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 won’t be making a game as long, or as complex. I want to keep it short so people will finish it all in one setting (so the narrative carries better), but I would also like to incorporate some of the Tecumseh group’s ideas. Their focus on multiplayer gaming is very interesting, and didn’t even occur to me –perhaps I’ll find a way to build this in, though it would involve considerable tailoring of the existing narrative. The Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry is another ARG project that’s gained some scholarly attention, and like mine, it’s more focused on single player experience. However, it also enforces a more structured look at documents and textual scources, whereas for my game, the landscape is what is being read. That said, I like the idea of incorporating textual sources to inspire different readings of the landscape, or perhaps tweaking some of the characters to get into different form of planning in Ottawa –city beautiful, garden city, high modernism and the like.

This is the week where technological setbacks start becoming a real issue as well. I have enough content inputted at this point that I should be testing to see how well it works. However, I don’t have an iPhone, and many of the folks who do are too busy with their own lives for a mad, murderous goose chase. I may have some luck with ALicia’s sister, so we’ll see where she’s at. Regardless of how testing happens, I’ve compiled a list of what’s to be done:

• Location accuracy: Do things pop up when they’re supposed to? Would it be easier to have all the surprise encounters show on the map, so people know to go directly to a targetted location? This would ruin some of the fun, but it would resolve issues stemming from faulty location finders, at least in part. Nathalie mentioned she had a lot of trouble with this, so I should try and test on more than one phone if I can.
• True accessibility: When I last walke the route, this seemed largely reolved (barring Nepean Point). I should figure out a solution for that one exception, and also make sure things haven’t changed with the spring thaw. I can’t imagine they would, as they tend to open up more stairs, but playing the game presents a new opportunity to figure this out.
• Content flow: It looks great on paper, but does the narrative make sense in a game, where you can’t refer back to the last dialogue as easily? Does it hold up well when you factor in the walk between segments, or the high likelihood that players will start and stop the game, rather than playing all in one go? (The game has been designed to talke about an hour, 1.5 hours if you’re not very quick. But you go through the market and along Elgin, and I’m sure some folks will want a snack or a peek in shops along the way)
• Ease of play: I need to being along Chantal, or someone else who has no knowledge of Ottawa’s history. I know the answers to the riddles, and as a local historian, they seem obvious. Will others get this connection? What about people like Reaume, who thought we send the Netherlans tulips every year because we helped them out with a natural disaster involving potatoes? He likes history but doesn’t know much about Ottawa. How would he experience the game?

Next Steps

• Continue inputting content into ARES
• Find someone with an iPhone so I can test the game (folow checklist)
• Incorporate more textual documents and primary sources
• Create/tweak characters to reflect more trends in environmental planning
• Focus more heavily on reading the landscape as a document
• Investigate co-op options