MashUP event

We gave a presentation on our work so far to the MashUP event being help in The Space, the dedicated gallery area at the univesity. The project seemed to be well recieved, generating some interest and possible future collaborations. The presentation was filmed so I’ll hopefully be able to get a copy of it to post up here. In the mean time here are the presentation slides…

The slide animations haven’t come up so if you want to see it properly I’d recommend a download. Please feel free to comment

Meeting 14/1/2009

Ok, first off happy new year to whoever’s reading this

We had our first meeting back yesterday and it was more of a touch base than anything. We did however decide it was best to scrap a couple of the sites we had initially decided upon as it was no loger felt they would be necessary. The first to be cut was the city resident blog. This had been in the outline document when I had first put it together and really I should have pulled it a while back. With the way the course and story have developed there is no real need for this.

The second was the business competitor website. After chatting with Simon it seemed that as they were going to be looking at retail best prectice as a whole, that they should be finding examples of how it should be done themselves rather than us providing them with that information.

We’ve decided to invest in a copy of Basecamp, a piece of online project management software. I might have mentioned it before but we’ve been using it for a while in its trial form and it’s proving really useful for keeping an eye on what needs to be done.

Simon fed back on a contact he made at a conference in Warwick last week that looks promising. We might have found someone to sort out our leaderboard for us. We’re going to both try and spec something up ready for our next meeting so that we can get them to do something “white label” for us that can be reused should anyone else in the uni want to try it out.

Now that the unit descriptor has been submitted as well, Simon can start to put together the basics of what need to be included in the report so that we can gear the weekly challenges to provide the students with the skills and knowledge they will need to apply to achieve and hopefully surpass this.

Further reading and meeting results

Since my last post I have read This Is Not A Game by Dave Szulborski and have to say I’ve found this book to be far more useful in terms of it’s approach and content then any of the other materials I have read so far. If you’re looking into doing anything with ARGs or just want to know what it’s all about I would recommend this book.

 

I’ve also started reading Interactive Stoytelling by Andrew Glassner which is getting me thinking a bit about the narrative behind the game and how ARGs can potentially tie in with Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey in terms of their story architecture.

 

After meeting with Simon, we’re now looking to move away from the rabbit hole used by the Ipskay ARG and are now looking to perhaps adapt the unit handbook in order to create the rabbit hole into the game while still retaining the information necessary for the students. After discussion we felt this could be best achieved by converting the unit handbook into a business consultancy firm’s promotional brochure, which sets out what the students (in their groups which will now become a junior consultancy team) will provide in terms of service to the failing business. This will most likely be a report with a number of proposals based around the information gained and events experienced within the game informed by research undertaken on real websites.

 

There will also be another, virtual consultancy in order to create a sense of competition within the game and to allow the groups to undertake analysis of market competition both for the failing company and their own.

 

The issues of tangible rewards was also discussed, with options for feedback from the game such as things sent from the company (possibly product samples depending on the company we choose) and then more superficial things like drinks and snacks at meetings.