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.

1.0 The Importance of Documentation: Why this page exists

The creation of the Tree Ottawa game has reinforced many assertions that have come up in relevant digital humanities scholarship. However, the importance of documentation is by far the most critical. It allows for the technical knowledge and critical thought wrapped up in the actual creation of the “thing,” whatever it may be, to exist beyond its immediate end product. To me, documentation is akin to a manual of bike repair. With it, you view the product in a new light, and ideally you are able to go back and recreate (to an extent) the original outcome. Or, even better, you can improve it.

As Jenny Kidd, a DH scholar and author of “Digital storytelling and the performance of memory,” asserts, “carrying memory for an assumed infinitum is a task the digital media ably take on.” However, she notes this task is not without its challenges. She is quick to point out that things die in the digital much as they do in real life. File formats become obsolete, as do storage methods. Web hosting platforms go under, and may take your data with them. Nonetheless, new media have an “integral role to play in what is remembered, the form in which it is stored, and, later, how it will be retrieved.”(1) This page is intended to outline the core processes and thoughts wrapped up in the creation of Tree Ottawa and mak them available to anyone who is interested in creating a similar, better ARIS game.

2.0 Using ARIS

Tree Ottawa: Greber’s Revenge was built in ARIS, a web-based gamebuilding platfom created by researchers are students at Filed Day Lab. The lab is in turn part of the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. ARIS presented several advantages for gamebuilding: its graphic interface requires relatively little technical skill to use, its pre-built app drastically reduces the back-end work required to develop any kind of mobile game, and its many help guides ensure a relatively seamless experience. More pragmatically, small games built with ARIS can use existing infastructure to gain visibility. Players in Ottawa ho already use ARIS will be able to easily find Tree Ottawa, for example.

However, ARIS hasn’t been a flawless experience. As a “from the box” gamebuilder, it requires developers and players to act largely within the constraints set by the gamebuilder platform. Actions and movements must stem from set markets, plaques, and conversations, and follow a particular line. ARIS works best for geographical discovery, where players folow a set of clues and narrative points to uncover an end goal. Densely located points on a landscape confuse the game, as do unexpected plot points. In Tree Ottawa, for example, killing the player ultimately had to be done through conversation elements, rather than a set event occurring at the end of a conflict. The same can be said for fight scenes.

These constraints stem from any gamebuilding platform, and indeed they continue to crop up even when developping something from “scratch,” albeit to a lesser degree. However, ARIS also poses some more obvious drawbacks that are more unique to its own design. Most obviously, the platform runs almost exclusively on Apple products with an obvious preference for the the iPhone. Not only does this narrow the game’s overall reach and adaptibility, it also poses some significant class-based ramifications. Currently, an iPhone 7 runs you $739 to $899 in Canada, depending on your chosen screen size. An iPhone 8 runs you between $929 and $1059, while an iPhone X starts at $1319. My own phone, which runs on an android platform and was purchased a year ago, cost $140. You can get cheaper smartphones than that, and many people do. By priviliging Apple’s products, AIRS effectively puts a price on your free game, exclusing a vast swathe of your potential audience. Although an Android modification exists, it results in a distinctively watered-down gaming experience with much less functionality.

The ever-present need for iPhone access also greatly affected the game’s development. As an android user surrounded by other android users, I wasn’t able to test it nearly as fully as would have liked. In fact, I tested it only once, when it was partially complete. I also played it once, on a friend’s phone, about a few weeks later. It’s an odd feeling, creating a game you know you will rarely play. I resulted in a certain degree of detachment in the development phase, though less so in the creation of characters in plot, as these can be enjoyed from anywhere.

3.0 The Process

Creating Tree Ottawa: Greber’s Revnge followed a relatively linear process, outlined below:

• Preliminary brainstorming: What did I want to create, and in what platform? We were presented with three core options in our seminar: AIRS, LibraryBox, and MapMap (projection mapping). Each would yield a different product. Looking to integrate some fun into my last semester at school I selected ARIS. (Projection mapping is by no means ruled out, however, and I have a separate project planned for May 2018).
• Concept design: How would the game take shape within ARIS? Would it be narrative-focused, or focus more on the straight delivery of information? How “game-like” was it to be?
• Geographical path development: ARIS demands a geographical path, upon which all other elements (quests, conversations, etc) are based. So what shape does this path take? What features within Ottawa can be commented upon easily, and how walkable are they? Which area should be the focus of the plot?
• Preliminary narrative development: How do you stitch meaning into your path? How do you make it something more than a guided walk, and why do you choose to do so? Characters were sketched out, a plot began to take shape, and the nuances of landscape were woven into simple storypoints.
• Accessibility and representation testing: Without actually opening the game in ARIS (due to lack of iPhone), what can be fixed with its geographical and narrative paths? The route was tweaked to allow for an easier, nearly barrier-free walk, and the storyline was changed to accomodate new female characters.
• The big test: Testing with an iPhone to sort out the recurring structural problems, like my misuse of the conversation tool.
• Fine tuning: An ongoing process, this doesn’t have a set start and end date. The game is, in theory, a living thing that should be tweaked and refined to accomodate new issues. In-class reports and conversations also greatly contributed to this ongoing stage, as well as the others set out earlier in this list. As with the accessibility and representation testing, this stage is made more complicated with my lack of access to iPhones.
• Turning it in: An academic project, this game ultimately needed a set “end.”

4.0 Landscape, place, and geography in digital history

In linking gamification to natural history, Tree Ottawa: Greber’s Revenge carefully considers the power of place when craftings its narrative. Ottawa is a living city with a great diversity of meaning, and the same may be said for its trees and natural spaces. Major’s Hill Park, for example, is credited as Ottawa’s first park. It’s also the site of the Major’s Hill Grenhouse Complex, remnants of which are still in use today. However, it also grapples with a conflicted past as a site of gay resistance and oppression. As Ottawa’s Village Legacy project notes:

Gay men, in particular, were targeted while cruising in well-known spots like Major’s Hill Park, behind Parliament, near the Germany Embassy, the YMCA on Metcalfe, the Château Laurier and Union Station, among others. These crimes came to a head in 1989, when there were at least 15 reported incidents of violence, and no doubt many more were unreported, as many men didn’t want to out themselves or deal with a hostile police force. In that year alone, seven people were thrown off the cliffs in Major’s Hill Park, with two dying from the fall. Others were robbed, assaulted or stabbed.

This is a horrible history, one which has traditionally been significantly overshadowed by happy recollections of founders’ homes and heritage hotdog stands. Dolores Hayden argues “Social memory relies on storytelling, but what specialists call place memory can be used to help trigger social memory through the urban landscape.”(2) So how then, can games take into account these stratified meanings emedded in a single site, or even a single tree?

Tree Ottawa looks at past and present land use, and how institutional planning has played a role in defining the natural features in the downtown core. When meeting characters, players are asked to look at specific features and consider what has shaped their present form, and what may be lunking beneath the soil. A direct connection to the game’s physical settings is established, drawing on specific examples that exist beyond ARIS’ digital constraints. It embraces meanings old and new and caters to a range of potential players,both local and tourist. As Hayden notes, “Places trigger memories for insiders, who have shared a common past, and at the same time places often can represent shared pasts for outsiders who might be interested in knowing about them in the present.”(2) However, multivocality in these readings remains critically underdevelopped, and this is indeed one of the biggest failings in the game. While users are encouraged to read different meanings in the landscape, the most difficult of all are avaoied completely. Indigenous uses and claims are conspiculously absent, and references to discrimination of other groups are few and far between.

This was not an unconscious choice, but rather an honest reflection of the resources available to dedicate to this project. When portraying marginalized groups in a public, university-affiliated project, consultation is a necessary first step. This is particularily true in a game like Tree Ottawa, which makes use of a host of goofy fictional characters (and one heavily fictionalized real one) and keeps a generally lighthearted, silly narrative. Shoehorning oppression and discrimination in without dedicating myself to the necessary consultative steps would result in more harm than good. And so the game suffers.

Conclusions

When considering the “final form” Tree Ottawa: Greber’s Revenge takes, I’m not entirely satisfied. The narrative could incorporate more narratives of local resistance, game mechanics could be more complex, the platform altered for accessibility, and the storyline modified to inclue marginalized histories. These changes, and many more, are necessary to make it a more complete work of public history, one which truly caters to the diverse publics it wishes to serve. More positively, it can be categorized as a failure.

Brian Croxall and Quinn Warnick assert that “there are many ways to fail when engaged in digital pedagogy: 1. Technological Failure 2. Human Failure 3. Failure as Artifact 4. Failure as Epistemology. In each of these cases, failure may well prove to be productive and engaging. In the end, it is only the fear of failure that one should always avoid.”

This project fails in many ways, creating a strange bounty of opportunities for success down the road. While it doesn’t function as well as a polished publish history product, it accomplishes a few basic aims (primarily landscape reading) for those who play it, and makes obvious the technological failures for those who can’t. It also serves as an example for future projects of this nature, setting out how to fail (and how to avoid failure) in ARIS game development. These failings, and thinking through them, also resulted in considerable success in development. While I have a product that is by no means finished, I was able to learn quite a bit about game development, digitial theory, ownership, agency, representation, intersectionality, and place in digital space. Taken together, these failures can be summed up as the production of “version 1.” Version 2 of this game, or any other, may build on them and improve.

(1) Jenny Kidd, Digital Storytelling and the performance of memory,” in Save As…Digital Memories. Ed. Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins, Anna Reading, 167-183. (New York, Hampshire, 2009): 167.

(2) Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. (Cambridge, the MIT Press, 1997), 46.