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#ENEL599 

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Reflective Statement for ICT Poster

Memes has been the key catalyst for social media’s rapid growth within the last decade. Predominantly using the format of an image with simple texts/captions, memes communicates with the viewer using a humorous nature to convey a message, often consisting of variations between popular templates. Memes are easy to understand, and often engages with the audience through events that are relatable to their personal lives or feelings. While light hearted in nature, memes can be a powerful tool for delivering messages, which is why I decided to create my poster with the theme of memes.

Young adults typically spend 4-6 hours a day on digital devices, connecting them to the internet and various media platforms (Reddit, FaceBook, Instagram etc). One thing that is consistent between these platforms is the presence of memes. Many viewers for my poster may have seen variations of my used memes before, however this can grasp their attention further. Research shows that when someone receives stimuli input that they have seen before, they will be more drawn to the content as the brain is just connecting and associating the new input to the memory that already exists (Reference 1). Capitalising on this phenomenon, I hope to see more viewers being drawn to the content on my poster after seeing the meme formats that are popular on the internet.

A meme typically delivers a message using bullet points and or very small amounts of text as viewers are expecting a quick dose of entertainment and will not be fully focused. I have kept the words on the posters to a minimum to ensure that the readers will not lose interest with their very limited attention span(reference 2), and have highlighted the main message in red surrounded by a cycle flow chart in reference to the Kolb cycle that we have learned in class. With an easy to understand layout and simple yet engaging formats to my intended audience, I hope that the poster will prove to be an effective display of the mistakes I had made and learning reflections of my BCT experience so far.

Cognitive memory association - Pieters, R., Warlop, L., & Wedel, M. (2002). Breaking through the clutter: Benefits of advertisement originality and familiarity for brand attention and memory. Management science, 48(6), 765-781.

Attention span - Nahinsky, I. D. (1956). The influence of certain typographical arrangements upon span of visual comprehension. Journal of Applied Psychology, 40(1), 37.

Sources of Images Used:

Kurzgesagt: In a nutshell - Screenshot from the video: What would happen if we detonated all the nuclear bombs in the world at once?

Adult Swim Shorts: Who killed Hannibal?

Image of male stacking dominoes & photoshopped image with dominoes removed

Wikihow instructional image for medications

Gru with whiteboard - 4 screenshots from the movie Despicable Me photoshopped. Credit to: r/memetemplatesofficial

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Virtually disabled group project - Sound

After many discussions and a plan to move forward on the VR experience for simulating disability, we decided to take the prototype of a blind person in an active shooter situation further. Using various software (Unreal, in game cinematics etc.) we captured some sound that made it sound like there is an active shooter approaching. Then the audio clips are trimmed with Audacity and cut down into pieces that we want. 

After gathering all the pieces that we require, piecing it together proved to be a more delicate task than I imagined. I even got lost trying to keep track of how many windows I had at one point. 

Another challenging aspect is that this project is relatively dark, and editing pieces of sound where people are dying, begging for their death or gurgling on blood isn’t exactly pleasant, however it is required to get the message across. 

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After some discussion, my group decided to make a prototype for our project where we put our user into a blind person’s perspective in an active shooter scenario. The prototype audio that we used to test on people is still in a very early stage of developing. The sound is made with an unreal engine environment and other clips are from a game running cinematic modes. The sound effects includes heavy rifles, shotguns, explosions, and some other added effects of ears ringing from the explosions along with fading footsteps and glass breaking. 

The biggest problem from our play testing is that we did it from a first person perspective or that the sound source from our shooter is in a really close proximity, making it seem like the person experiencing this is in the perspective of our shooter. 

Tonight I will be going back home to tweak this, and also learn how to use 3D sound environments in Unity in case that the engines itself is unable to produce the effects of the shooter being really far away and slowly approaching. 

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We have consulted Ben and Stefan for advice on integrating virtual reality and 360 videos into our project. We have been told that this is going to be a hard project considering that we barely have any experience with virtual reality and are unfamiliar with the game engines. 3D sound is also another aspect that will be very hard to implement, so even when simulating a blind person’s experience with just audio, it can be very hard to implement it well.

However, after discussion, we were able to do some play testing to have some hands on experience with VR. We first experienced the Google Cardboard type of equipment where our phones can be used to power the VR experience. The strengths of this type of VR is that it is easily accessible, and works very well with 360 videos. However, the downside for this is that the effects and quality are quite underwhelming.

Next, we tried the HTC Vive, and it was a complete different class compared to mobile VR. We started with a game that someone made, using sci-fi components and it show cased the effects of 3D sound that Stefan told us about. When moving a lightsaber around, we can sense that the sound source is changing according to what we see on screen. Stefan also later told us that there are ways to implement sound ‘above’ and ‘below' as well, adding another layer of experience, however also meaning another layer of complexity.

We later explored a cave that is mapped with millions of dots instead of actual triangular textures. Flying around in the cave also showed us how to move around using the special vive controllers. It also displayed how different it feels to ‘move’ around in VR compared to real life.

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What to do?

After forming a group with Izzy and Ben, we have one common goal - to let the user’s experience another person’s daily life discrimination/difficulties from their perspective. The easiest way to do this will be to use virtual reality, however we recognise that there will be some technological challenges along the way.  While discussing, we found out that another good option is to use virtual reality to help people understand what daily life or emergency situations is like for a disabled person. 

A drawing board later, we decided with 3 situations: 

- Deaf person unable to hear the fire alarm going off

- Blind person in a stressful, active shooter situation

- Mute person trying to call an ambulance 

Some other possibilities that we are also considering are simulating various eye conditions that affects them in certain emergency situations. 

The reason why we chose to do an emergency situations is because it is usually far more stressful than normal day to day activities, and can really leave a lasting impression for the user. After talking to Ben and Stefan, we borrowed a 360 degrees camera from the studio, since we learned that 360 videos are also a great way to do our project since creating an entire environment in a game engine will be quite difficult. 

Ben also suggested that we look into an autism simulator, where it is a sensory overload for the person experiencing it to see if we can learn some techniques present in that VR experience. 

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Project 3 Grouping

Project: 

After the initial writing up of the brief, I have now formed a group with Ben and Izzy. We are all interested in working with virtual reality and have consulted Stefan and Ben for advice. From day 1, we are told that there will be many technical challenges from this project. From learning how to use a game engine from scratch, to integrating either 360 degrees videos and audio in a 3D surround setting into virtual reality will be difficult to learn. However our group is quite determined, and we all want to do something related to virtual reality in the future, so we see this as a great opportunity to learn the basics of virtual reality. 

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Reflective Journalism - ctec502

Delivering a fluid, engaging play experience may seem simple to a user is a complicated task for the creators. In the BCT project “Cards for Play”, my group and I created ‘What You Do?’ - a card game with simple mechanics in mind that aims to inspire creative, hilarious or simply unorthodox solutions to win. Balancing competitive aspects with the ‘fun’ aspects along with mechanics and visual aesthetics was not a simple task, and my group had to learn a lot along the way. In this reflective journal, I will discuss the unexpected hardships for game mechanics design, the learning experience and other improvements before we finally came to our end product.

Experience:

In the first few weeks of BCT, the class learned about the core ‘pillars’ of aesthetics for designing a play experience - fantasy, challenge, fellowship, sensation, narrative, discovery, expression and submission (Reference 1). We are tasked to create a play experience using some of these core aesthetics and joined groups with those who share a mutual interest in the aesthetics that we chose. We agreed that unlike a triple A titled video game with a much higher magnitude of production resources, our card game should be much simpler. Too many core aesthetic pillars will instead create something that is overly complex, scattered elements with no real focus. We all agreed on having three core aesthetics at most to ensure that our content can be smoothly incorporated into the deck of cards. The chosen core aesthetics we had in mind were: challenge, fellowship, fantasy and sensation. The class also learned about the MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics) framework when approaching game design, which gave my group a rough outline on how to approach the play experience development.

While having minor debates on our chosen aesthetics, my group decided to put the arguments aside and discuss the features and theme that we wish to put into our product instead. After brief discussions, we all collectively agreed on the theme: Nostalgia - late 90’s and early 2000’s popular culture with the target audience being people in the early 20’s who would be most familiar with the pop culture from that time period. However, this time period covered a vast amount of content. Popular culture also involves much more than just music, movies and other media. Foods, drinks, social activities, games and life experiences quickly became fields that we aimed to integrate into our product. While numerous ideas were being thrown around in conversation, Charles, our TA suggested that we do a ‘STFU’ exercise - writing down as many fragmented ideas on post-it notes and throw them onto a wall, categorising or eliminate them accordingly later. With a sizeable wall filled with post-it notes requiring the murder of a few trees later, we ended up with not just the potential popular culture material to be used, various game mechanics and gadgets was also presented. After a process consisting of repeated eliminating and categorising, our next step was to build a play experience using our content.

Reflective Observation:

With all elements of content and mechanics in mind, we were on our way to making our first prototype. Filled with excitement, crucial steps were spared, resulting in a series of painful mistake. We aimed for our design to be a trivia quiz based game consisting of an assortment of gadgets such as RFID tags and QR codes that paired with mobile phones to play media content in order to fulfill the ‘sensation’ aspect. A 3D printed card shaped funnel as a timer, and a point counter to add to the ‘challenge’ aspect, all while playing in a social situation aimed to trigger nostalgia, revolving around our ‘fellowship’ pillar. Our first critical mistake was cutting corners with our survey, and rushing into production, creating detailed features, ordering materials and I jumped ahead to create detailed CAD models for the cards and gadgets, all without a rough prototype and feedback from peers or teachers. A major red flag was also ignored when Charles’ advice suggested that nostalgia is a very personal emotion that cannot be intentionally triggered easily.

After further research, we discovered that all human sensory inputs are memorised by the brain, however, when the information has not been accessed for a while, the ‘path’ to that memory diminishes, eventually becoming hard or impossible to recall. Nostalgia is an emotion that an individual experiences when their current stimulation (typically visual, sound and smell) resembles one that is borrowed deep in their memory, where it has not been accessed for a long amount of time (Reference 2). With various popular culture being plastered over our social media, we are constantly reminded of 90’s and early 2000’s music, media content and even lifestyle aspects, making triggering the feeling of nostalgia near impossible. Research also shows that nostalgia is a very personal feeling, only triggered under calm, stress free environments. With a timer ticking and competitive aspects in mind, mixing the feelings of nostalgia with a competitive card game was doomed to fail. Starting from square one was the only viable option in sight.

Conceptualisation:

During final production, we decided to play test within our own group - to summarise, the play experience was no less than a complete disaster. The gameplay was uninspiring with little to no replayability and content that did not relate to those who were not heavily influenced by media of the time. My group knew that this was a less than mediocre product that will be embarrassing to present, and we had to start from square one. After a harsh lesson from our series of mistakes and ignored red flags, we quickly recovered and created the product: ‘What You Do?’ - a much more simple card game yet replayable and engaging, something that my group was proud to present. Reflecting back at this BCT experience, there was a lot that I have learned, and many improvements that will be made in future projects.

Sangita, our lecturer suggested that if we have an idea for a project that was heading nowhere, ‘killing the baby’ and starting from square one early on, and bringing useful elements into the next project is a viable solution provided that we have enough time. My group did not ‘kill the baby’, we had to “kill an adult” instead, restarting when we had a product that is already rolling on the production line. A major lesson in our failure is that ideas are nothing without a concrete plan to ensure that it flows smoothly with the intended mechanics, and that every concept will have hardships to confront, taking a different path just creates complications in other forms.

Experimentation:

During our second attempt, comprehensive surveying along with extensive play testing was done to ensure that we do not repeat our mistakes. We learned to consider both the designer and player perspectives, changing our product and design process to be experience-driven as opposed to our previous feature-driven design. After research (Reference 3), we shifted our focus on the audience’s perspective, we looked into the aesthetics, then continued onto the dynamics and the underlying mechanics of the game.

To make our product provide a positive first impression, rectangular and hexagon shaped cards were used for the question and answer cards, along with a 3D printed case that stores cards fitting to their unique shapes. Challenge and fellowship were the only two core aesthetic pillars that were used, ensuring that we do not over complicate our design and that remaining content is built on simple, yet solid mechanics. Extensive play testing was carried out with members of BCT and outside of the classroom, we recorded the feedback and tweaked the product accordingly. Further research was also done to ensure that our dynamics within the game is appropriate for our intended mechanics, and how each card corresponded to another, ensuring good synergy and replayability. Overall, we felt that our product: “What You Do?” was genuinely interesting to play, and the presentation achieved our expectations, having very positive feedback from our audience.

Conclusion:

While many mistakes were made in our first BCT project, my group managed to quickly recover and start over from square one with a new mindset and capitalised on the lessons we learned. Cutting corners and ignoring the importance of playtest feedback was the downfall of the first project along with great, yet scattered features without a direction. Although the second attempt was done within a very limited time frame, we worked overtime to ensure that every step that was taught was taken, and made sure that to not focus on overwhelming the product with features, instead focusing our design process from an audience’s perspective, ensuring that even with simple content, the mechanics and dynamics plays well for our users. In the end, we were satisfied with our final product: “What You Do?”, and will be taking the valuable learning experiences onto future projects.

References:

(Reference 1) Kim, Bohyun. ". Game Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics." Library Technology Reports 51.2 (2015): 17-19.

(Reference 2) Bontempi, Bruno, et al. "Time-dependent reorganization of brain circuitry underlying long-term memory storage." Nature400.6745 (1999): 671.

(Reference 3) Salen, K., Tekinbaş, K. S., & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. MIT press.

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Writing the reflective essay for our BCT experience required a bit of planning since the word limit cited that we had to stay within 1500 words. Here is the rough draft that I used to plan:  What we made: card game - What You Do?

What we did wrong:

Did not have a real focus for the core aesthetics Overseen the mechanics of the game 

Over complicated the content and bells and whistlesWas going around in circles Reflective:

We were walking around in circles since we cannot decide on something concrete - everything that we choose has something easy and hard, we just have to work through it.

Unable to deliver a game that plays smoothly and engaging enough due to the lack of solid mechanics 

Did not do surveying work correctly

Resources that I am using for the essay :

Game Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics Paper (MDA)

Brain memory access pathway and cognitive memory

Rules of play: Fundamentals for game design

Corrections to be made for the future: 

Make sure that we have a solid idea of what game mechanics we want to deliver when making the game 

Survey the people to ensure that they will want to play a game that is built upon our concept 

Ensure that we did not overload our products with features, instead build and tweak it from the consumer’s point of view

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Friday before the semester starts again, we all came in to work on the chair. We made some adjustments, glued on more leather and made sure that it stuck properly. We ran out of supplies on the superglue halfway, and had to go to the store and get some more. The spray paint nozzle was also lost and we had to go get a can of something else so we can salvage the nozzle. However, it all worked out in the end. here we see the chair that is finished, and also Ella sitting on it with the spring leg in compression. 

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A sleeve for each leg was put on to make the chair look better, also to cover up the spring so it looks like a more ordinary chair from a distance. Although there were some problems at the start with the sleeve. Every time the spring compressed, the sleeve will go upwards, so we had to tape the bottom but of the specially fitted sleeve for the spring in order to prevent it from constantly crawling up with each spring compression. Kirsty from our group also knitted a piece of fabric that we were originally going to use as a back rest, but we decided to use a wooden one instead, since when we were testing, the scarf will not be strong enough to hold a full adult’s weight and that posed a risk for people accidentally falling backwards. 

We are also planning to get spray paint for the legs so that the cardboard will have a better look to it also hiding the tape that we have on the special leg with the spring attached to it. 

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The last session before the semester break begins, we decided to focus more on the aesthetics and feels of the chair. We took the chair to the workshop, cut off redundant bits that we didn’t need, took out the older leather that was not attached properly, and then sanded down the metal. We had to use something called the ‘bastard sander’ that was suggested by Krishna, since there were large chunks of glue and leather still left on the metal beams, then we sanded it down with a fine grain sanding paper. 

Next we focused on glueing the leather back onto the chair to make sure it looks and feels better than the plain metal. The glueing process was a bit difficult to get right since leather required special adhesives and was hard to fold properly but we got it done in the end. 

We also tested the spring on the leg and made sure that it can be repeatedly sat on without breaking or bending out of position, making the chair wobbly or unstable while not having any load on it. 

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We were discussing various different objects after bringing in our own prototypes/discussing our prototypes. However, we hit a dead end since our objects were too simple, or we couldn’t incorporate data into the objects. So instead of thinking on the spot, half the group went to consult Krishna, and the other half headed to look sharp to look for objects that we can use on our data set, as shown in the picture. 

We thought that the ping pong balls can be cut in half and put on the surface of the chair along with the toothpicks as spikes so that we can make it uncomfortable. The water balloons were originally going to be made into a cushion along with the yarn, and the cups were going to be attached together, making it super hard to drink. 

We experimented with the objects and found out that the majority of them can only either represent a little bit of data, so we had to incorporate these elements that we thought of into a larger data set. 

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The group went spring shopping in our spare time, along with some other objects that we think can add to the data set. We found the right springs to fit our chair after searching for quite some time, and some fitting was needed to be done in order to fit the spring onto the chair. 

We used cardboard tubes to fit onto the spring and then ‘sleeved’ the cardboard tube with the springs on them onto the chair. It took some time to fit the spring onto the right sized cardboard tubes, and it took some time to make sure that it didn’t slip too much. But in the end, we got the spring mechanism working. 

We had to cut one of the legs of the chair a bit short in order to make room for the spring’s length. We also had to test out various different springs, since some were too soft and compressed fully before it can support an adult’s weight when sitting on the chair. Some others however, were on the other end of the spectrum and was way too stiff and didn’t compress even when we shifted our whole weight onto that specific leg of the chair. 

We tested the mechanism many times to make sure that it worked, however it kept slipping up and we all agreed that we need to find a way to make this mechanism more stable the next day. 

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Monday session: we brought in our prototypes, and then we made a wall of post it notes to pin our ideas. This is one of our most “iconic” prototypes, where the chair can represent various data on disability and disability related unemployment. The session is spent mostly on data research, searching for the most optimal data set and making sure that it is accurate. The group has also gone through lengths to discuss various ways that we can incorporate our data into our data object. 

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More prototypes have been done in this session, along with discussion on how we can incorporate data into those prototypes to make a data object. The picture here shows more ideas that we have plastered onto our wall with post-it notes, and also the broken toothbrush/broken fork that we have made. The items are broken by the handles but still joined with the other half, making it essentially a useless weight for the objects. 

The fork was really hard to break, and the toothbrush broke too easily, so I found that it will be hard to get the proportions right in order to reflect our data. We discussed some more, and agreed that a chair will probably be the best object to use. We talked about picnic tables (Zed made a picnic table prototype) and also other things, however with a chair there are 4 legs, arm rests and back rests that we can work with, making it a versatile object with many different types of data that we can embed into the object. 

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Wednesday session (CREO render): 

Last night I went home and spent three hours making our object in CREO, with 12 separate pieces and made a final assembly for our chair. 

The upper picture is a render without the net or back support, since I am on my laptop and it is not powerful enough to render multiple repeats of the geometry patterns. However, upon arriving to class, we had an idea of adding a spring to one of the legs to make it more unstable for whoever sits in the chair. 

In this picture, I made three springs since I thought it was harder to find a spring that fits exactly onto the chair. A rubber ball has also been added onto the other leg to make it even more slippery and harder for the user to sit on. On the seat itself in the first picture, there are 12 spikes that are made out of wood to make it uncomfortable. The amount of spikes can be changed according to the data that we are making, however my goal was to use the area of spikes to represent a data for youth disability statistics.