This reflection outlines the devlopment of Tree Ottawa: Greber’s Revenge, an ARIS-based game hosted in Canada’s capital. Tree Ottawa follows changes to Ottawa’s landscape, mapping broad changes in planning though the evolution of the urban canopy and its accompanying features. Players learn the read the landscape as a living document, chronicling the broader changes Ottawa has experienced since approximately 1899. Along the way, they encounter a host of characters struggling to solve a supernatural mystery threatening the very existence of the capital. Using their newfound skills, players must solve the mystery and come head to head with one of Ottawa’s most well-known federal planners.

This marks the final week of work for the Greber game. Though it’s still not perfect, it comes closer every day to what I’d like it to be. More importantly, it gives me ideas for using ARIS in the future. I think the platform, though intended for “gamification,” may work well for a less fictionalized exploration of landscape as well. You could plan quite a few unique “hidden history” using the same fundamentals. But, more to the point, concerns that have arisen this week:

• Concerns over audience agency: what can others do with the ganme? ARIS is fairly secure in that you have to work a little harder to co-opt the platform or tranform it for your own use, which is a bit of a blessing and a curse. It doesn’t allow for people to play around with your content and discover it in new ways, nor can they effectively build on it. But, alternatively, you run less risk of things going amuck and retain a lot of control as a creator.
• Concerns over accessibility: I’ve got the route more or less accessible, in high summer. But with springtime puddles appearing, my efforts to create something totally accessible that still goes down by the river are thwarted. That’s commentary on how our cities are designed as well, to a degree. But it’s nonetheless a challange.
• Translating landscape: Even though the game expects you to occasionally read landscapes for traces of the past, it doesn’t do a great job really leading yu to the nuance. You’re told what to look for, sort of, but you could be given much more comprehensive instructions. I feel like landscape reading is another topic that could work well as a non-fiction game, or perhaps a more dedicated game with a storyline less rooted in high fantasy tropes.
• The usual issues with class, gender: you need an iPhone to play, the game doesn’t really do anything to actively advance a diverse narrative (it’s more one size fits all, though there are some strong female leads now), it’s only available in English despite Ottawa’s large french speaking population, etc. (the fact that I’m even using etc speaks to the vast ocean of intersections that need to be more fully explored)

The Tree Ottawa app is in its final stages, with most of the content inputted. Now, I’m trying to reconcile the final changes:

• Accessibility (locations, vision, tech literacy and affluence)
• Politics and Theory:
  • Gender imbalance
  • Moving away from black and white narratives, need more nuance with local acceptance and resistance
  • Lack of diverse representation (all my D&D guys are white)
  • Using fake people to avoid the big ethical questions, but it’s still imposing a narrative on a landscape
• Intagrating layered landscapes
  • Integrating place in digital (meaning, senses, community =place in a placeless realm)
  • More focus on reading lanscapes, evolution of trees and canopy
  • Focus on who and why of landscape use
  • Landscape as an evolution
• Integrating more textual sources (Greber plan and photos, but what about resistance?)
• Who is real?
• Copyright, media usage (what is gurella?)
  • NCC DIgiLab photos
  • Clipart

With a week to go until the end of this project, I’m putting the finishing touches on the ARIS game. Unfortunately, I still haven’t been able to test it. However, while its bones may be flimsy, the foundations behind the concept grow more solid with every tweak. Among the changes I’ve implimented so far, a few stand out the most:

There are a few major changes to the game coming up, inspired by Tecumseh Lies Here and the Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry. They focus primarily on improving the following aspects:

Thankfully, this week is going to be a studio week. There hasn’t been much progress since last week, though I was able to take a look at a few other digital storytelling formats and see how they structured their narratives. Tecumseh lies here did not blur the lines as closely between fact and fiction, and incorporated a more insistent push toward research –players weren’t exploring a landscape in the same way the Ottawa trees game does, but they were interracting more with resources there. They combed through libraries, investigating primary and secondary sources. I’d like to try this a little more, perhaps offering fragments of the Greber plan. They also put more of an emphasis on multiplicity, allowing players to engage with a host of unique characters with highly differing views on the War of 1812.

I’m pleased to say there’s been considerable progress this week, particularily on the storyboarding end of things. I’ve charted out specific character dialogue, items, fight scenes (crafted through the consversation tool) and quests to be inputted into ARES, with the aim of creting a much more robust story.

Most work has been done on the MRE side of things, with the creation and tweaking of the Wordpress site. While I had initially opted to showcase individual stories on separate pages, as referenced in my design plan, it seems a better idea now to arrange narratives thematically. This presents the issue of imposing a narrative on respondents’ stories, however the digital component would have done that to a degree anyway. The benefit here is that people do not have their personal informaiton posted to the same degree that individual pages would have demanded.

So here we are mid-February. After much struggle, there has been come good progress on both projects. If I had to think of a theme for the past week, it would be “workarounds” I have been trying to find so many workarounds for various issues that have come up.

This week looks at the cracks in the system, and how some of the possible platforms we’ll be using have been used locally. I plan to focus on two options here, casting both out for feedback before ultimately settling on a chosen path. The two technologies in question are ARIS, a web-based game development client that produced content for an established app; and projection mapping. Projection mapping is undoubtedly the most widely-used option of the two, and appears across Ottawa at a variety of government-sponsored events. The Parliament hill light show is one example. Every summer night at nine, a complex display of Canadian history is mapped across centre block. On holidays, the display is changed to reflect the nuances of the event.

Projection Mapping in Ottawa tends to take the form of large-scale events and celebrations. It’s commonly employed by the Department of Canadian Heritage (light show) and City of Ottawa (Kontinuum), but has been used for a range of promotional activity. (Ottawa Tourism)

This is the first of a series of devlogs chronicling the progress made on the construction of a virtual exhibition documenting Greenbelt oral histories in Ottawa, Ontario. Although this post and its accompanying blog are designed from templates, they are very much from scratch. These lines mark the author’s first successful attempt at creating a webpage from text file, and their second successful attempt masquerading as a mango.