Paper Reading #5: Playable Character: Extending Digital Games into the Real World

Introduction

In their paper "Playable Character: Extending Digital Games into the Real World," Jason Linder and Wendy Ju from California College of the Arts explored the world of games in order to find out how real-world activity could be incorporated into digital games. This resulted in the development of the game Forest for the non-profit organization Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF) in San Francisco. This was presented at CHI 2012 in May of 2012 in Austin, TX. Linder is pursing his MFA in Design and MBA in Design Strategy.  Ju is an assistant professor and is interested in physical interaction design.

Summary

Linder and Ju isolated certain aspects of games and analyzed how activities performed in the real world could be incorporated into a digital game system. This led to several game prototypes that were tested by various colleagues and friends. Finally, they developed their final game Forest which used these elements in an interesting manner. First, they created a game similar to SimCity called Simulation City. The players had to take pictures of real buildings in order to add items to their city. Second, they developed SphereQuest to see what connections could be made between someone's daily tasks, like eating a piece of fruit, and their video game character's stats, like magic. Third, in the game The Other End, players simply checked in at a sensor at one end of a hall and then somehow make their way to the other end of the hall and check in at a sensor there. There was a scoreboard with three categories listed: most points, most trips, and best time. Fourth, they developed Cubelord; the players had to give up personal information or perform different silly tasks to beat other players. They acquired territories (the cubicals of the studio) by buying them with funds that they acquired by doing the aforementioned things. Finally, they designed their final game Forest. They implemented a small version of the game to test the reception by volunteers of FUF and several others not affiliated with them. In the game, players could to check in a tree by taking a photo or adding information about the tree, which would earn them "leaves," a kind of currency that could be used to allow them to build and customize their Virtual Forest. They could mark a GPS location to be an ideal spot for a new tree with the "Tree Please!" function and earn more "leaves" that way. Players can earn tokens like badges or special game items by participating in team activities like volunteering.

Figure 1: Forest game - Adding information for a tree to earn "leaves"

Related Work Not Referenced in the Paper

This work is not really novel. There has been a lot of research on games. The authors talked about background information about types of games and the gamification of day-to-day tasks, but they did not reference as many related works as I thought they should have. Some related works are listed below.

1. Crabtree, Andy, and Tom Rodden. "Hybrid ecologies: understanding cooperative interaction in emerging physical-digital environments." Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. 12.7 (2008): 481-93. Web. 6 Sep. 2012.

Crabtree and Rodden discuss how the merging of physical and digital environments are becoming more prevalent. Such background information is useful to add perspective when designing games that connect reality and digital games

2. Benford, Steve, Andy Crabtree, et al. "The Frame of the Game: Blurring the Boundary between Fiction and Reality in Mobile Experiences." CHI '06 Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems. (2006): 427-36. Web. 6 Sep. 2012.

Benford, et al. give a perspective on how mobile experience on how mobile devices creates new opportunities to combine reality and the digital world. They offer ways that the line between acceptable behavior in the physical world and dramatic behavior in the digital world can be blurred.

3. Cheok, A.D., Fong Siew Wan, et al. "Game-City: a ubiquitous large area multi-interface mixed reality game space for wearable computers." Wearable Computers. (2001): 156-57. Web. 6 Sep. 2012.

Game-City is not so different from Forest because it can span a whole city. It also combine the physical world with a digital game. The only significant difference is that Game-City uses wearable computer components, which could be applied to Forest in some way.

4. de Kort, Yvonne, Wijnand A. IJsselsteijn, and Brian J. Gajadhar. "People, Places, and Play: A research framework for digital game experience in a socio-spatial context." n. page. Web. 6 Sep. 2012.

de Kort, et al. explore how digital games can be shaped by the socio-spatial context of the game. For a game like Forest, that can be seen in both the physical world and the digital world.

5. Fails, Jerry Alan, Allison Druin, et al. "Child's play: a comparison of desktop and physical interactive environments." IDC '05 Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Interaction design and children. (2005): 48-55. Web. 6 Sep. 2012.

Fails, et al. compared physical games and digital games for young children. Both types of games can have different impact on their social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. This is an interesting viewpoint that Linder and Ju can look at and maybe apply to their Forest game for children volunteers.

6. Bareford, CG. "Community as client: environmental issues in the real world. A SimCity computer simulation."Comput Nurs. 19.1 (2001): 11-6. Web. 6 Sep. 2012.

SimCity has a lot more to offer than what Linder and Ju alluded to. They could probably take a few more elements from SimCity and add it into Forest and further enhance the game.

7. Babcock, C. "Lessons From Farmville." Information Week. (2011): 29-34. Web. 6 Sep. 2012.

Farmville is a much simpler game compared to Forest. However, a lot of similar elements are there, and Linder and Ju can use Farmville to come up with new ways to build upon their early version of Forest to make it more popular and increase FUF's numbers.

8. Shelley, Bruce. "Guidelines for Developing Successful Games."Gamasutra. (2001): n. page. Web. 6 Sep. 2012.

Shelley offers says to improve games so that they can become a success. Linder and Ju can use these suggestions to refine Forest or conduct more research on reality and digital hybrid games.

9. Churchill, Elizabeth, Andreas Girgensohn, et al. "Blending digital and physical spaces for ubiquitous community participation." Communications of the ACM - Information cities. 47.2 (2004): 38-44. Web. 6 Sep. 2012.

Churchill, et al. looks at how blurring the boundary between the digital and physical can increase face-to-face community participation. This is the kind of work Linder and Ju should look like because it is directly related to their goals.

10. Intille, Stephen S., Charles Kukla, et al. "Merging the Physical and Digital in Ubiquitous Computing Environments." n. page. Web. 6 Sep. 2012.

There are many limitations to Forest right now. These need to be looked at critically from different angles. Intille, et al.'s work looks at how digital interfaces for physical environments, like a city, with ubiquitous displays and sensing can create some unique problems.

Evaluation

Linder and Ju's evaluations were largely subjective qualitative data. They looked at the responses of players and their own perceptions of the players' interaction between the real-world activity and the digital game element. First, for Simulation City, the players seemed to enjoy collecting interesting buildings just to have a collection of real-world items. Second, in the game SphereQuest, the more the player could connect with the action, the more fun they had; for example, they had to use public transportation to increase their stealth. The players enjoyed pretending that they were being stealthy in real life. Third, The Other End seemed to catch a lot of interest beause it was quick to play and it created lots of competition. They first tried to beat each other's times, and when that became difficult to accomplish, they focused on the other statistics. There was also an increase in social interaction; the players would linger and discuss stratgey. They also noticed that the players were trying to find a way to beat the game by bending the rules. Fourth, the Cubelord game showed that the players were more likely to do tasks that were convenient because it was the quickest way to earn funds. The game Forest combined all of the elements that Linder and Ju found engaging for players. The players tried out a small version of the game and commented on how they were excited to see the full version. There was generally positive feedback when asked about the game.

Discussion

I think this work is very interesting in trying to recruit more volunteers for a non-profit organization by making the activities seem more like a game than a job or obligations. The game experiments leading up to Forest were less interesting to me. There were probably better ways to test or research such aspects of a game. The evaluation seemed okay but there was no real data collected other than observation and user feedback. The contribution was not novel to me. In fact, Forest sounded a lot like the popular Facebook game FarmVille, but with slightly different elements involved.