Jess Goes Interactive: October 2005 Archives

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October 20, 2005

Life by the Fire Playtest Review

I enjoyed this playtest immensely. We wanted to create a game where the players had to make up their own stories based on a few pieces of inspiration, and that is somewhat of a risky proposition. If the players aren't into it, then the game is not going to work. Rick, Josh, and Justin did a fantastic job of creative storytelling and dealing with the cumbersome tech situation. It was so great when they kept up the tale-spinning between turns - that was something that we hoped would happen but didn't seem like something you could order your players to do when laying out the rules. Overall, I think the intended and emergent behavior during the game was incredibly successful.

I think the most interesting question that came up was how to handle story preparation. Josh asked for paper to jot down notes - I am torn on how to answer this request. To me, this game celebrates the tradition of oral storytelling and the passing on of tall tales and myth, and I am afraid that letting people write stuff down would lead to the reading of written stories, which is a different feeling entirely. Also, we structured the game so you could only tell one tiny story about your friend (the musical pieces were only 1.5 minutes long), and you had the sentence and picture to use as reference points. Also, I think in a setting where the players have the time to go around and around and tell lots of stories there wouldn't be as much pressure felt to make your story the best story possible - our playtesters may have felt that they would only have time to tell one story during the test and so been nervous about making sure that it was a quality one.

The question of how to handle the music previewing was interesting. All testers agreed that they didn't want to all preview at once because then they'd have to remember their stories and timing while the others went. But if each player is previewing for a couple minutes before their turn then there is the question of how to handle the dead time. Maybe this is something that having more players would solve - maybe with four or five players the continuation of the tale-spinning would be more engaging. Maybe real marshmallows would help too.

Posted by rosenblj at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2005

Mad Prophet story dimensions

So here's what I have looked into in terms of information sources to add complexity/depth/etc. to our story:

Weather: It can be done, but it may need to pull real-time data from an additional source, I'm not sure.

Speech Recognition: It can be done, and I am quite happy to mess around and learn how to use Sphynx. My only question is whether this doll will really be used in a situation where it will overhear any language at all. Perhaps we could design it so that the user could comment to the doll about its prophecies, and it could use mediocre speech recognition to retort with more prophecies.

Flight patterns: I didn't immediately see any master list, but we could compile one using flight tracker sites.

Earthquake info: There is pretty close to real time data out there, but if we don't want to deal with that we could use data from a previous day, month, or year. What about data from a century ago?

Transportation schedules: Found the list - we could extrapolate the timed locations of trains/buses. Also perhaps there's a way to incorporate traffic alerts, etc.

Tides: Charts easily available.

Near Earth Objects: Impending doom from the heavens. Data is not real time, but these things don't move too much relative to us from day to day, so it probably isn't a problem.

And on an unrelated note, when I searched Google for "comet tracker" this was the top hit. Can anyone say "Big Brother"?

Posted by rosenblj at 09:14 AM | Comments (1)

October 12, 2005

Highway distraction

Last night driving home on the 10 I happened to end up behind a Shopper Shuttle minivan. What you can't see on their snazzy press photos is that their vans have a scrolling LED marquee at the top of the rear windshield. So suddenly, instead of watching the road, I realized that I was instinctively reading the little red words that were gliding across my field of vision. "Shop with us the easy way...call 310-..." etc. When I realized how mesmerized I was, I got freaked out and tried to look anywhere else. Is a display like this legal? It's so much more distracting than any still billboard on a bus. I know I'm easily distracted by shiny visual displays, so perhaps this is an overreaction. It just seemed like the combination of the eye-level marquee directly in front of the driver (unlike electronic marquees high on the sides of buses) and lettering with the same hue and luminosity of brake lights was pushing it.

Posted by rosenblj at 11:05 AM | Comments (2)

October 11, 2005

Aquarium puzzles

So here's what Rick and I came up with yesterday afternoon:

Big Idea: Several mini-puzzles, solutions fitting together into an overarching meta-puzzle about balance
and the global ecosystem, possibly with some sort of take-home artifact. Each puzzle can be scaled based
on the age level of the player.

Puzzle #1: Overpopulation
- players decide whether to be a predator or prey
- each turn, each predator rolls a die
- if the roll is less than the number of prey present, then that player gets to survive the round and the number of prey drops by one
- after all predators have rolled, all surviving predators and prey reproduce
- this is repeated until the system collapses - this puzzle is weighted so that, assuming all the kids want to be the cool predator, the predators kill off all the prey and then face starvation

Puzzle #2: Codependence in the Ecosystem
- Jenga-style game
- pull pieces until system collapses
- pieces have meaningful lables, represent different species
- depending on the age group, point out that it's not a specific sequence that causes the collapse, but the aggregation of all extinctions

Puzzle #3: Dependence on Habitat
- "Take me home!"
- player is presented with several fish that are in the wrong habitat
- misplaced fish explain their issues (e.g. "I can't lay eggs here," "I can't hide here," "I'm too cold here," etc.)
- have to put everyone back in the right place

Puzzle #4: Adaptation
- large open ocean area connects with more specified habitats, e.g. deep sea, arctic, coral reef, etc.
- player is a generic fish that wants to get a competitive edge on food in a more specialized area
- choose adaptations that allow you to move deeper into your new home

Puzzle #5: School vs. Solo
- explore why some predators and prey travel in groups and some travel alone

Posted by rosenblj at 09:56 AM | Comments (1)

October 10, 2005

499 Research Links

1) Speech Recognition
Here's a program developed by Carnegie Mellon. It's free to use, plus it was used by some good friends of mine on their thesis project at Carleton a year ago: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php

2) Weather
Here are some research papers on using GPS for weather measurements. I'm not clear on how much of the data you need to do such a thing is from a source other than the GPS satellites:
http://www.cosmic.ucar.edu/related_papers/Kuo361.pdf
http://ams.allenpress.com/amsonline/?request=get-abstract&issn=1520-0477&volume=077&page=0005
http://www.cosmic.ucar.edu/related_papers/Rocken367.pdf

Posted by rosenblj at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2005

Seasons of Hollywood: A P&A Mod

You are a rising star in Hollywood. You need to get the public's attention and approval - namely in the form of box office returns. You also want to get the attention of the Academy and receive the most precious of all human honors: an Oscar. But you face many dangers. There is the Hollywood hierarchy, that cruelly demands homage and favors to those better and brighter than you. There are other stars out there trying to rise faster than you, trying to keep your face in oblivion, trying to steal your fans away to their own premieres. There is the fickle public, who will get bored with you if you are too popular or too confined in your choice of roles. And then there is good old Lady Luck. You must fight your way past all these perils in Sleepy Spring, Blockbuster Summer, Eclectic Fall, and Oscar-bait Winter. All along the way you face reviews of your performances, but after all four seasons you face the one review to rule them all: the Academy Awards.

Each season is played as a round of Asshole, but the cards are not normal playing cards. The deck of 60 cards contains:

10 tv ads (value of 1)
10 billboards (value of 2)
8 product endorsements (value of 3)
8 talk show appearances (value of 4)
6 exclusive magazine interviews (value of 5)
6 publicity stunts (value of 6)
4 expensive premiere parties (value of 7)
4 abandonments by delinquent significant others (value of 8)
2 critical acclaims (value of 9)
2 tabloid attacks (value of 10)

Note: the value of each item is indicated on the card so players don’t have to memorize the order of priority.

There are two views seen by the player. The first is their hand of cards and the present play laid on the table. The second view is after each play, the players see a cartoon view of Hollywood with publicity sprinkled all over it in response to the moves made during the game. Billboards, media screens, newspaper stands, etc. Cards that represent actions (e.g. talk show interviews) are displayed as movie clips from that action, then headlines shown on newsstands.

Play proceeds clockwise around the table from the player who starts the progression. Each player must play a card or set of matching cards (pair, three-of-a-kind, four-of-a-kind) of equal or greater to the play made by the previous player. Each time a play is made, the landscape of Hollywood is updated to reflect the promotional action chosen. For example, if someone plays a pair of billboards, a close up of the poster is displayed to all the players and then the landscape shows two large billboards of that poster overlooking the town. If a someone plays a publicity stunt, the players all get to see a clip of the stunt as shown on Fox News, and then that headline appears on the Variety newspaper dispensers. When no more plays can be made in the progression, the last person to play gets to start the next progression. The trump card in this deck is the tabloid attack, which places all other players in public disgrace and allows the person who played it to take control of the next progression. The player who goes out first had the best box office return for their opening weekend. There are no uncouth names for your star status, only cold hard numbers.

So far this game is simply Asshole with a different metaphor and amusing visuals. At the start of the next season, the lowest star must pay homage to the highest by sending them a gift of her two best cards. The highest star must then acknowledge the gesture with a polite nod of his two lowest cards. The second lowest sends a gift of one card to the second highest star, who will reciprocate similarly. The other stars mill about in their mediocrity. The major difference in this game is that the computer, playing as the general public, will take notice of how long you stay at the top of the box office. After two seasons the public starts to get sick of you and will turn a blind eye to your publicity attempts. To win a third season in a row you must finish while all other players have at least half of their cards left (indicating a really slow season). To sweep the year, you must win the fourth season despite donating your tabloid attacks to the second highest star. At the end of the four seasons, the Academy Awards are held. To be considered, you must have either swept the year, or have finished in the top two Winter box office positions after having not held either position in either Summer or Fall. If there is more than one qualified nominee, the award will go to the one with the best Winter position.

Basically, the point of these mechanics is to make it so that you don’t want to always be the top dog but need to pull yourself back up by the end of the game.

Posted by rosenblj at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)

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