One day this summer I found out that it was possible to create objects in ARIS that would spawn. Half an hour later, I was out of breath, nursing a pulled hamstring after playing my first spawning game. Spawning is awesome and opens up a whole new kind of game design in ARIS.

The Basics of Spawning

Any object you create in the sidebar in ARIS can be spawned according to certain parameters instead of placed on the map. By hitting the make spawn button in each object’s settings, you get the following options:

ARIS Editor 1.7 Spawn Settings

These options are almost self-explanatory. Almost. The basic idea: There is a timer. Every so often the game checks to see if it should try spawning something, always one-at-a-time. If the rules allow, an object gets spawned. The rules you set determine if an object gets spawned and the length of the timer. I have a warning and some explanation of the actual options below.

Warning:

Currently it is really easy to accidentally engage spawning. When you hit the make spawn button (even just to look at the options), it does just that. If you want to stop spawning, you have to hit the red Stop Spawning button.

Spawn a maximum of  (quantity) per player/total - The total number of possible objects on the map at a time per player area or total for the game. Only one gets spawned at a time, but the game may keep adding them each time the timer cycles up to this number.What counts as a player is a little complicated.

within min and max meters of player/location – Describes a ring where objects are allowed to spawn, not too close and not too far. Of player is a little complicated; I’ll explain more later. For now, just think of it as a player or a location on the map as the center of spawning.

with a probability of (percent) every (quantity) seconds – First, probability makes my head hurt. I just start at 100% and reduce it if I want to have some chance involved. The number of seconds is the timer. Whatever the number here, that is how often your game will check the rest of the rules and decide whether to spawn this object.

Location Name – Just like with other locations in ARIS, the name on the map can be different than the name of the object it links you to. Good for surprises.

Time to live – This is how long each object, once spawned, sticks around on the map.

Nearby range – This is how close a player must be to the object to interact with it (assuming quick travel is off). 15 is reasonable but might be too tight. If you’re having trouble hitting objects with GPS, go up to 30 or so.

Delete when viewed – The spawned object disappears from the map when a player interacts with it. This is really important for games like the one I’ll describe below.

Force View – AKA Auto Display. If checked, the player automatically interacts with the object when nearby. If not, the object shows up in the player’s nearby tab.

Hidden – Hidden means the object is invisible on the map. Good for landmines.

Quick travel – The player can interact with the object by tapping the icon on the map. Does not mix with hidden very well.

Wiggle – Eye candy. The object’s icon bounces up and down on the map.

Display label on Map – Got a cool looking icon? Don’t want to clutter the player’s map with pesky words? Select this option.

Fine print:

If you select “per player” and “player” there are a couple of fine points worth knowing. When the game checks to see if more objects are needed, it checks the rings around players for existing objects. This means that if your player is moving very rapidly in relation to the length of the timer, you will generate a huge swath of objects. Weird things also happen if your location is wildly inaccurate and your position jumps around the map.

Rupee Collector at 80mph

This also has consequences for players playing near to each other so that their rings overlap. Say two players are right next to each other with the rules above. You might think that the game will generate 10 total objects (I did). But this is incorrect. The game checks the ring, and if there are 5 objects it will not generate a new one. This is mostly a good thing. It means that settings designed to work for one player do not get wildly out of whack when more players are present.

Rupee Collector: An Example of a Spawning-Based Game

When I pulled my hamstring that summer day, it was because I knew spawning would make a fast-paced outdoor running game possible, and I had to try to make one to find out. By the end of the summer, with some help, the end result is Rupee Collector.

If you’re on an iOS device, and have ARIS installed you can play Rupee Collector right now. Simply look for the game in ARIS. I even had some help skinning the content of the web backpack and including it in the game as a high score list. Thanks Toussaint! And thanks Phil for the awesome pixel art!

Rupee Collector v1.0

Rupee Collector High Scores

The game is super simple: collect rupees. There are a couple niceties I’d like to make happen someday, but I’m pretty happy with it. I hope you enjoy it. All the little pieces came together in the little ARIS design jam we had at the beginning of August 2012. Here’s a video Shelby put together from the jam. Breanne also wrote a nice blog post about the experience.

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone: Variation on a Theme

Something else that came out of the August design jam, thanks to Breanne and Phil, is a 2-player variation on Rupee Collector called It’s Dangerous to Go Alone. In this version, there are still rupees to collect, but enemies also spawn on the map. Moblins to be precise. There are two roles in this game, and the player chooses when starting. The miner can collect rupees, but will be killed by Moblins. The hunter can kill Moblins, but cannot collect rupees.

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

It will be interesting to see if this method of building a game around a core mechanic, and then having others workshop to create variations, proves fruitful. I’d like to think that it could make a unifying design challenge for a class or jam.

Filed under: ARIS, Games, Tutorial

Just read an article in Slate called Digital Jiminy Crickets about apps that help you be more ethical, do what you  need to do — all those things that we mean  to do, but need a nudge to actually do.

Capitalizing on three inter-related movements—nudging, the quantified self, and gamification—the good-behavior layer pinpoints our mental and emotional weaknesses and steers us away from temptations that compromise long-term success.

One example, they give is Gym-Pact, which “rewards” you with cash that you and other users put in a pool to pay the folks who work out. It’s a bit hilarious, and I imagine even more demoralizing that losing just the membership money. Here’s their video (also below).

What would an app to encourage good studenting look like? Would it quantify how much value you’re getting out of college by dividing the cost of the semester by the actual hours you study? (“Congratulations! You just studied $48.34 worth! No breaks until you earn $100!”). Would it just nudge to do homework or get to class on time like the one Marshall students developed? Or are there other “good student” qualities that can be gamified? (“Quest completed: Visit with your Econ prof during office hours.” Or, “Quest completed: participate in class 3 times this week.”). Would it include ARIS-like elements that guide you different resources on campus?

I’m actually soliciting ideas for this to pilot in my class this Fall. Send them to me at regardingjohn@gmail.com or tweet to @regardingjohn.

I’m stealing this directly from my colleague, Jim Mathews, published on the Macarthur Spotlight blog.

4.20.12 | Guest author Jim Mathews is a teacher at Middleton Alternative Senior High School in Middleton, Wisc., and a UW graduate student. Mathews is one of the designers of Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling (ARIS), a new augmented reality platform for the iPhone. The following is excerpted from a chapter he co-authored with Mark Wagler, “Up River: Place, Ethnography, and Design in the St. Louis River Estuary.” The article will be published in the forthcoming book “Mobile Media Learning: Amazing Uses of Mobile Devices for Teaching and Learning” later this year from ETC Press.

If you’re interested in using mobile games in the classroom, but feeling intimidated about how to get started, Mathews says you need not be. He recommends starting small and not being afraid to jump right in and experiment. He’s shared his rules of the road here:

Start small. Create something simple before embarking on a more complex effort to design a game or interactive story with lots of moving parts. Experimenting with many simple (and smaller) ideas helps build your fluency with the tools, clues you into what does and doesn’t work, and often sparks ideas for more complex designs.

Start designing. Don’t wait for the “perfect project” to start designing. Some teachers start by designing something for their personal use (e.g., as part of a birthday party or family outing) in order to learn the tools and experiment with different design ideas.

Start local. Build something that revolves around your school, schoolyard, or immediate neighborhood. This allows you to experiment with the technologies and teaching strategies without having to organize more complex field experiences.

Pilot. Implement a small design project with a subset of students. In some contexts, this might mean running an after-school workshop or organizing a field trip for a group of highly interested students. These experiences can be used to test learning activities and build your and your students’ capacity for doing mobile design work. Also consider organizing a design competition or inviting your students to design a mobile-based story or game to meet another class requirement.

Collaborate with students. Engage students as co-designers when you develop pilot projects, by actively seeking their advice for how to improve the project and embedded activities. These same students can serve as experts or classroom assistants when the project is implemented more broadly.

Experiment with design. Build students’ interest and expertise with the tools through game jams, where they build games that are not related to any specific content. This allows students to explore the tools and design processes, without the added constraint of specific content or concepts. Later, students can use their understanding of the tools to design media that aligns with specific curriculum areas.

This fall, Alyssa Concha and I have had a lot of fun playing Digital Graffiti Gallery, an ARIS game. The above shot is from our most recent outing, where we found a piece reminiscent of the one that began the game (below) but is now long gone. Digital Graffiti Gallery is a good example of an activity that ARIS can support whose robustness doesn’t really come from what the game’s author put into ARIS, but rather the way in which ARIS mediates an interaction that is pregnant in the place. It is also a good way to begin talking about some of the larger pedagogical aims involved in this work.

Digital Graffiti Gallery

Digital Graffiti Gallery was put together by Ivan Kenarov, a student in the first run of my class, Local Games in ABQ. The idea is pretty simple. There’s a lot of graffiti on the UNM campus, and some of it is very good. Whether it has something to say, or whether it is a simple tag, it will likely be painted over within a week. Digital Graffiti Gallery lets us record this ephemeral art and keep it in place.

The authored ARIS content is really pretty minimal, just enough to (maybe) get a player into the idea of how they can contribute. A player contributes by firing up the game, finding graffiti, using the camera tab to take a picture, and finally dropping the resulting item from their inventory. Eventually, the game map fills in with art that is no longer present in real life but can nonetheless be viewed by future visitors. Hence, Digital Graffiti Gallery.

Not a lot happened with the game when it was first created. Over the last year I have mentioned it fairly often as a way to easily describe what some of the data collection features being put into ARIS might be used for. When Alyssa and I began teaching the second run of the local games class, I decided we should play the game very visibly as the class wandered around campus during our initial brainstorms. The idea was to show what it might look like to engage in a place-based game, and that this wasn’t an abstraction but that there already were student-made, playable games all around them. Along the way, Alyssa and I realized we were having a lot of fun, and I have been playing the game on average once every two weeks.

Why it’s Fun

The author doesn’t have a strong voice in Digital Graffiti Gallery. It simply turns out that looking for and capturing graffiti makes wandering around campus fun. There’s a lot of interesting work to find, and there is a fairly high rate of renewal. When you find something really cool, it feels like a victory to get it into the game. Also, it’s fun to guess where you might happen to find wall art.

The activity is not so intense that it takes over your whole field of consciousness, leaving time to talk about other things that are best talked about while wandering around with a friend. Digital Graffiti Gallery gives me just enough to do to get me outside the office and my routine so that I can entertain what might be possible. This activity taps easily into the feeling under a lot of our mobile game research that there’s a lot to be learned from being in the world rather than hidden from it in some classroom. Furthermore, noticing graffiti is a verb that our city already understands.

There’s also a certain element of pride, camaraderie, and competition in Digital Graffiti Gallery that ARIS is able to almost invisibly provide. When I find something really cool, capture it, and drop it on the map, I know I’m the first one to it (in the game world at least), and I want to show it off to others. Even without the (upcoming) ability to like and comment on players’ data gathering activities, or a further articulating of what is being collected through some sort of metadata driven by a taxonomy of wall art, it feels meaningful and connected.

This too is why I would now describe Digital Graffiti Gallery as a game and not simply a curation activity. Though the feedback is not happening in the software, the boundaries and playfulness of a game emerge from our engagement with the basic mechanic of capturing wall art.

As a Teacher

Just as Digital Graffiti Gallery has been an easy way for me to explain to broad audiences how ARIS might be used for data collection activities, I hope it can help me explain my intent to help students produce meaningful work.

In academics, for students and researchers alike, most of the focus is on the work that gets put into a project, and far too little on what comes out. Digital Graffiti Gallery is certainly an example of getting out more than was put in. Not to minimize Ivan’s accomplishment, but others’ projects that semester involved far more research and technical mastery. Yet his idea is inspiring, and his game is fun to play (it’s the first ARIS game I’ve really played casually). It has increased my ability to teach others how to use game design to tap into local culture in other ways, both in class and with the other researchers and teachers I work with. His work moves the field forward.

It’s not that careful research isn’t important, just that we’ve gotten used to putting the cart before the horse. Many of our educational models assume that students do not produce work capable of taking on meaning outside the classroom, capable of inspiration (leading to new forms of action) and not merely evaluation.

Teamwork – Serial Partnerships

The creation of Digital Graffiti Gallery also says something about the possibilities for group work within classroom contexts.

Outside the classroom of course, group work is the norm rather than the exception and it is constituted in multiple fashions. Yet our typical emphasis on and particular construction of individual achievement inside the classroom (not so much the individualism itself – that’s rampant outside too) creates a context where group work seems artificial and awkward. I try to make my classrooms places where a different culture can take root, where multiple forms of partnership are possible and make sense.

Digital Graffiti Gallery is an example of a kind of group work we don’t often make room for in classrooms, the serial partnership. Ivan gets credit for authoring Digital Graffiti Gallery. But the idea did not begin with him. Jaksa Oisinski, also a student that semester, is a local artist and frequently brought up the topic of wall art in class. Tyler Mound, another student, took these ideas further, envisioning the encoding of local, underground art in a data collecting activity mediated by ARIS and accompanied by ethnographic research on the artists. Ivan instantiated a subset of those ideas in Digital Graffiti Gallery. At no time were they working on a team together in the usual sense, but these students were nevertheless able to accomplish more together than alone.

Serial partnerships look more like relay races than how we typically think of group work. It’s not the sort of group work that is codified in group work that is formally assigned, and it’s hard to imagine how it could be, especially as the roles are not uniform, and uniform achievement and responsibility are at the core of the paradigm of student achievement. I’m sure someone could come up with a rubric and a physical artifact to attempt scaffolding this process, but that’s not really the point.

Coda

Classrooms should be places where informal collaboration is likely to spontaneously occur. And those classrooms should sit in places where this collaborative work is capable of inspiring the instructor to write a long-winded blog post about it a year after the fact.

Filed under: ARIS, Games

This is a slide from a presentation Chris B and I gave about ARIS from Open Ed. 2011 (last week). The idea was to show how many more people were doing things with ARIS than only 4 months ago. But later, I noticed something else interesting. Not only have the numbers grown bigger, but the relationship between each of the stats has changed, painting a picture of a qualitative change that has occurred.

In June,

Players < Games < Editors.

In October,

Editors < Games < Players.

So back in June, we had fewer than 1 game per editor. Effectively this meant that we were on the whole signing people up to make games who never made a game. Now we are in the situation where on average, every editor has made (just barely) more than one game. We also were in the situation where games were not really getting played on average (more games than players). But now we have more than 50% more players than games. This is just one stat, but it seems like the aggregate nature of how ARIS is getting used is evolving. How cool!

Filed under: ARIS, Games

At the Open Education Conference last week, I spoke just after Jeff Hausman from the Jesuit Learning Academy. He was speaking about trying to unite the 200+ Jesuit College campuses across the country, and one of the icons on the screenshots he was showing caught my eye (the candle above). It looked like an app icon (what does that say about me?) and the title underneath was 3-minute retreat. This reminded me of little ARIS “games” that Jim Mathews has put together; he called them meditations. The idea in these meditations was to facilitate someone taking a little break from life, going somewhere peaceful or contemplative, maybe providing an idea to think about or a little music to aid introspection.

Jeff came up to Chris Blakesley and I the next day and said he thought maybe there was some part for ARIS in his mission. So I told him what I was thinking. He told us more about the role of the 3-minute retreat at their schools. Basically, they are similar to what Jim was envisioning, but specifically about taking time out of one’s day to connect with God. It was a nice introduction. And then Chris B and I did something fun. We spent the next hour making a spec. of 3-minute retreat in ARIS. We found their materials, and they were a perfect match for what ARIS can display. We combined that material with on-site photos that Chris B and I had been taking for fun anyway. At the end of that hour, we had something up to show Jeff. Not a complete rethinking of his idea within the medium of ARIS or taking particular advantage of local place, but suggestive of what might be done. It was enough for him to show any colleagues a working prototype.

You can play our mock-up of 3 minute retreat. Look for it in ARIS. It’s near Park City Utah if you’re using the map. Maybe it will give you ideas about how meditation as an activity might be facilitated with ARIS or some other mobile platform.

Filed under: ARIS, Games

It’s 2011, and yesterday at our #ARISgames.org meeting, the programmers demoed some of the data collection things that they were working on for ARIS v 1.6.

It’s like a dream come true.

In 2006, I lobbied for a web-based version of MIT’s River City Augmented reality editor. ARIS delivered that for me in 2010.

The idea was that the web offered accessibility to folks who didn’t have smartphones — folks like teachers and their students. A web-based editor would allow classrooms to engage in place-based design. I used the few projects we had started at the time as examples of the type of projects that could be done by students.

We’ve reached that point, and with ARIS v1.6, I think we’ll begin engaging in some massive exploration of GeoAnnotation and Data-collection.

Good times a-coming!

One of the things I love about my job is that I get to play with stuff like this. ARIS is moving from virtual reality to real reality. Cool stuff from our programmers!