I personally conducted a quick little test on our dice mechanic. The idea is that we have a dice which creates a hypothetical set of conditions in our digital environment and that our cards react to said conditions in different ways, based off what “role” they play in the instance of callout culture. Initially I didn’t plan on testing this, but decided to after our final choice of material to make the dice, MDF, got comments that throwing it around would make it rather heavy. Therefore I conducted a mini test to see what results I’d get.
Before the test I had been planning to make a 7x7x7cm dice. From this mini test, which texted paper prototypes in the sizes 6cm, 7cm, and 8cm, I learnt that people overwhelmingly favoured the smallest dice. 7cm did have its fair share of favours, but as predicted 8cm, while favoured occasionally, was deemed too big and clunky, especially in regards to our material. It certainly pays to test the little things.
So far what we have decided is that we want to remove the competitive aspect of our project, as it was getting in the way of what we wanted to convey. Speaking to Ben, we were informed about a game creator Nicky Case who created a game about trust, further elaborating that while the subject matters were different, our project and that game overlapped in the way that what we have been really trying to show is the micro-macro aspects of social media. The small effects of an individual, compared to the greater effect on the wider environment.
That being said, what we’re going for is a project which displays how what we consider an insignificant action on social media, can have enormous consequences. By removing the competitive aspect we’ve essentially tried to create a simulation which presents three basic scenarios which can play out on social media due to the influence of call out culture.
Our third prototype was a major overhaul as we decided to make the focus more action based on an individual, rather than exclusively the relationship between an influencer and fan. Points are now based off severity of actions from different cards labeled, Event, Action, and Audience. We simplified the rules to have more emphasis on the action of combining cards to make things happen. Players are encouraged to use one of each card to form a “sequence” which had a total amount of points. Whoever had the most points in that round, won said round.
Our testers commented that while this iteration was easier to understand and play, they found it was still very hard to be competitive in the way we hypothesised. More feedback compared it to being like a reworked version of cards against humanity and previous testers commented that there seemed to be a lack of necessity for the screen element if we decided to go with this route.
There were also issues of once people got into it they ran out of cards, and the action of reusing other cards was seen as boring as they wanted more options within the scope of things.
[Test Data]
Testing began August 25th. Resumed September 17th. Ended September 23rd.
Returning to the topic of fandom groups and culture. There is a rise in the amount of people who “police” what is acceptable behaviour in fandom spaces, while this does seem to have its benefits, there is a grey area in what's become “acceptable”. In some cases fandom policing has instead turned into cases of extreme cyber bullying.
The bridge goes both ways though. What we hear about more these days are content creators who bring controversial issues into light or specifically add fuel to online “drama” in order to boost their own notoriety. In pursuit of followers, money, or reputation, we don’t realise just how far these people will go to, nor do we understand just how far the people that consume their content are willing to go to in order to justify themselves.
When we call out people to such an extent, we don’t understand the effect it has on them. Nor do we understand the effect the people creating the content have when they choose what goes in their content or what content they promote.
Our idea we’ve come to as a group is to create a card based game which demonstrates that, along with an accompanying digital display which would show the real time effects of the actions. We don’t have everything sorted yet, but the player’s will take the place of a creator or influencer and play cards which will either benefit the group, or benefit the individual sacrificing your opponent in the pursuit of followers, money, or reputation. We got the idea after learning about the origins of monopoly, in how it was changed from its original purpose by Charles Darrow and the Parker Brothers (now hasbro) in pursuit of money.
Amongst this culture of attachment to fictional media, often comes the case of Hikikomori syndrome. Initially unique to Japan, though its now been identified has occuring in parts of europe, hikikomori are people who have socially isolated themselves physically and become “shut ins”. In some cases, some hikikomori haven’t left their houses for 10-15 years.
Addiction and obsession to SNS, the internet, and online gaming have been seen as some contributing factors to the phenomenon and often they have been overlapped with being “otaku” - die hard fans of animation, comics, and tokusatsu. However some hikikomori may be otaku, others may not be, similar with otaku in that some may be hikikomori, but others may not be.
illustration: @/michaelabct
This syndrome of attachment along with a play on words helped me come up with a rough idea. Using visual novels to display the syndrome in a way more easily understandable and relatable to others. In Japanese “hikikomori” is written ひきこもり or 引きこもり, meaning acute social withdrawl. However the character for forest (or woods) 森 is read “mori” (もり), which brought me towards the idea of using mushrooms as a theme for the visual novel. Perhaps a dating sim with mushrooms as the “targets” (if pigeons have been done then so can mushrooms). It's not a concrete idea but it’d be interesting to play around with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI5frPV58tY
I was informed of Paul Stamets and his work with mushrooms. Which made an interesting point of humans sharing more dna with fungi than any other creature on the planet, along with mushrooms often being seen as severely underrated. But we’ll see.
Ante Silić, Jakša Vukojević, Ilaria Čulo, & Hrvoje Falak. (2019). Hikikomori silent epidemic: a case study. Research in Psychotherapy, (2). https://doi-org.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/10.4081/ripppo.2019.377
Masaru Tateno, Alan R. Teo, Wataru Ukai, Junichiro Kanazawa, Ryoko Katsuki, Hiroaki Kubo, & Takahiro A. Kato. (2019). Internet Addiction, Smartphone Addiction, and Hikikomori Trait in Japanese Young Adult: Social Isolation and Social Network. Frontiers in Psychiatry. https://doi-org.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00455
Quite recently, Kyoto Animation went up in flames. One of their studios was set alight after a man who claimed the company stole his novel, poured gasoline and set the building on fire while people were still inside. While this isn’t a direct case of fictional content affecting real world actions, this isn’t the first case of when people have decided to take drastic measures towards these companies who create and manufacture said content.
Square enix, publisher of the renowned fantasy video game series “Final Fantasy”, has received death threats over one of their “gacha games” (a game which users random number generated rates for special items of characters).
https://news.livedoor.com/article/detail/16254063/ (original article was deleted, summary remains)
Recently a Chinese cosplayer attending the comic convention “Comic Market” (Comiket) in Japan was overwhelmed to a point of a panic attack when photographers aggressively surrounded her in order to get up-skirt shots of her in costume.
This attachment isn’t always romantic, and it isn’t always healthy. There are many more cases where people’s views on fictional characters begin to overlap in real life, without taking into account that there are real people behind costumes and companies producing this or displaying fan content.
The darker side of this attachment is an interesting concept to play with. Games such as Doki Doki Literature Club (ddlc) which is initially portrayed as a typical dating sim, take into account these darker aspects. In DDLC’s case they made the hyperfixation of the character Monika on the player the key component of the game, going as far to having the code react to if you tried to delete any of the games assets that were related to Monika.
A rise in “fandom” culture and people’s relationships with 2D media has resulted in an interesting evolution of how we perceive relationships. No longer are people bound to interacting just with supposed “3D People”; Around us there is an increasing amount of people who show varying (ranging from mild to extreme) levels of attachment to fictional characters.
At the forefront of this are visual novels which are of the “dating simulator” variety. They’re the more obvious example as they’re explicitly marketed as well, dating simulators. You’re guided through a story and encouraged to raise your affection with various characters in order to pursue romantic relationships with them. These days you can easily access f2p (free to play) dating simulators on your mobile device, some of which have their story play out over real time (for example Mystic Messenger).
The impact on these games are rather hard to ignore. There are entire communities who provide fanworks ranging from stories, to art, to “cosplay” (costume play). People write walkthroughs on how to complete a character's “route” and bond together over a mutual appreciation and adoration for for these characters who have no physical influence on the “real world”.
Live document: http://bit.ly/2zpQIFv
Ganzon, S. C. (2019). Investing Time for Your In-Game Boyfriends and BFFs: Time as Commodity and the Simulation of Emotional Labor in Mystic Messenger. Games & Culture, 14(2), 139. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edb&AN=135191574&site=eds-live
This prototype differed in that we made “two” prototypes which count as our “second” prototype. In prototype 2A, we decided to not tell the testers what categories the cards were from. They were presented with cards with a blank side and a labeled side which contained all the information on the actions, points, and categories. We’d also changed the category “fame” to “fans” as we felt fame was rather broad and overlapped somewhat with reputation. However even with these changes, it was hard to test properly so we made a new prototype.
Prototype 2B involved the removal of categories entirely and became focused more on the idea of the relationship between fans and reputation. The testing of this prototype also wasn’t quite ideal as we lacked the digital aspect of it which calculated the effects of the prototype on the hypothetical fans. We did try to make do with a paper substitute but it wasn’t quite the same.
Our first prototype test wasn’t ideal. The rules were too complex for our testers to pick up and the mechanism we had to decide what would win a “round” which was points based, didn’t make a lot of sense to the testers or to us.
Cards were separated into three groups: Money, Fame, and Reputation respectively. The content on those cards had a series of actions, and points which correspond to the severity or nature of the action taken (i.e. scamming fans would be a major deduction of reputation points but hugely increase points in money. At the time we thought this would be a solid prototype.
We tested it anyway to see what could be said from it. Our testers said they liked our concept but found the play convoluted and basically unplayable. This prototype is going back to the drawing board.
Open Studio came and went. It was difficult getting to the stage where we had a presentable work but for the most part I think we did okay. For the most part My group and I spent the night answering many questions of “but why?” which became rather frustrating after the 10th time. What was interesting though was the few people who asked “what if?” which was interesting. I think after this whole project, it was refreshing for someone to interact with it, and take their own perspective on where the project could go.
Overall, it was definitely a learning experience. The lack of information about whether or not it was a light or dark space didn’t help some of the technical aspects such as having to re-calibrate the camera. Work In Progress is definitely an experience worth learning from as a whole and it was very interesting to watch how varied the interactions with the project were.
Over the past two weeks we’ve been crunching out work to make up for lost time. We went back to our initial ideas with synaesthesia and incorporated our sound elements back into our project which were dropped some time between week 9 and week 11. My main focus was on asset design and creating a website for our team which can be found here.
We ultimately decided on a lot of important things too such as our group / project name:
Work In Progress
And our logo:
My main job over the past few weeks, however were to create graphic assets to use in the digital component of our project.
This screenshot shows all the digital assets of the project. But the bee and bird are really well captured so here are the individual assets
Creating assets using a lineless art style to fit the aesthetic theme of our project was a real challenge but I got there in the end and I’m really happy with the results.
Most assets were chosen based off having relevance in the fact you could likely find them in some people’s personal work spaces, while others were merely decorative (wind chimes, plant), and others such as the bee and bird were to decorate the landscape beyond the sky. All in all, I believe our the digital part of our project came together in the end quite nicely.
Separately, when getting feedback from Laurant, he told us of how even if our project was memorable, it wasn’t enough to last forever and suggested we offer to take pictures or have a way to visually capture peoples products of interaction with our installation. Therefore I spent a lot of time also setting up a group email to use to send pictures if necessary to people who were interested in the project along with developing a website to include in the signature so people understood the team behind the project.
During this time I spent most of it either at home sick or at home and working so it pulled back our plans a lot. We also came to a stand still with our direction due to some unintended miscommunication.
Our initial idea was to create a installation which used office objects in the physical space, to mimic what people did with the simple 3d shapes during the testing stage, with midi and sound controls used to change the textures of the shapes. This is the mock up concept I created.
These were mainly made as a way to demonstrate the rig but it sort of represented what we wanted to display (minus the image in the screen being books and a cup but rather simple shapes with “building material” textures.
After completing our testing we had to generate ideas. From what we learned, we really wanted to create a sort of physical enviroment that had impact on a digital enviroment (what happens in reality will happen in simulation). We had many ideas on how this could work, most notably we began by brain storming ways we could use NFC (near-field communication) and RFID (radio-frequency identification), which technology most commonly found in things like library books (to “scan” them), our swipe cards, and our bus cards/tags. You can use some phones to “scan” these tags and the worked mostly as long as the tag is close enough to the receptor. They commonly look like these:
The reason we didn’t use any of these however was a pretty simple reason. It was just too expensive. We still really wanted to have a sort of object tracking feature in our installation so @/tigershaobct and I consulted Stefan about what we wanted to do in hopes he could point us towards a more affordable solution.
We discussed many options such as shape or colour recognition but we ended up being referred to an option called “reacTIVision”. ReacTIVision works by tracking specific symbols - called fiducial codes - through a webcam and assigning them a number.
with these codes you can attach them to real objects and link them through the reacTIVision program to track their movements.
With a camera from the mechlab @/liamcollbct was able to construct a basic prototype of what we might have.
However @/lightsbct and I decided that the symbols were too big an intrusive and tested various heights at fiducial code sizes to get the ideal height at which the camera can detect the codes, but create a reasonable amount of space to put objects in.
Along side this prototyping. I was doing some research on people’s interaction with organisation, which brought me to the famous (or infamous depending on who you are) “The Life-changing magic of tidying up the japanese art of decluttering and organizing” by Marie Kondo. While the book has recieved equal amounts of praise and critique, Marie Kondo presented a very interesting view on people and their interaction with their possessions. While tidying or organising, most people are compelled to use every single item or make sure every single item has a place, regardless of whether they need it or not. Marie Kondo’s book reiterated the idea of asking whether you really needed the item or not, and sent the message of “sometimes less is more”. This was an interesting account on how people interact with the material world I found, and I hope to use what I learnt reading, in the project.
We’ve identified that we no longer feel as if we’re going in the direction of synaesthesia. Initially we started out wanting to create a personal space which plays sound and visually represents chromesthesia, synaesthesia which combines auditory and visual senses. However when we were developing a method of testing we figured that our direction had changed significantly and we became more involved with how people interact with space, specifically, their personal space.
From this, I proposed we conduct two types of tests,
One test used general office stationery and we asked participants to organise it as they pleased.
The other test used simplified basic 3d shapes such as rectangular prisms and cubes, we asked them the same questions
What we learned from this was interesting as the more specific/detailed the items were, the more people felt compelled to organise it by a way of order, such as by shape/type/size etc.
However when presented with the blank simple shapes people felt more compelled to start creating and building different shapes. Instead of organising them by size or shape they began building little villages, forests or cities. This surprised us greatly and the comparison between the two tests allowed us to generate ideas on what our final project might be.
花鳥風月 (Kachofugetsu)
Lit. Meaning “The Beauty of Nature”
I tried to stay in line with my theme and felt they both embodied somewhat opposing forces of nature with how they played out. Therefore I chose to give them a “past” and “present” notation a long with matching images to show that they’re a pair. Both use similar sets of instruments but play out very differently and I think that contrast is what I was aiming to do from the beginning, by taking the Shamisen out of its intended genre and context.
One song stays closer to its origins but uses a more modern genre.
The other uses it outside its genre but still remains somewhat recognisable to its origin.
I’ve realised combining Shamisen and Chims creates a type of futuristic effect for the Shamisen which contrasts the more organic feeling of the first track. The first one is more lo-fi in comparison to this one which has a slight edm feeling but not entirely.
