annaisinteractive-blog

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Reality is broken?

I’ve just finished reading Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal and woah. Woah. It’s about the ways in which we find games more satisfying than real life and how we can use these tools to make the world a better place. Which I suppose makes it about gamification, but on a deeper, more rigorous level than the ‘points for getting your shopping’ basis. It’s such a good, positive book and it’s inspired me to go out and try to make the world a better place. I suppose my interactive journey doesn’t stop here... onwards! 

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Resists the urge to make puns about pitches

So, I’ve just about absorbed the pitches from last week, and now it’s time to reflect. Absorbing and reflecting, just like a leaf! I found the pitches so interesting, and was fascinated by how different all the ideas were. It was also great that the panel had such a diversity of strength, and were able to stress test ideas in a variety of different ways. It gave me a lot to think about to bring forward into my pitch document: particularly in articulating how the user experience will work with my app and how the mechanics of the app will work. Just because the idea is familiar to me, and the details seem obvious, it doesn’t mean that applies to everyone! Luckily, the pitch document at 3500 words offers a lot more room for explanation than the pitch itself!

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Well holy macaroni this is interesting! Are we moving to the point where we can transmit more than sounds and visuals over long distances? Obviously this particular example is pretty crude, but it will be interesting to watch and see if it goes anywhere. 

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While I’m wrestling with technical details and app development, here is one of my favourite pieces of user-generated content to gee me up. Shia LaBeouf, motivational psyching up, and fire. Excellent.

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Group pitch reflections

So the group pitches on Thursday were really fun and I enjoyed seeing what everyone else had come up with. It was interesting that everyone came up with such different concepts and probably reflects on the breadth of possibilities for creativity within interactive media. On the one hand, this is massively exciting. On the other hand, the scope of possibilities can be a bit intimidating and paralysing. Where do you even start when the possibilities are so vast? David described this feeling perfectly in class a few weeks ago as a kind of vertigo. As with most things, the answer is probably just to start somewhere. 

With this in mind, I was also struck by something the Flat Broke team said on Thursday about keeping the graphics simple to stop an app hogging battery or processing power. I am going to have to work this into my app idea. There’s no point having a beautiful app which no one is going to play because it drains your battery before you can even get to work. Pokemon Go kind of got away with it, but they had pokemon and I do not. So, I need to work out a balance between the user experience and technological limitations. 

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My competitors

I’ve been exploring the world of mindfulness apps.The one closest to what I’m trying to do with my project is probably mindful gnats as it offers a playful aesthetic with the mindfulness tools (https://www.aware.ie/mindful-gnats-free-app-for-young-adults/). It does certainly offer a comprehensive set of mindfulness tools. However, the videos and tools are not very engaging, and I found the static cheerful aesthetic somewhat grating. Where the app has advantages over mine is in the comprehensiveness of the tools. However, where my app would have the edge would be in narrative strength and gamifying the experience to engage with users.  

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Further projected thoughts

Introducing a firm proposal for my personal project: Hero | Be the hero in your own story. It is an app game playable across multiple mobile platforms, which gives users a mechanic to envision and defeat their worries. 

In addition to the episodic quests to defeat worries, the background narrative of the game will be of a world reborn. In Shadows of the Colossus, your avatar nd the world grow more grim and broken with every quest you complete. This game would take the opposite approach, with the world and your avatar bloom and thrive as your quests are completed. This additional level of engagement will keep players coming back to the game.

The game would be free to play and I would seek government funding or crowdfunding to develop it. Once the game was on the market, there would be DLC which customers could choose to pay for. However, this DLC would only offer additional customisation options rather than locking non-playing payers out of aspects of the game. 

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I’m quite preoccupied just now with designing a world and visual environment for my app and looking for beautiful apps found me Leo’s Fortune. Unfortunately I can’t download it because it’s only available for apple mobile devices, but just looking at the website, that aesthetic is much closer to what I’m going for now: good news because it proves it’s theoretically workable for some mobile devices. I definitely want to keep it mobile because it is a stress busting tool before anything else. I want people to be able to pull out their phone and play it whenever. 

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So, this is interesting. Are there some places that interactivity shouldn’t go? This journalist sure thinks so. I was having a conversation the other day with someone about how introducing interactivity (particularly to an educational activity) can bring with it confounding factors which lessens the impact of a narrative. Maybe this is a similar sort of idea? We want a structured, satisfying story and sometimes interactivity might make that more difficult. 

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Further thoughts and a working title that works

So, I’ve been thinking more about the way my app is going to work and blending the therapeutic / practical side of it with a narrative approach. I’m thinking of having an overarching plot to go alongside the episodic worry-busting missions. Also, characterising the prompting of worries a little bit: so you perhaps have a wise old woman asking what is worrying you and you can type in or say your worries. A flagging system sorts these into categories, with a different monster /hot air balloon for each (work / home / money /misc etc.) or perhaps the monsters / balloons are just randomly generated. Then you go on to defeat them. This puts a bit of a spin on the concept, as the user is choosing their battles, and having an input into what they want to fight. From that idea comes the new working title: Hero (as in, be the hero in your own story). The only thing is, I wonder if this will have an impact on the popularity of the app, because it will make it harder to find...?

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This is super interesting in the context of the internet of things. The data leaks are pretty scary, but it also doesn’t seem like the developers made security a top priority (recommending a password of qwe...? Are you sure..?). I really like the idea of kids being able to used stuffed toys to communicate over large distances but a friend did point out that a lot of children play with their toys by giving them personalities. This made me think of the toy as a kind of medium... picking up voices from the ether and passing them on which, yeah is a little creepy. Perhaps a lesson in considering how people use devices in addition to the technological possibilities they present?

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Mental illness monsters

I was pretty set on a simple cartoonish style for the graphics in care bounce (That working title is bugging me, I’ll come up with something better soon, promise). BUT then I saw these mental illnesses drawn as monsters in that slightly high-fantasy, fairytale style.

http://www.boredpanda.com/mental-illnesses-illustrated-by-monsters-by-toby-allen/

AND they are beautiful, and now I’m wondering if I could something similar to that instead. It would be another way of setting my product apart from the functional, utilitarian mindfulness apps dominating the market, and resonate with the strong sense of narrative I want the app to convey. That would work for the monsters, and then to keep the style consistent across the app, the breathing exercise path could project ornate little hot-air balloons with augmented reality rather than plastic party balloons. I don’t know what this would do to the project in terms of costs and processing power needed to run the thing, but that story-book aesthetic would be amazing if I could achieve it.  

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The internet of things and other exciting concepts

I really, really like learning things. While there are certain things that are less fun to learn (like health and safety policies, for example) and certain contexts in which learning is less welcome (like learning about flesh-eating bacteria just before bed), generally learning for me is the one. So, when I type in this little box that Gill White’s workshops on the internet of things were one of my favourite learning experiences thus far, you can rest assured that that’s some pretty serious typing. 

The workshops themselves were great fun and I loved the way they got me to thinking about creating in a slightly different way. As a creative writer, I’m used to a private creative process, and one that’s in my slippy grasp pretty much all the way through (particularly as an unpublished creative writer!). Working collaboratively to create a story, both through the randomised clues left by the other groups during the #sherlockiot exercise and in a more directed way in the Sherlock-murdery sort of week and the place-making week was such a breath of fresh air. It’s so lovely to get excited about stories *with* other people. It did become slightly riotous towards the end of week 1 and I had to duck out the room with a nosebleed (I never get nosebleeds! My face apparently just has a finely tuned sense of the dramatic...), but the sense of energy and urgency in the room was really special. Although a wee bit more time might have resulted in slightly more polished performances, I think there’s a lot to be said for pressure cooker fun.

Speaking of performance, personally both the drawing and the performing put me slightly out of my comfort zone. And (surprise, surprise..) I thought this was great! By the time I have giggled with my partner about my extremely rubbish drawing of a traffic-light-cum-library-self-issue machine invention (Dragon’s Den is *not* missing a great contender), a large puddle of self-consciousness has evaporated, and it’s a lot easier to be in that playful headspace where great ideas happen. So yes, thank you Gill! Hooray for playfulness and post-it notes.

https://twitter.com/AnnaIbbotson/status/832194858911748096

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THIS LOOKS EXCITING! Love the interplay between culture, education and fun stuff, hooray! 

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There’s nothing a worry hates more than being seen

You can take the girl out the library, but you’ll never take the library out of the girl..

So I was work the other day, and spied a book in the self-help section called the ‘The Huge Bag of Worries’ by Virginia Ironside, which is about a little girl who starts being followed round by a bunch of worries she doesn’t know how to handle. It’s simple, and great, and the worries look a little something like this: 

Which is an aesthetic with some similarities to that I’m envisioning for my app. Not exactly the same,I want my visuals to be cartoony but very clean and not picture-booky exactly, but it’s a nice reference point for now. And Catriona mentioned in class about a game where you can use different non-violent actions to solve problems. So I now need to look up Undertale, because I thinkt that would be a great wee mechanic to include, and perhaps one could be blowing a kiss, like the kindly old lady in the picture? Something for me to consider.

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Care Bounce

Right, first things first, the working title definitely needs more... working. Yes.

With that said, I’ve been having some *thoughts* on how my digital worry doll app could be most effective...

First of all, I think I need some kind of soundscape as part of the app, and I might look into ASMR (https://www.reddit.com/r/asmr/) to see if I can incorporate these ‘sounds that feel good’ although the wikipedia page is currently flagged for deletion because of ‘pseudoscientific nonsense’ so I will perhaps tread carefully... Also, sounds will of course have to be optional, because I want the app to be as flexible as possible in how and where it can be used.

Secondly, I thought it might be nice to include a social ‘you are not alone’ aspect to it.. Although of course given the sensitive nature of the topic, this would have to be heavily moderated.

Thirdly,  I believe there may be a strong case for duty of care with this app, because again of the sensitive nature of the way I hope it will be used. Because of this, I’m thinking that it might be good to tag certain words / phrases / repeated trigger words as concerning, and perhaps have an ability to send a nudge to the user’s phone saying something like: ‘Are you OK? If you are struggling with frequent feelings of [insert trigger here], it might be worth visiting your doctor. Once this message had flagged up, you could dismiss it (perhaps by pressing ‘I’m getting help. Thanks’ or similar?) but it could be a way of engaging directly with those who might be struggling to cope.

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The dinosaur of technological limitations

After what Brian was saying in class today about web browsers being platforms in their own right, I was reminded of one of my favourite wee easter eggs on chrome. 

I’ve been haunted by this dinosaur for many years: it informs you that your internet connection is gone and you should probably take the chance to go outside / go make a coffee and cry. BUT I recently discovered that this is no static dinosaur! It’s actually the starting screen for a funny little game! It is super simple, you are a dinosaur and you can jump. That’s it. Your dinosaur runs towards some cacti, which come increasingly thicker and faster and you jump over them. Needless to say I’m rubbish at it. But I really love the idea of giving people a wee thing to fiddle with and destress when they’re halfway through a complicated job application and the internet goes down.