A playful collaboration between Collective Noun, HIT Lab NZ and creative players from across Aotearoa, Torokiki will be an ethnographic role-playing game designed to encourage players to create and share stories from their contemporary environment, using geotagged historical images to guide their exploration of interesting local areas.
- The name, Torokiki, is a Maori verb meaning: ‘to sprout afresh, re-emerge, re-establish, reappear’. (When we’re being familiar, we might just call it Toro, which on its own means: ‘to visit, stretch forth, stretch out, extend, survey, reconnoitre’.)
- The team includes Alex Herdman – @alexsaru, Cj Wells – @clarionjulie, James Everett – @jamese, Jem Yoshioka – @jemshed, Miranda Kaye – @BubbleUp, Rob Ramsay – @robramsaynz, Sam Minnée – @sminnee and Timothy Greig – @taonga.
Quests: Carefully curated quests make sure player behaviour is focused and measurable. The small number of goals that make up each quest encourage players to visit locations in the city to create image, video, audio, and text ‘responses’ along set themes. Players create content in response to a controlled number of historical images, chosen from a larger pool just for a particular goal.
Players can develop their profiles as they earn points and badges through completing these quests. Where quests have been developed around local events, these badges can lead to tangible prizes!
Email Magic: Players submit most content while out and about using email. The game keeps track of the quests that players submit under, and wider community reaction.
Team Adventures: The game is primarily designed for people to play together in small groups at specific events. There’s a quest curation system which allows us to design new quests and assemble new sets of content around our chosen theme.
Key moments: Here are a couple of examples of ‘moments’ that might drive the spirit of the game.
- Visiting a historic site in Wellington, with an original photo in hand, and being able to experience all the new stories people have created in response to that original.
- Sharing a really special story of your own, or the story of someone you know (maybe a grandparent) about what that location means to them.
Environmental Scan: These are projects that we’ve noticed which are similar in spirit to Torokiki.
- Croydon Then & Now – a personal flash project which reveals historical images over top of modern ones.
- History Pin - Attach pictures (from Picasa) to locations on Google Maps/Street View. Users can write stories about any pinned image. Created by Google and We Are What We Do.
- Make History - A 9/11 memorial project which collects stories, videos, and photos from witnesses of the attacks. (By Local Projects.)
- SepiaTown - Pins historical images to Google Maps locations. See also the SepiaTown blog.
- Street Museum - Museum of London project, uses iPhone’s location to display images from the Museum of London collection relative to the user. This review of Street Museum walks through how the app works.
- Tales of the City - Part of London’s Festival of Architecture (19 June to 4 July 2010). Buildings were labelled with QR codes and people were invited to add their stories about the buildings.
- Timescope - A viewfinder/binocular installation in Berlin which overlays historical images on the modern city for the viewer.
Introduction
Torokiki is a playful collaboration between Collective Noun, DigitalNZ, HIT Lab NZ, and creative players from across Aotearoa. We are building an ethnographic role-playing game that’s designed to encourage players to create and share stories from their contemporary environment, using geotagged historical images pulled from DigitalNZ partners to guide their exploration of interesting local areas.
- A mobile site will make it easy for people to discover, create and upload new content on the go.
- A website will be an archive of created content and a tool for motivating the creation of new content.
Game
Players develop their profiles by earning points from three types of game actions:
- Discover: To discover new historical images players either search the Torokiki website or request random images be sent directly to their phones by email. A player could:
- visit nearby locations because only geotagged images are available.
- browse a map of nearby historical images, and also see player generated content.
- save interesting images to a folder for later retrieval.
- receive points for planning excursions by assembling a folder of images.
- Create: Some players may choose to create new content in response to viewing a historical image and can submit this content to the website. This may take the form of text, image, audio, or video. Players can respond along two themes:
- Renew – create a ‘new’ version of the image, take a new photo, make a drawing.
- Narrate – tell a story about the image, explain what it is, personal, historical, fictional.
- each piece of submitted content.
- having that content recognized by the community as being a worthwhile contribution to the theme.
Players can upload these images by email, or via a simple form on the website. The game keeps track of the themes that players submit under, and community reaction. Players gain points for:
- Review: After new content has been submitted, some players judge the relevance of what has been created. Players review by:
- Flagging submissions as inappropriate.
- Agreeing that, yes, this content matches a certain theme.
Sites
Player activities are divided up between two sites:
The Website
- Discover new challenges that they want to complete
- View the challenges they’ve completed
- Rate/review existing content for further incorporation into the game
Smart Phones
- Quickly retrieve a relevant new/saved image that can be completed
- Allow quick description and submission of new content
- Retrieve a quick summary of a player profile
Target Audience
- smartphone owners
- camera fans
- orienteering/scavenger hunters – challenge-completers
- interested in New Zealand’s local/urban history
- keen to pull ‘stunts’ (like re-staging photos)
Spirit
This is how the game should feel to play:
Key moments
There are several ‘moments’ that drive the spirit of the game.
- Visiting a historic site in Wellington, with an original photo in hand, and being able to experience all the new stories people have created in response to it.
- Sharing a really special story of your own, or the story of someone you know (maybe a grandparent) about what that location means to them.
Aims/ideas
- We aim to initially draw on DigitalNZ heritage image resources.
- We don’t want to constrain people in terms of the kinds of things they can contribute.
- Making this a game needs to encourage audience participation.
- The barrier to initial participation must be really low, the audience should be able to participate as little as they’d like.
- Some form of mobile interface for smartphones should help display and collect this media, reducing the time/distance between creating something and being able to upload it.
- We want a project with a simple, clear, comprehensible scope, something that people can understand quickly, making it straightforward to begin contributing.
- We want this to be scalable within Aotearoa, with a life beyond the initial launch – even if this is just for the next month (We have the idea of “packages” which can be used to run short gaming events and seed new player bases).
Other similar projects
Jem 7:32 am on April 30, 2010 Permalink |
I wonder how the audience felt about each of the different forms of interaction?
Perhaps we could do some research by interviewing people who played the games as to how it felt to interact with the game?
I liked what we had with Midnight note. The plot was ours, the big events were all ours, but there was a smaller scale of interactivity by the “players” talking with Sam like he was a regular twitter person. I felt this was a useful tool to engage people into the story. This is my kind of thing. We told a powerful story that was ours to tell. I think we could have had this with DWS, progressing the story once the puzzle was completed. (We ran out of time to really write one, though).
I think we asked players for a good level of interaction in DWS. Yes, it was a high level and it frustrated some people who wanted to be more involved and couldn’t during weekdays, but I still thing everything we gave them would have been possible with a bit of teamwork and a place to catch up. The beginning was just as challenging as the last puzzle – in fact, it was arguably more so, but they pulled it off because they talked to each other.
I think the biggest thing that stopped DWS from working as well as it could have was that there was no central communication hub that felt comfortable for the audience. I think this is something that Flickr could have delivered if we had initiated it from the start. We gave them ARG signifiers, and since ARG players already have unfiction, they don’t need to be given a place to hang out. We also didn’t give them any instructions. Again, fine for ARG players, they know the formula so they don’t need to be given it. Our players needed it, because most of them had never seen anything like this before.
Since we were making an ARG for a non-ARG audience, we could have appointed Beth as a kind of team leader, helping people to organise themselves and know when they were doing stuff right, and keeping track of who was up to what.
If we had worked harder to establish an “official” hangout, so people felt like it was the in-game place to talk and discuss, I think we could have potentially seen a lot more interaction in the later weeks.
I think the lack of response to player concerns about things impacted on their willingness to continue. Perhaps when Badtom had voiced his concerns about the difficult nature of focusing on DWS during a weekday, we should have had Beth or DWS respond with something. Just little touches like this (that, of course, I only think of now) could have made the experience a little more inviting for the players. (This should have probably been my job, since I’m the one with the free time all day).
One of the the things that worked really well in DWS was the photo-matching exercise. We nailed that one really well. Knowing that our friends are photography buffs as well as historical enthusiasts really helped to make that one awesome. Hell, they even picked an Architect to tell their story about!
I think for future projects we shouldn’t be aiming for the more passive Midnight Note model necessarily, but to make participation less “Life or death”. In this one the story (and players) were punished because they couldn’t/wouldn’t participate. We didn’t plan very well for this kind of low-input option, although I think the solution we ended up with worked quite well.
So! To sum up! Things we could do to improve for next time:
- Establish hub point for content/archive/conversation/submission
- Give clear instructions so that new players know how to get involved and what getting involved requires. (<3 you, n00bs)
- Reward any and all levels of interactivity (@ replies, # comments)
- Have a more active role in maintaining and guiding the community (In-character, or OOC)
Timothy 7:45 am on April 30, 2010 Permalink |
So when you say, “Reward interactivity” – a reward is just a reply from a character – so a reinforcing of that interactivity, that it was the right thing to do?
Timothy 7:59 am on April 30, 2010 Permalink |
Another thing that springs to mind about the “hub point for content/archive/conversation/submission”… we had two of those for Midnight Note: Midnightnote.com, and Facebook.
I wonder how much people looked at midnightnote.com to keep track of what was going on? It was “where the story was”, but we hoped that ‘Out Of Game’ interaction would turn up on Facebook, and it totally didn’t. Not even a little bit.
Having a single hub point is a good idea though. What would some of the key features be?
Hadyn 9:17 pm on May 2, 2010 Permalink |
I think perhaps the story might have been your problem with DWS, as much as the interactivity part. And I don’t mean that it was a bad story it was pretty good, though even now I could tell you what the plot was (with the noted difference between plot and story).
My feeling is that what you had was a clearly linear storyline similar to MN (which it how I shall abbreviate Midnight Note), but the you had real task points that if not completed genuinely affected the story. So what you needed were **consequences of failure**.
So I play Mario Brothers, in the opening sequence I discover that I have to save the Princess, and if I fail then she’s going to die (or marry that dinosaur guy I forget). But basically I know what my end point kind of looks like, though how I get there and where it is I don’t know. Similarly with MN, we opened with Sam at the end of the story telling the audience what’s going on and then (effectively) telling the audience that they are in for a sequence of interesting events to get where he already is.
I felt that was missing with DWS.
The character of Beth was introduced with the same level of mystery as DWS himself, making the players feel that no matter how many puzzles they solved there was still another level of mystery, and no real reveal. MN had good stages where, upon completing a task, players were rewarded with another large chunk of the plot.
Now, as you say the ARG folks may have lapped this up, but the group you were working with were the same group that had loved MN and so were possibly expecting something similar (“A new game from the creative minds behind Midnight Note” etc).
And this where **consequences of failure** come in.
If I fail in Mario, the Princess dies (or maybe ratifies the treaty with Bowser). So many games have these, don’t find item X and you won’t be able to get to the next level or if get there it will be much harder. Consequences are the last part of every good story logline: Protagonist has to overcome difficulties otherwise there will be consequences.
Think about what would’ve happened if we hadn’t found the package on the 9th. What would be the consequences? Would we be punished in some way for it? would we arrive a day late only to discover the package had been taken by a competing group? Would DWS lose power or parts and become less coherent in his communication every time we missed a deadline?
Essentially a health meter or “Game Over” message.
It makes the story harder but like MN you can keep bringing it back to the main story. Just make them work for it.
Hadyn 9:36 pm on May 2, 2010 Permalink |
[Just realised this all seems very down on DWS, so I need to preface with the fact that it was actually pretty fun doing all the tasks and playing along. These comments are just more of an attempt to describe how it can be polished for next time]
So why did the puzzle task work so well?
It was the first and possibly most interesting task. It required us to get together and discover who was involved*. We learned quickly that it was something to do with the Centennial Exhibition, and a secret message. We were all focussed on what the message would tell us, and then what the secret package was. Following that, the tasks seemed to become less involved.
Naming buildings around Wellington was fun, because it was a little bit urban exploration, but it didn’t come with an accompanying “reveal” it seemed like it was just a time-killer that would lead to yet another task. So instead of story punctuated with tasks, like MN, DWS was tasks punctuated with story.
If people don’t feel like they are getting anywhere they lose interest. So the reveal of DWS’s identity wasn’t as big a “WOW” moment is it should’ve been.
*SIDE NOTE: A neat twist that I think we should explore in a future game is having two teams one like the DWS team (but smaller) and another competing one that is told to be secretive and work against the first group, sort of like a werewolf situation. Then at some point the first team could be alerted to their opponents and then the real game would start.