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
