World of Warcraft’s latest content patch provided players with Guild Banks, a feature long sought after by players. Interestingly enough this new common space has already been appropriated for new forms of emergent play.

WoW Insider  has posted about players using the Guild Bank space for a checkers board, and stated that it is a shame that each column is only 7 cells deep. If there were 8, Chess would be a simple extension.

Connect 4, Tic-Tac-Toe, and even Pictionary are are playable in this space. Reversi is as well, but I can’t imagine would would have the patience to keep changing all those pieces.

I need to check out the new version of the WoW Add-On API to see how this shiny new space can be used for appropriative gaming within Azeroth as I mentioned in my thesis: Pervasive Game Are Not A Genre! (They are a sub-genre).

As I’m finally getting down to reviewing the Google’s mobile Android SDK, I’m wondering if this is the nail in the coffin for OpenMoko (it isn’t a very big coffin and would only need 1 nail).

My thinking is this: I’ve been working on a appropriative /pervasive game toolkit, and have been holding off on moving into the dev stage until I had a chance to get my hands on the consumer version of the Neo1973 to what I could really do with it. The fact that the device has been continuously delayed has not helped OpenMoko in this case.

You might ask why would I even bother with OpenMoko in the first place. Well the pervasive game toolkit requires a fairly high level of API access to a device’s hardware functionality. While I realized that any OpenMoko version of the toolkit would only be demoware, I was prepared to use it until the mobile community came to their senses.

Now it appears that Google may have lead them there. I’m putting a lot of stock into the optional low-level hardware APIs that have yet to be released but based on what I am reading now, it looks Android will allow me to have my demoware and deploy it too.

…I still might get a Neo1973 when it is finally available, but I certainly won’t be developing for it.

Did Android cause anyone else to close the book on OpenMoko or am I the only one who ever bothered to open the book?

One of the biggest challenges in appropriative game design, is computational quantification of action. How do you prove something happened, and to a lesser extent, how can you objectively inform a computational structure that something happened?

It all comes down to the tag problem. Observe any game of tag, at some point there will be a disagreement about whether or not a tag was made. When I teach on this topic, my student’s first assignment is to develop a method to quantify a tag and then inform a computational shell of the tag. Their second assignment is to then have the shell inform all players that the tag has been made.

Typically I see different riffs on the same methods, but I’m always looking for more. I’ve also been trying to abstract those methods into general approaches. Now I’m biased towards pervasive gaming and utilizing mid to high-end consumer mobile devices so this list is influenced by that. …this is also a very raw, and incomplete, draft.

Approaches to Collision Detection in the Real World

Network Proximity: Essentially if while scanning for connections over an ad-hoc network, if Device A can “see” Device B for X amount of time, a tag is made.

I’ve nicknamed this method “missile lock.” While using mobile devices and Bluetooth, I’ve found that the tag radius is ~30 yards and a time period of ~30 seconds of continued presence to establish the tag works fairly well.

Optical Recognition- Scan: If Player A is able to optically scan a barcode/glyph on Player B with his/her mobile device, a tag is made.

I’ve played with this one a lot, and have observed some interesting emergent behaviors. Before I get ahead of myself, I generally use Shotcodes linking to Php/AJAX websites to make the mechanic work.

The interesting emergent behaviors I mentioned generally are all a reaction to the Shotcode client’s effective range on mobile devices. First of all, the client doesn’t support zoom. A colleague of mine hacked the client and enabled zoom, but doing so greatly degraded scanning performance. Regardless, the effective scanning range of a Shotcode-enabled device is ~2 feet or less for a Shotcode with a 1-2 inch radius. As you would imagine, range increases as the size of the Shotcode increases. I haven’t worked out a specific size to range relational table yet, but how big are you going to make a Shotcode if you are planning to stick it on a player?

So in an interesting reaction to the limited effective scan range of the majority of Shotcode-enabled devices, innovative players actually used digitial SLR cameras to take snap photos of targeted shotcodes from long range and then scanned them off of the SLR’s LCD screen. Rather than outlaw this mechanic, I’ve decided to embrace it in my games.

Optical Recognition- Photo Recognition: I’m including this because it inevitable gets brought up in conversations. The base mechanic is that if Player A is able to take a recognizable picture of Player B, a tag is made.

I’m not a fan of this method because simply because it is in-exact. I’ve yet to work with affordable and/or reliable facial recognition software with which to automate this task. You can leave it to a human referee, and that is a legitimate low-tech approach, but I just haven’t found it to be a very interesting mechanic in practice. Granted after a few mundane tests I’ve pretty much shelved the idea, but I haven’t seen anyone else do it in an interesting fashion.

Physical Tag- “The Button”: A few times we had the idea of attaching a button of sorts to players. The idea was a tag would be made if some chased them down and pushed the button. After this resulted in a gang tackle or two, we moved one.

Physical Tag w/ Consensual Reporting: Saving the best for last (in this post at least), this tagging mechanic has worked the best in the most situations I’ve tried it in. Under this model, players tag each other in the same way they’ve been tagging each other since they started playing tag…physically, with their hands.

So Player A chases down Player B and tags him/her. Player A sends an SMS to the game server that reads, “Tagged B.” The game software then moves both players into a ‘purgatory’ queue until the tagged is resolved. If Player B agrees that a tag was made, he/she would SMS the server “Tagged By A.” If Player B disagreed with the tag, both players remain in purgatory until Player B consents to the tag or Player A withdraws the tag by texting “Untag B” to the server.

…so that’s my short list, does anyone have any other interesting mechanics they are experimenting with?

In about a week and a half, Come Out & Play 2007 will kick-off as part of PICNIC ‘07 in Amsterdam. Unfortunately I am not able to make the festival due to scheduling issues, but past collaborators David Jimison and Jeff Crouse have a game so Georgia Tech will be proudly represented. Hopefully my accepted entry Disavow! will find its way into to CO&P ‘08 this coming spring in NYC.

Out of curiosity I surveyed this year’s entries based on my sub-genres for appropriative games (list below), and was surprised at what I found. Given the perceived mobile sophistication of Europe compared to the US, I expected a large percentage of games to heavily leverage mobile and fall into the realm of pervasive prototyping/ubiquitous gaming. Now while a few of the games do leverage higher end mobile features (the Nokia N95 seems popular), just as many employed no computation at all. In fact, I would go as far as to wager that the big games will be the stars of the festival.

I’m hoping to get a few on site reports, and will post them if they come in.

Big Games

• Bocce Drift
• Censorsh**
• CounterSquirt
• Human Snake
• Manila
• People Watching
• Safari

Pervasive Games

• 3001
• CollecTic
• FUSE INVASION
• Lumenatio
• Navball
• OMMRPG
• Snap Shot City
• The Target

Ubiquitous Games

• Can You See Me Now?
• de Pong

Alternate Reality Games

• TAH II

This is a response to this email from Markus:

Hi Markus,

I whole heartedly agree that the question is, “What is the purpose of classification?” My response is that, “we must classify in order to do more specific work.” It seems that everyone who works in our area has their own definition for ‘these games,’ and my primary concern is that the bulk of these definitions make good sound bites, but are thoroughly unusable when attempting to construct a greater theoretical framework. For example, a lot of definitions say that there is something intrinsically urban about these games and I disagree with that notion entirely.

Interestingly enough, I don’t see that IPerG’s approaches as being in any great conflict with my own- although I may be getting a head of myself. I believe that this genre of appropriative games are defined by the fact that they are designed for places/environments that were not originally intended to accommodate them. Now this definition can be approached through both schemas that you mentioned (issues of culture & distribution).

Culturally, these games are taking place in places where game generally aren’t supposed to be played. We see this in Norman Douglas’ London Street Games and when the NYPD requests that a checkpoint for Journey to the End of the Night relocates from the steps of a federal building. I realize the cultural implications reach much further than that, but they are not my immediate focus. Distribution is an interesting approach, but if you’ll bear with me I don’t think that it falls to far from my sub-genres (big game, pervasive game, ubiquitous game).

All games are at their core rule-based constructions. I really don’t anyone would argue with that. The distinction I have tried to base my sub-genre divisions on is who or what is administering, executing, and enforcing the rules of the game. The line that we like to draw at Georgia Tech is that an artifact (ludic or otherwise) is either computational or not. In my model, “the not” would be big games. I then divided the computational games into pervasive and ubiquitous games.

While this seems to be a simple question of tech, it is actual a question of cultural adoption of technology. Mobile technology is a great example to draw upon. In the US the cultural adoption of mobile tech lags far behind Northern Europe and Asia. As such when I design a “pervasive game” in the US that uses cellphones, I cannot rely upon anything beyond a voice connection and SMS. Without being an expert in Northern European mobile culture, I know for a fact that I could at-least MMS to that list for a game in your neck of the woods. In my view, pervasive technologies are naturally found in the area a game is to take place- which makes distribution a greatly simplified task. Ubiquitous technology, on the other hand, is tech that hasn’t been culturally adopted…which makes distribution/playability a far more daunting of a task. If we were to design a game using handhelds, GPS, and custom software, the chance of someone wandering along and being able to join in without being given equipment is zero.

I really don’t think anything (history or contemporary design) needs to be scrapped in order to move forward. I would love to see more encompassing models (as mine attempts to be), but people seem unwilling to generate them.

Best,
Dakota

P.S. For my own purposes I have defined an alternate reality game as an appropriative game that occupies two or more different types of environments concurrently (i.e. a real world location & a virtual world location).

Recently Markus Montola wrote a mini-review on my thesis as part of his on-going dissertation work in Pervasive Games. Markus is one of the driving forces behind IPerG and is one of the proverbial heavyweights in the area of appropriative gaming. Markus and I have struck up a dialog on the subject, and as long as he consents (which he has) I will be posting the exchanges here in unedited forms.

Hi Dakota,

We’ve been discussing genres a lot lately within IPerG, and found out two sensible approaches to “pervasive game” genre classification. Either you study existing games and gaming cultures and discuss the existing historical and popular ways of classifying the games, OR you build your own categories from scratch in order to inform design. The question is: What is the purpose of the classification?

Due to distribution issues, the former one is really hard to do with “pervasive games”: They’ve been reinvented SO many times over and over. You have locally born game groups like big games, alternate reality games and pervasive larps, which are partially overlapping, partially similar and have bunch of strange features other groups consider irrelevant. You end up with a game like Momentum, which perfectly belongs to all three groups, and game like Majestic, which looks like an alternate reality game but is not due to not being part of the ARG movement. Computer games have had easy and fairly global distribution, so genres such as platformers and rally games have crystallized very early. The ways of playing larps and “pervasive games” are too many to count or distinguish.

So you can take the design approach, asking what are the prototypical feature compositions that best serve as a basis for a designer trying to think about this new stuff. If you go this way, you may scrap most of the historical influences from your classification, and build an entirely new one. (Of course old practices, games and groupings should help you along). But if you go this way, I don’t think your three groups are informative enough.

So… where do you stand, in either of these approaches or elsewhere?

Best,
- Markus

Markus Montola, who might well be described as the Godfather of European Pervasive Appropriative Games, had a few kind words for my thesis Pervasive Games Are Not A Genre! (They are a sub-genre.).

Other than the fact that the curse of Dakota Fanning has struck again (he refers to me as a she), Markus raised a few points of contention that I would like to address. Unfortunately, Markus’ website doesn’t allow for comments so I’ll address his concerns here.

Of course I disagree with many things presented in here. One of them is the classification of appropriative games to big, ubiquitous and pervasive games. I agree with the argument that we need to classify these things into more elaborate sub-groups, but I don’t agree with the division made here; Brown’s categories basically boil down to “no tech”, “user-owned tech” and “game operator provided tech”. The distinction is useful, but not sufficient as a genre classification.

The speed at which one can be bogged down while discussing genre is amazing, so I will keep this a brief and as to the point as possible. A genre is simply a category of composition belonging to a greater taxonomy. In constructing my genre system, I tried to answer two questions:

1. What do these games do?
2. How do they go about doing that?

These games erect a representational layer of play over existing space without significantly altering the physicality of that space. Everything one might layer on top of this (real vs. virtual space, 1 player vs. many players, etc), are really well-passed the core of the experience. These games appropriate space and then relinquish it physically unaffected by the gameplay.

This “representational layer of play” is either constructed through computation or non-computational means. I choose the term big games to represent the non-computational ones. I’ll admit that this term isn’t optimal, but this application reflects the rhetoric of its popular usage. The non-computational games big games received the least amount of attention in my treatment, and really do warrant a greater investigation.

I devoted most of my efforts to the games that constructed their “representational layers of play” computationally. For a starting point, I relied greatly on Jane McGonigal’s This Might Be A Game. I became fairly invested in looking at how game theorists on the humanities side of things viewed the terms “pervasive” & “ubiquitous” versus how game theorists / computer scientists viewed the terms. I’m not going summarize that section here, but it did allow to me arrive at what I think is a valuable distinction.

Pervasive games are games that rely upon computational technology that has already been dispersed through the appropriated environment. On the other hand, ubiquitous game rely upon computational technology that must first be introduced to said environment.

Not to be short, but reducing this distinction to “user-owned” and “operator-provided” completely disavows the historical computational context through which the terms “pervasive” & “ubiquitous” were derived. I find that a lot of work done in this field relies too heavily on convenient adjectives and verbs. Definitions constructed in this manner often make great sound bites & blog posts, but fall apart under the slightest of theoretical scrutiny.

Which leads me to:

P.S. On page 49 Brown sees some unintended implications in my model of pervasive game: In fact I tried to express pretty much the same stuff she writes here. I suppose this is an unfortunate side effects of metaphorical models: They inspire creative readings.

I can’t blame Montola for calling me out here. The first part of my agenda was to call out and debug a few of the popular metaphoric models. It isn’t so much that I disagree with Markus as much as I disagree with several conclusions I have seen that drew upon his work in question.

Unfortunately, the second part of my agenda had to be cut from the thesis. It just wasn’t going to be ready. I’m hoping to be able to address it soon (I really need to finish Ian’s Persuasive Games first). Ian argues:

…that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. [He calls] this new form “procedural rhetoric,” a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation.

I believe that appropriative games operate similarly, but distinctively differently due to the confusion in regards to the magic circle we are referring to. I refer to this new form as “procedural dialectic,” and will be expounding about it further in the future.

So…comments?

Wow. Brilliant. Does anyone know whose work this is? The concept is just beautiful. I’ve placed an email to Whydoesshelovethemoon@gmail.com in hopes of finding out. Also, no chatter yet over at the ufiction forums. So I really have no idea whether this is one-shot art or part of a larger campaign.

Via Stencil Archive:

“She Loves the Moon” is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spray painted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text.

It’s a love story involving two characters who start in different locations. His story starts at 16th and Valencia, in front of the Crown Hotel / Limon Restaurant with the text “He Leaves his Lonely Apartment.” Her story starts at 21st and Guerrero in front of a Victorian mansion with the text, “She Leaves her Lonely Apartment.” Eventually their paths merge in front of Tartine Cafe at 18th and Guerrero, where they meet, and their paths travel together until relationship drama pulls them apart. Eventually their paths remerge, at which point there are two possible endings, happy and tragic, and two other points where the story can end unexpectedly if the viewer chooses the wrong ending. All in all, there are 4 possible endings.

Stencil Stories: She Loves the Moon has been added to the Avant Game List.

Two more links for you:
Doej15’s Flickr Photo’s
Stencil Story @ New York Magazine

Thanks for the link Al.

It looks we have another mass-market ARG states side. Over the weekend, a JJ Abrams / Bad Robot branded trailer ran with the new Transformers movie. The cover name of the project is “Cloverfield,” but that is most certainly not the film’s name. The trailer follows a group of party-goers around New York (cinema verite-style) until a bunch of explosions start tearing apart the city. There is a growing vibe that this game is to promote a HP Lovecraft-based project.

So far we have a few sites (in-game & commentary):

• Ethan Haas Was Right
• Ethan Hass Was Wrong
• 1-18-08
• Ain’t It Cool News
• Joystiq
• Cinematical
• Ufiction Forums

Fun stuff so far. I hope Abrams takes this to the level of The Lost Expirience and we get some significant real-world cross-over. If you get through the material (find spoilers somewhere else lazy ones), you’ll learn that August 1st is a big day. Interesting.

I’ve been asked a few times now, “What is a good indication that something is an appropriative game?” In the past I’ve used a few different answers but after listening to a recent NPR report on Parkour, I think I’ve settled on the perfect sound bite: If the game pisses people off and makes them say something like, “Hey! You can’t do that here!” there is a good chance you are playing an appropriative game. Unlike other games, the primary friction between an appropriate game and the rest of the world isn’t a discussion of content. It is a discussion of location and Parkour is a perfect example of that.

Via Wikipedia:

The cultural phenomenon Parkour is a physical activity which is difficult to categorize. It is not an extreme sport, but an art or discipline that resembles self-defense in the martial arts. According to the founder David Belle, the spirit of Parkour is guided in part by the notions of “escape” and “reach,” that is, the idea of using quick thinking with dexterity to get out of difficult situations. You want to move in such a way, with any movement, that will help you gain the most ground on someone/something as if escaping from it, or chasing toward it. Thus, when faced with a hostile confrontation with a person, one will be able to speak, fight, or flee. As martial arts are a form of training for the fight, Parkour is a form of training for the flight. Because of its difficulty to categorize, it is often said that Parkour is in its own category: “Parkour is Parkour.”

Parkour has been added to the Avant Game List.

Bonus: A David Belle BBC Commerical: