks in the pub and a more relaxed chat. Thanks to everyone who was patient enough to put up with my incessant questioning! I hope that the event will be the first of many and look forward to seeing the projects that come out of it.
Posted by craigharkness 
