No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The Malthusian Paradox: performance in an alternate reality game
Abstract
The Malthusian Paradox is a transmedia alternate reality game (ARG) created by artists Dominic Shaw and Adam Sporne played by 300 participants over 3 months. We explore the design of the game, which cast players as agents of a radical organisation attempting to uncover the truth behind a kidnapping and a sinister biotech corporation and highlight how it redefined performative frames by blurring conventional performer and spectator roles in sometimes discomforting ways. Players participated in the game via a broad spectrum of interaction channels, including performative group spectacles and 1-to-1 engagements with game characters in public settings, making use of low- and high-tech physical and online artefacts including bespoke and third-party websites. Players and game characters communicated via telephony and social media in both a designed and an ad hoc manner. We reflect on the production and orchestration of the game, including the dynamic nature of the strong episodic narrative driven by professionally produced short films that attempted to respond to the actions of players and the difficulty of designing for engagement across hybrid and temporally expansive performance space. We suggest that an ARG whose boundaries are necessarily unclear affords rich and emergent, but potentially unsanctioned and uncontrolled, opportunities for interactive performance, which raises significant challenges for design.
... In this sense, it seems more accurate to see TINAG as the mindset of game developers to design an ARG as real as possible, and the choice of players to believe in game's narratives, and hence to maintain the suspension of disbelief (McGonigal, 2003;Evans, Flintham & Martindale, 2014) and immersion. ...
... In TMP, players established their own wiki and Facebook page and excluded producers' access to their posts. Researchers suggested that by developing online conversations beyond the core narratives and even influencing the main plots, players were empowered to gain the communicative agency (Evans, Flintham and Martindale, 2014). However, based on the existed SCP stories, UnLondon has to respect the original version so that it will avoid too subversive interpretations. ...
The Augmented Reality Game (ARG) is a pervasive game genre and a form of immersive experience. As the Collins Dictionary’s definition, augmented reality is ‘an artificial environment created through the combination of real-world and computer-generated data’. In this sense, ARG can integrate happenings in the digital and the real world into a game environment. However, it is not recently invented. One of the most successful ARGs, The Beats, has been launched in 2001 as marketing stunts for the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (McMahon, 2013). Since then, ARG became more and more popular. However, although ARG is famous for its flexibility of narrative forms, it seems little ARG have converged the latest VR/AR technologies with storytelling yet. Therefore, this proposal aims to design a science-fiction ARG named UnLondon, based on the original fiction by AstronautJoe (2012), to explore the potentials of combing these latest narrative technologies. Part I is the Design Proposal of UnLondon attached as a slide (Appendix I), Part II is an analysis of the design from the standards of ARG and three other perspectives: immersion, production and ethics, which reveal its strengths and limitations.
... Many investigators decide on approach based on personal experience, preference, and perceptions of reviewer acceptability. Foundational work reflecting on "in the wild" methods [for example 3,11,20] provides valuable insights, but the field lacks systematic empirical work that investigates the implications of experimenter roles on data collection. Debates about approach focus on how much the experimenter should intervene during evaluation, ranging from overtly creating a controlled experience (for example [6]) to completely unstewarded experience (for example [35]). ...
... The GlobalFestival [35] information display was evaluated completely through video analysis, combining automatic pedestrian tracking [36] with detailed manual analysis of interactive segments. The Tourist Planner [21] [11] and Feeding Yoshi [3]. These both recruited participants in advance and asked them to use pervasive applications in everyday life without the experimenter present. ...
Public evaluations are popular because some research questions can only be answered by turning "to the wild." Different approaches place experimenters in different roles during deployment, which has implications for the kinds of data that can be collected and the potential bias introduced by the experimenter. This paper expands our understanding of how experimenter roles impact public evaluations and provides an empirical basis to consider different evaluation approaches. We completed an evaluation of a playful gesture-controlled display not to understand interaction at the display but to compare different evaluation approaches. The conditions placed the experimenter in three roles, steward observer, overt observer, and covert observer, to measure the effect of experimenter presence and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
... The utilisation of preexisting digital systems and technology, such as websites, email, and social media, in conjunction with physical locations and facilities, as well as physical means involving newspapers, books and other physical artefacts, are employed to create a multilayered story of enigma. In other words, puzzles have the potential to be concealed in both digital platforms and physical mediums and locales, generating a multifaceted and demanding gameplay encounter (Elsom et al., 2023;Evans et al., 2014;McGonigal, 2003;Tulloch et al., 2021). The purpose of utilising this combination of environments and media is to enable the development of storylines, characters, and interactive elements to an unattainable degree within a single-media framework (Evans al., 2014). ...
This paper presents and discusses the inclusive inquiry-based alternate reality game (IB-ARGI) approach, a pedagogical gamified approach supporting inclusive contemporary educational contexts. The IB-ARGI approach comprises Inquiry-based Learning, Alternate Reality Games, Universal Design for Learning and Augmented Reality technology in order to shape an inclusive inquiry-based learning environment for all students. The aspects of the IB-ARGI approach are illustrated and discussed by focusing on an IB-ARGI implementation on the topic of Magnets and Magnetism for 65 preschool student teachers in the context of a laboratory course in Science. The study aims to explore preschool student teachers’ perception of the IB-ARGI approach as learners and future teachers using a mixed method approach and assess the intervention’s learning outcomes through pre- and post-tests. The results revealed fruitful insights into how the IB-ARGI approach motivated the student teachers to actively participate in the inquiry through an immersive experience involving multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression. Findings concerning the learning outcomes also indicated significant learning gains for the participants. Despite this work’s suggestive and exploratory nature, the study offers new perspectives and findings to the literature regarding the formation of more inclusive inquiry practices. Additionally, it contributes to opening a route in the current literature concerning the formation of more inclusive approaches and practices in science education.
... Because of the complexity involved in pervasive games, a collaborative design effort between players, game facilitators and designers is necessary when creating and playing pervasive games. Studies of pervasive games highlight the importance of collaboration both as a key aspect of player behaviour (Evans, Flintham, & Martindale, 2014) and as a necessity when designing games that can support players' social roles (Bonsignore, Hansen, Kraus, Visconti, & Fraistat, 2016). Several game theorists further emphasise how pervasive games can inspire players to actively engage in problem-solving, knowledge sharing and the co-creative process of building new knowledge (Gurzick et al., 2011;Muscat, 2013). ...
... Blast Theory's Can You See Me Now (Benford et al., 2006), Active Ingredient's 'Ere Be Dragons (Davis et al., 2006), or Brendan Walker's Breathless (Benford et al., 2012). Likewise, we had previously worked with Urban Angel on their game Malthusian Paradox (Evans, Flintham, & Martindale, 2014). In all these cases, however, the artists tended to "typically have a vision, which may be more or less well formed at the start, of what the artwork is to be" (Benford et al., 2013, p. 3), and researchers helped to bring this vision to life and then subsequently studied the game being run. ...
Background. Research games are challenging to design as they seek to fulfil a research agenda as well as work as a game. We have successfully collaborated with a group of artists in a research game about people’s perception of provenance called The Apocalypse of the Ministry of Provenance (MoP). The web-based game ran for 6 months with a total of 1004 players signing up over its lifetime with 490 consenting to their data being used for research purposes. While the game allowed us to answer our provenance-related research questions, in this article we look at the game design process of such a collaborative research game.
Aim. The co-creation approach created tensions that had to be carefully negotiated between everyone involved. The purpose of this article is to investigate the nature of these tensions, what has caused them, and how we managed (or failed) to mitigate them. This leads to recommendations for future researchers co-creating a research game with artists.
Method. We use the form of a post-mortem reflection on the development of the game, based on our own experiences, a one-hour long interview with the two artists involved, and post-game phone interviews with players (n=8).
Results. We identify the following three tensions that had a high impact on the overall process: 1) Translating research questions into engaging gameplay elements; 2) Creation of research-relevant content by artists; 3) Artistic vision conflicting with research agenda. We contextualize these tensions by describing six vignettes concerning our collaboration in rich detail that highlight the salient issues of the overall process and resulting game from different perspectives. Lastly, we present seven mitigation strategies on how to deal with the tensions or prevent them from arising.
Conclusions. A collaboration with artists for the purpose of creating a research game is a rewarding but also challenging process. Overcoming the resulting tensions is possible by utilizing mitigation strategies that need to be implemented jointly between researchers and artists to guarantee the success as an engaging research game.
... También es interesante plantear el proyecto BIM2MAR (Williams et al., 2014) que ponen de relieve la necesidad de producir información en tiempo real a partir de diversos elementos que conforman el espacio físico, en esta misma línea. También encontramos, entre las diferentes aplicaciones y usos que utilizan el espacio físico como soporte con información virtual embebida, los ARGs (alternate reality games o juegos de realidad alternativa), con aplicaciones en líneas de trabajo recientes tales como la resolución de problemas en el mundo real (Dondlinger y McLeod, 2015), o juegos como The Malthusian Paradox (Evans et al., 2014), además del ya clásico Ingress, que fue desarrollado por Niantic LABs (2012) 15 , -que constituyó una filial de Google hasta 2015-. También, en esta línea, se proyectan trabajos de investigación en los que se pone de relieve la posibilidad de medios virtuales interactivos en espacios físicos como museos (Carrozzino & Bergamasco, 2010). ...
Resumen El permanente proceso de evolución de la tecnología de la información y la comunicación hacia unos cada vez más evidentes niveles de interacción y de inmersión están transformando profundamente el contexto en el que se produce y se transmite la información. Este tipo de tecnologías (realidad virtual, realidad aumentada, sensores de movimiento corporal, wearables), si bien no surgen recientemente, la rápida implantación de dispositivos como cascos de realidad virtual o HMD, aplicaciones de realidad aumentada para artefactos móviles, o sensores de movimiento o MSID (motion sensing input devices) en el contexto cotidiano, ha abierto un gran campo de posibilidades para diseñar experiencias en las que el flujo de comunicación sea multidireccional, teniendo un enorme potencial todavía por explorar en campos como la medicina, las industrias culturales, la divulgación del conocimiento científico o el diseño de escenarios educativos
... También es interesante plantear el proyecto BIM2MAR (Williams et al., 2014) que ponen de relieve la necesidad de producir información en tiempo real a partir de diversos elementos que conforman el espacio físico, en esta misma línea. También encontramos, entre las diferentes aplicaciones y usos que utilizan el espacio físico como soporte con información virtual embebida, los ARGs (alternate reality games o juegos de realidad alternativa), con aplicaciones en líneas de trabajo recientes tales como la resolución de problemas en el mundo real (Dondlinger y McLeod, 2015), o juegos como The Malthusian Paradox (Evans et al., 2014), además del ya clásico Ingress, que fue desarrollado por Niantic LABs (2012) 15 , -que constituyó una filial de Google hasta 2015-. También, en esta línea, se proyectan trabajos de investigación en los que se pone de relieve la posibilidad de medios virtuales interactivos en espacios físicos como museos (Carrozzino & Bergamasco, 2010). ...
Resumen El permanente proceso de evolución de la tecnología de la información y la comunicación hacia unos cada vez más evidentes niveles de interacción y de inmersión están transformando profundamente el contexto en el que se produce y se transmite la información. Este tipo de tecnologías (realidad virtual, realidad aumentada, sensores de movimiento corporal, wearables), si bien no surgen recientemente, la rápida implantación de dispositivos como cascos de realidad virtual o HMD, aplicaciones de realidad aumentada para artefactos móviles, o sensores de movimiento o MSID (motion sensing input devices) en el contexto cotidiano, ha abierto un gran campo de posibilidades para diseñar experiencias en las que el flujo de comunicación sea multidireccional, teniendo un enorme potencial todavía por explorar en campos como la medicina, las industrias culturales, la divulgación del conocimiento científico o el diseño de escenarios educativos
... Our final group, Urban Angel, are a voluntary arts organization working predominately with performance and making extensive use of digital technologies. Of particular relevance here is their recent project The Malthusian Paradox (2012), an alternate reality game (ARG) that involves players in an apparent scientific conspiracy surrounding genetically modified crops, a fictional company called TFT and an equally fictional and mysterious activist organization called AMBER who are campaigning against TFT (Evans et al, 2013). ARGs typically deliver a game or narrative to players over multiple media and also engage them in visiting physical locations and solving puzzles. ...
We explore the ethical implications of HCI's turn to the 'cultural'. This is motivated by an awareness of how cultural applications, in our case interactive performances, raise ethical issues that may challenge established research ethics processes. We review research ethics, HCI's engagement with ethics and the ethics of theatrical performance. Following an approach grounded in Responsible Research Innovation, we present the findings from a workshop in which artists, curators, commissioners, and researchers explored ethical challenges revealed by four case studies. We identify six ethical challenges for HCI's engagement with cultural applications: transgression, boundaries, consent, withdrawal, data, and integrity. We discuss two broader implications of these: managing tensions between multiple overlapping ethical frames; and the importance of managing ethical challenges during and after an experience as well as beforehand. Finally, we discuss how our findings extend previous discussions of Value Sensitive Design in HCI.
Transmedia research has in the past been mainly interested in defining transmedia and examining transmedia franchises that have their starting point in movies and TV- series. However, there are multiple transmedia constellations that have a game as their starting point and this paper concentrates on two of those, Defiance (Trion Worlds, 2013) and Quantum Break (Remedy Entertainment, 2016). The survey data from these two examples was analyzed by using constructivist grounded theory- informed approach in order to find out what motivates audiences to consume or avoid game-centric transmedia. Ten categories related to consuming game-centric transmedia and five categories related to avoiding it emerged from the data. The motivations to consume game- centric transmedia had a strong focus on narrative aspects. The results differ from earlier transmedia audience studies and suggest the need for more game-centric transmedia audience studies, where the core text is a game instead of a television show.
Background:
As the games industry grows around the world, the pervasive game is becoming an important way to play. A pervasive game is one in which the game experience extends into the actual world or where the fictive world of the game merges with the physical world. How pervasive games can adapt to the ever-changing nature of technology and design in current society requires a comprehensive review.
Objective:
In this systematic review, four dimensions of pervasive games are measured and analyzed through development, technology, experience, and evaluation. Moreover, discover and interpret their relationship with game, interaction, experience, and service design.
Methods:
The researcher first chose three well-known databases, WoS, Scopus, and EBSCO, with dates from 2013 to April 2022. Then, a strictly thorough Boolean search for research keywords like "pervasive game," "design," and "interactive" turned up 394 relevant articles. These articles were identified, screened, and checked for eligibility to find valid and useful ones, which were then put into categories and analyzed using the PRISMA method.
Results:
The systematic selection was finally left with 40 valid and valuable articles. After categorization and analysis, it was found that all articles were classified according to four main themes, which are design and development (11 articles), interaction and technology (15 articles), users and experience (9 articles), and evaluation and service (5 articles). These four main areas can be further subdivided into several smaller ones respectively.
Conclusions:
In the four areas of game design, interaction design, experience design, and service design, many scholars have studied pervasive games and made contributions. Although the development and technology of pervasive games have evolved with the times, there is still a need to strengthen emerging design concepts within pervasive games.
Drawing on observations and focus group material from pervasive drama project, The Memory Dealer, this article explores both the dynamics and the limitations of existing models of digital subjectivity. It interrogates, in particular, constructions of the digital subject within critical internet studies, focusing on the work of Jodi Dean. This model of subjectivity argues that participatory digital media are a conduit through which the subject is ‘captured’ and shaped to suit the needs of capital. It is suggested here, however, that framing subjective engagements with technology as inevitably being relations of capture, is dangerous in foreclosing scope for resistance and inter-subjective political action. The article ultimately argues that there is a need to reconceptualise the digital subject away from models of capture and towards a more situated, material analysis of the affordances enabled by subjective entanglements with technology.
Successful Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), such as The Lost Experience, I Love Bees and Urgent EVOKE have solicited thousands of active participants and, often, millions of spectators from around the world. ARGs require significant resources not only in terms of initial design, but also in implementation, since live, dynamic interplay between players and designers is an inherent aspect of their interactive storylines. This paper outlines a novel design framework for creating reusable ARGs that will help extend the lifespan of ARGs and allow them to permeate new domains such as education. The framework includes three key reusable design objectives (replayability, adaptability, extensibility), each of which can be enacted at different levels of depth. We also identify barriers to reusable ARGs and design strategies for overcoming those barriers, drawing upon ARG designer interviews and existing ARGs.
"Exploring the myriad connections and connotations of a wide array of paratextual materials ranging from movie trailers to action figures, Gray deftly challenges established conceptions of textuality, and opens up intriguing and important new dimensions in media and cultural studies. This is an invaluable contribution, and will change how we think about, and make, media."
The authors introduce a new analytical instrument, the Scene Function Model, as an expansion of Seymour Chatman's theoretical classification of story events into kernels and satellites. The Scene Function Model is designed to examine the narrative function of television scenes and provide the user with a clearer understanding of the structure of the television narrative.
Mobile experiences that take place in public settings such as on city streets create new opportunities for interweaving the fictional world of a performance or game with the everyday physical world. A study of a touring performance reveals how designers generated excitement and dramatic tension by implicating bystanders and encouraging the (apparent) crossing of normal boundaries of behaviour. The study also shows how designers dealt with associated risks through a process of careful orchestration. Consequently, we extend an existing framework for designing spectator interfaces with the concept of performance frames, enabling us to distinguish audience from bystanders. We conclude that using ambiguity to blur the frame can be a powerful design tactic, empowering players to willingly suspend disbelief, so long as a safety-net of orchestration ensures that they do not stray into genuine difficulty.
This article examines the hybrid ontologies that typify networked and mobile location-based games, exploring some of the phenomenological, embodied or somatic aspects of the practices and perceptions of ‘mixed reality’ game-play. In particular, it focuses on the potential cultural and corporeal effects of mobile gaming since the introduction of the iPhone and subsequent touchscreens, and the specific technosomatic arrangements such devices demand in everyday life. Mobile media and game-play in both urban and domestic places evoke particular kinds of embodiment, indicative of emergent habitual and quotidian behaviours, gesturings, positionings and choreographies of the body, at times partially determined by the culture of the user, at others by the technical specificities and demands of the interface. Location-based mobile games and applications also modify our experience and perception of ‘being online’, and effectively disassemble the actual/virtual dichotomy of internet ‘being’ into a complex and dynamic range of modalities of presence. Finally, this article suggests that the kind of ontological and ‘containment’ metaphors we use to describe the space of screen-based game-play — in particular, the magic circle, and tropologies of the screen as a fixed window or frame — are ill-suited as descriptors for the complex layering of material and virtual contexts specific to mobile location-based and mixed reality gaming.
Product Description The early years of the twenty-first century have seen dramatic changes within the television industry. The development of the internet and mobile phone as platforms for content directly linked to television programming has offered a challenge to the television sets status as the sole domestic access point to audio-visual dramatic content. Viewers can engage with television without ever turning a television set on. Whilst there has already been some exploration of these changes, little attention has been paid to the audience and the extent to which these technologies are being integrated into their daily lives. Focusing on a particular period of rapid change and using case studies including Spooks, 24 and Doctor Who, Transmedia Television considers how the television industry has exploited emergent technologies and the extent to which audiences have embraced them. How has television content been transformed by shifts towards multiplatform strategies? What is the appeal of using game formats to lose oneself within a narrative world? How can television, with its ever larger screens and association with domesticity, be reconciled with the small portable, public technology of the mobile phone? What does the shift from television schedules to online downloading mean for our understanding of the television audience? Transmedia Television will consider how the relationship between television and daily life has been altered as a result of the industrys development of emerging new media technologies, and what television now means for its audiences. About the Author Elizabeth Jane Evans is lecturer in Film and Television Studies in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. She has previously published in Media, Culture and Society and Participations.
Convergent media and communication technologies have changed what it means for games to be mobile, but play has a mobility of its own that often goes unacknowledged. This article draws together emerging theory from debates in game studies on the separation of the experience of gameplay from the everyday. It examines the metaphor of the ‘magic circle’ and analyses how play, as a mode of experience, is mobilized across dimensions of hardware and software, extending the functions of games beyond the imagining of designers and manufacturers. The article considers what the mobility of play indicates for the player in the creation and management of identity online in the light of game studies consolidation of the magic circle through Goffman’s Frame Analysis. It sees new opportunities in the play of Zombie Media and the role of digital game artifacts in the presentation of the gamer persona, recasting Benjamin and Baudelaire’s flâneur as the ‘gameur’.
Pervasive gaming is a genre of gaming systematically blurring and breaking the traditional boundaries of game. The limits of the magic circle are explored in spatial, temporal and social dimensions. These ways of expanding the game are not new, since many intentional and unintentional examples of similar expansions can be found from earlier games, but the recently emerged fashion of pervasive gaming is differentiated with the use of these expansions in new, efficient ways to produce new kinds of gameplay experiences. These new game genres include alternate reality games, reality games, trans-reality games and crossmedia games.
In this paper we present a study of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called MeiGeist - a cross media game in which narrative elements of a story presented to players across a whole range of on-line and offline media and through which players can interact with in-game characters and events. The study looked at player progress over the eight weeks the game took to play, following their behaviours through the on-line forums, chat rooms and in-game logging of player interactions. The paper explores aspects of collective participation among players, the motivations underlying such participation and the factors that shape these contributions such as timescale of the game. It discusses too, how the narrative is produced and progressed through collective player interactions and how the experience is created through a collaborative suspension of disbelief. Different aspects of participation are also considered, in particular how a more passive spectatorship is an important experience for many players of the game. Finally the game considers how the ideal of a collective ethos among players is sometimes challenged during game play and the efforts necessary to repair this.
Guía de referencia para el diseño conceptual de un videojuego, donde se ofrecen los marcos teóricos para construir el juego como un sistema de información que necesita administrar los datos estratégicamente para crear una experiencia de juego (historia, placer, simulación y sentido) en el usuario.
The frame of the game: blurring the boundary between fiction and reality in mobile experiences
- S Benford
- Reeves A S Crabtree
- Dix J A Sheridan
- M Flintham
- Drozd
Benford S, Crabtree A, Reeves S, Sheridan J, Dix A, Flintham M, Drozd A (2006) The frame of the game: blurring the boundary between fiction and reality in mobile experiences. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing sys-tems (CHI '06). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 427–436
Theatre of the oppressed Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (Trans.)
- Boal
Boal A (1979) Theatre of the oppressed Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (Trans.). Pluto Press, London
Politics of spatial appropriation, Michael Breslin and Saskya Iris Jain (Trans.) Performance and the politics of space. Routl-edge
- Fischer
Fischer-Lichte E (2013) Politics of spatial appropriation, Michael Breslin and Saskya Iris Jain (Trans.). In: Fischer-Lichte E, Wihstutz B (eds) Performance and the politics of space. Routl-edge, New York, pp 219–238
Designing reusable alternate reality games. In: Pro-ceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in com-puting systems (CHI '13)
- Hansen Dl
- Em M Bonsignore
- A Visconti
- Kraus
Hansen DL, Bonsignore EM, Ruppel M, Visconti A, Kraus K (2013) Designing reusable alternate reality games. In: Pro-ceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in com-puting systems (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 1529–1538
Alternate reality games white paper. International game developers association alternate reality games SIG
- A Martin
- B Thompson
- T Chatfield
Martin A, Thompson B, Chatfield T (2006) Alternate reality games white paper. International game developers association alternate reality games SIG. http://archives.igda.org/arg/resources/IGDA-AlternateRealityGames-Whitepaper-2006.pdf. Retrieved May
A real little game: the performance of belief in pervasive play. 030303: Collective Play, Research Collo-quium
- Mcgonical
McGonical J (2003) A real little game: the performance of belief in pervasive play. 030303: Collective Play, Research Collo-quium, University of California at Berkeley, March 3. http:// www.avantgame.com/MCGONIGAL%20A%20Real%20Little% 20Game%20DiGRA%202003.pdf. Retrieved May 2013
Participation, collaboration and spectatorship in an alternate reality game In: Proceedings of the 20th Australasian conference on computer-human interaction: designing for habitus and habitat (OZCHI ‘08)
- O Hara
- K Grian
- H Williams
Rules of play: game design fundamentals
- K Salen
Politics of spatial appropriation, Michael Breslin and Saskya Iris Jain (Trans.)
- E Fischer-Lichte
A real little game: the performance of belief in pervasive play. 030303: Collective Play
- J Mcgonical