Story Notes

We had a group meeting on Tuesday to fill out the production snapshot and discuss what to do next.

Our top priority is getting down the plot and themes of the story so that we can start sorting out decoration and our stall set up. Michael and I (Kezia) are going to be the writers.

We've decided to set it in Wellington to give people a sense of familiarity, but also probably include some fantasy or adventure themes to make it interesting.

Our Market Setup:

Proposal and Production Form

We got together in the first week of the break to fill out this form for the organizational team. At this point in time, a lot of our answers are vague or temporary since we are still testing set ups and playing with ideas. Still, wer're a lot more settled on our idea that in previous weeks, and by the time classes start again we plan to have our ideas more decided upon.

Week 6 Prototyping and Testing

Today we set up our basic structure and let people test our story.

There was a mostly positive response to the idea, but we also got a lot of feedback of how we could work it better. I ended up making a lot of little updates to the game on the day in response to people's popular choices.

Some main points:

• Larger text (we should have a larger screen on the day, so we can definitely fix this.)
• Images and sound to make it more interesting (these were already in our plans, but it's good to see others thought this too)
• Make the idea of our stall clearly explained up front (we were introducing it as people approached, but signs/etc would help)
• Since we were narrating the story, it was suggested that we remove the text from the screen completely as it is distracting to listen and read simultaneously. (Without narration, there's just awkward silent reading, so we are definitely doing narrating.)

We also got a lot of insight into the kind of choices people were making most often. Since the story set up was an adventure, people were choosing based off what would be most exciting, not necessarily what they would naturally do. People were also very trusting and kind, more likely to talk than attack when given the choice.

Week 6 test game

I've out together a little test version of our choice game in Twine for the proto-market tomorrow. Twine is a simple program for making interactive stories. It also allows for a lot of visual customization, including inset images and sound, but I haven't looked into those yet.

It only has a few endings at this point, but I was just throwing it together without much team input. The final will be much more polished with the help of the whole team.

[Download html file]

Proposal and Production Snapshot

Creative Industries 2016

Proposal & Production Snapshot

Team number: 30

Team name: See Ya Next Wednesday

Title of market offering: _

Last updated: _

1. OFFERING / ‘STALL’

• Short description of your team’s offering:

• Short description of the way this offering will be presented at the market:

2. PRODUCTION ITEMS/QUANTITIES/MATERIALS

• Type and quantity of items/products being produced (if any):

• Any items to be built/assembled for your market ‘stall’ or environment:

• Any packaging, branding material, or other collateral to be produced:

• Materials being used, quantities and sources:

3. TOOLS/EQUIPMENT/FACILITIES

• Tools/equipment/facilities needed for production (Provided by Massey? external provider? you?):
• Tools/equipment/furniture/facilities needed for installing/presenting at the market (provided by?):
• Has any electrical equipment that you are bringing in been taken to Uli in the 3D workshop to be safety tested and signed off?
• Any storage requirements for materials or other items other than what will fit on the designated trolleys on Level D (this must be signed off by a staff member):
• Have you discussed any use of Massey tools, equipment or facilities with a technical staff member and made bookings where necessary?
• Have all of your team members had health & safety inductions for the use of all facilities or equipment they need to use?

4. PRODUCTION SCHEDULE (key tasks and deadlines etc for production)

5. BUDGET/COSTS

6. COLLABORATION

• Any collaboration with other teams (give team numbers and nature of collaboration):

7. ANY OTHER NOTES/COMMENTS:

Week 5 Homework

"With the proto-market coming up next week and the study break immediately after, it is important that everyone start think about not just what you are going to produce for the market, but how.

So that you have some key points collated in one place to discuss with various people (tutors, peers, technical staff) we have created a helpful 'Proposal and Production Snapshot' template for you to fill out. (Please do not edit the original, make a copy with your team number in the title). This document will evolve over time and can be updated every time your project becomes a bit clearer.

For next week, we suggest that you attempt to respond to the points on the first page. Have a read of the second page, and if you can fill out anything there, great. By the end of the study break you should have the whole thing filled out with your most up to date production plan.

In order to get to that point you might want to make the most of next week's session to get advice from tutors, peers and technical staff about how your proposal might move into the production phase. To do this it might be a good idea to have it printed out at your 'stall' on Wednesday."

Week 5

- Organizational model

- Presented ideas

- Narrowed down our stall ideas.

Week 5 - Visualizations

Market Stall Concepts

Week 4 Homework

Bring your your work on A3 pages printed out for 9am next class.

Consider / answer each of these questions in one clear sentence.

A3

> what is your offering? 
> who is it for? Audience/user/participant
 > why would they care?
 > what is your budget?
 > Confirm you are using a currency-less system of exchange. What will you/your offering get out of it if your audience just brings themselves and their labour/ideas/time/brainpower?
 > what are your space requirements? What will you need?> what time-management / planning needs to happen?

> Have an A3 page with your offering visualised clearly enough to communicate with the wider group.
Have 3 variations / options so you can get feedback on the strongest direction or workable details.
> Alongside your offering have a precedent of an immaterial labour from art / design that excites you / informs your ideas.

We will be starting to prototype next week so you need to have a some ideas of what you are offering, but please have a range (see above) offering ideas/areas/moments to explore and test. Prototyping is a test process, you will try it and see, adjust and try again. Bring a range of prototyping materials eg. old cardboard boxes, sticky tape, sharpie pens. The testing is quick and rough and ready so be prepared to be flexible and open to what you discover! Things will shift and change/grow/become clearer.

A3
>Make a visual-map of the user experience of your offering to help you think this through and see what you could test.


A3
> what is your preferred organisational model for the Immaterial Labours market?
We will vote on the organisational model in class next week and so please review the slides from this week to see the wider groups thoughts and preferences.

A3(s) 

Prototyping

Market Space - Floor D

Our market will be held on floor D of the Te Ara Hihiko building. We're going to have to work within the limitations of the space alongside sharing with others. Some aspects of this room that may work for or against us:

Floor
The floor of the whole room is concrete, some parts with carpeting laid on top. This is solid, flat, and good for stability. However, it's also hard and potentially dangerous for physical activity. We also need to check before using any adhesives on it, as they may not come off.

Walls
The room is long and relatively thin, with not much flat walling. One side is entirely window, which we could potentially work with. The other side varies between whiteboard and textured walls. This side is also broken up by gaps leading into the hallway. There are also sliding pinboard walls that can separate up the room, which should prove helpful.

Whiteboards
Many of the walls are fitting with ceiling height whiteboards, and there are other portable ones around that we could borrow if we wished.

Projector and Screens
The presentation area of the floor has a large projector screen, and there are also a couple of other large monitors we could borrow and use to show video or other stuff from a computer. These could come in handy for our story telling, though the presentation space is probably going to be highly contested by other groups.

Lighting
Due to the large amount of windows, the whole floor will be pretty light throughout the market, assuming they aren't blocked out by other stalls. If we want a dark space, we'd have to either secure the presentation space or make our own enclosed room.

Wi-Fi
Though the building does have wifi, it won't be reliable if a lot of people are trying to use it at once, so we should make sure our stall doesn't rely on internet access.

Ceiling
The ceiling had many places we could hang things off, though due to the amount of wiring and the height of the room, this needs to be done with a uni technician.

CYOA Precendents

The Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) genre is a kind of interactive fiction which has existed in many forms. Some of these include:

Text Adventures
This was an early for of story based gaming from back in the 70s and 80s. Players were introduced with a small paragraph of text then could type in simple commands to control the character and interact with the environment (e.g. 'pull lever' 'go west')

From Wikipedia: "Zork I is one of the first interactive fiction games, as well as being one of the first commercially sold. It is one of the most famous interactive fiction games. Here it is portrayed running on Gargoyle, a modern interpreter." 

Relating to our market, this form is probably not visual enough to hold great amounts of interest, and also not simple enough to be picked up and played immediately by visitors, who may not have played this kind of game before.

Gamebook

 

[source]

Gamebooks are the book form of CYOAs, wherein the reader is given choices at the end of a passage, and page numbers of where to read next. This was popular in the kids horror series, Give Yourself Goosebumps. These books are often written in second person (e.g. "you open the door..." and may incorporate luck or chance by telling the reader to flip a coin or roll a dice to discover what path they should take.

This is a bit long and boring for a market stall, but it's a precursor to many later role playing games.

Modern RPGs
Role Playing Games are games where the player assumes the role of a character within a story. The importance of your choices can vary wildly between games. Some games use a morality based system, where how you behave affects how you are seen in the world.

 [Dragon Age: Inquisition]

Examples:
Dragon Age: The story is relatively set, though you may affect small parts of the plot, and possibly make a large choice at the climax of the story. Your choices also affect your relationship with the other characters, making the player feel more attached to them.
Dishonoured: Certain choices can lower or raise "chaos" levels, which affect the environment of the game (e.g. high chaos means more guards will be present in the area.)

MMORPGS
Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs are characterised by the fact you play on a server and interact with other real people also playing, often teaming up with them to complete missions. These games are  open world and the plot is often shown from the context, not through a story you are the main character of. Examples include World of Warcraft, Runescape, and Star Wars: the Old Republic.

 

[World of Warcraft; image source]

This isn't feasible for a market situation, but it's interesting to think of how we might make our story interactive between players.

CYOA webcomics

[Rubyquest]

Webcomics have also begun to use the CYOA format, wherein they start off a scenario, then open reader suggestions for what the characters do next. This is often done on forums where readers can easily chime in easily and see what other people are suggesting.
Examples include Homestuck and Rubyquest.

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For our market there are a couple of things are key in choosing and altering what format we present our story in:

• Players must be able to intuitively understand how to operate the story, with little to no instruction. This keeps the flow of players moving quickly and doesn't break immersion by having players confused by the interface.
• As we are an art and design school, the game should be visually appealing. This will also attract people to our stall and provide better immersion.
• The game shouldn't rely too heavily on sound, as the market place will likely be crowded and full of talking.

Precedent: Sensory Stories

A Sensory Experience

The adjective sensory describes something relating to sensation — something that you feel with your physical senses. Sticking a knife into a toaster will give you a sensory experience, but so will smelling a rose. Stick with the rose. Sensory comes from the Latin word sentire, meaning "to perceive, feel."

[Source]

-- 

In the Amphitheater Gallery and additional spaces

Sparked by recent developments in digital technology, companies and creators are exploring ways to extend storytelling beyond traditional screens. Sensory Stories invites visitors to encounter new immersive technologies and creative experiments that engage sight, hearing, touch, and smell. These virtual reality experiences, interactive films, participatory installations, and speculative interfaces offer insights into a possible future where stories engage more of our bodies than just our eyes and ears. 

Conceived and organized by Future of StoryTelling 

[Source]

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Research: Booth Management and Organization

- Sam

Collective stalls ideas

At our group meet up we discussed some ideas for our stall, based on last week's class discussion of systems of exchange. Some of these don't quite fit (e.g. they give out physical objects) but the system isn't set in stone yet, and they can always be adapted and built off.

• Exchange of information; customer tells the stall person a fact about themself in exchange for a related fact about the stall holder. Maybe like a game? Goes on until one person can't name a similar fact?
• Kezia
• Wind Up Actors; a play is performed by the stall holders, but they only move when a crank is turned. They act relative to the turning speed; if they crank is turned fast, they speed up, and if it's slow, they slow down. If the person stops cranking the actors pause in place, and resume from the same spot when someone else comes along.
• Kezia
• Achievement Game; like achievements in a digital game. A 'level' is set up and the player is given a list of achievement names. They have to guess what they mean and act out the achievement (e.g. Achievement name "hopscotch": player must play hopscotch to be awarded the achievement.)  The labour is the activity. The prize is satisfaction.
• Kezia
• People drawing each other at a table, then swap, to see how other people see them.
• alternatively, working with words instead of drawing.
• Kajal
• Roasting stall; insult each other.
• Michael
• Hugging stall
• Kajal
• Speed dating
• Make a food box of your favourites from a selection of food, then leave it for someone else and take a box made by someone before you. Experience their tastes.
• This might get expensive
• Kezia
• Choose your own adventure story - acted out by our group. At the end, you are given a judgement of your morality. Answers are time limited for snap decisions.
• Michael
• Murder mystery but with no ending; investigate, come to your own conclusion, leave. Discuss with others, but no 'true answer' will be given.
• Kezia
• Something with paper fortune tellers
• Michael
• Broken telephone; listen to a recording of someone whispering a phrase, then record yourself whispering what you think they said for the next person to listen to.
• Kezia
• Something with fortune cookies
• Kajal

Organizational Models

We met up as a group on Friday to discuss organizational models in preparation for next week. Individually we researched different existing models, then came together to draw up one that would be best for our market.

(Notes by Kajal)

We basically all had a similar idea on what would work for the market. Michael described it as like a tree.

Original diagram by Kajal

There's one team in charge of the market; organizing the space, advertising, etc. They are the trunk.
Every other team is doing a stall, but had one representative who communicates with the Market Team and all the other representatives. They are the branches, and the other teammates are the leaves.
If the teams have a question, their representative will take it to the others to discuss and get an answer.

 

Tree diagram by Kezia

By having a set representative, communication can happen more clearly, and with all the representatives talking to each other (via a group chat/FB groups/etc) everyone gets the answers and the same question doesn't get asked twice.

The main issue we thought might happen within this model is that there won't be a team who wants to take up organizing the market. If this happens, we could look at varying the model slightly.

Week 3 Homework

Taken from email, things we have to look at before next week's class:

Organisation Models
Things to consider:

• How will this market work?
• How will we organise it? What are the tasks needed to make it happen? The roles that are needed?
• The Pragmatics > pack in / pack out, communications, marketing, health and safety, system of exchange, how will the space work / how might the space be allocated?
• How will communicating these operational things be communicated to the whole Immaterial Labours group? 

Team offering / stall 
We would like you to start brainstorming what your team will be offering at the market. Look at precedents of Immaterial Labours to get you thinking. Part of this will be considering who your audience is:

• What might they want, need, be attracted by?
• How do you find this out?
• How do you gain empathy and insights?
• They are your fellow 2nd years.

Explore as a group and upload your findings and examples to the slides here > Slides for Stream 2: Teams 17-32 (Market of Immaterial Labours)

Class Notes: Systems of Exchange

In class we discussed systems of exchange with the other teams, specifically now relating to how we would like our market to run. A summary of what groups agreed on:

• Reciprocity; an exchange with mutual benefit and eliciting an emotional response.
• Exchange of experience; exchanging labour for an experience and engaging the senses.
• Experience only; come with nothing, leave with nothing, no prizes makes teams more equal.
• Anonymous kindness; giving with no expectation of return, kindness as a currency.
• Giving and gifting; pay it forward, gifts between stalls.

Overall, the main ideals the entire class seemed to agree on were:

• No currency
• Focus on experience and charity
• Only paid in time 

This leads us into next week's homework and discussion of how we want our market to be organized and what we want our stall to be.

Group Contract

Systems of Exchange

Our homework task for this week was:

Do an analysis of your selected 'system of exchange' precedent and make a slide summarising your findings on these slides (Exchange_Impossible Things) and (Exchange_Immaterial Labours) (the slide should speak for itself without you having to verbally 'present', but we will also have a group discussion about the research). Remember to think about:

• what is the system and how does it work?

• what is being exchanged and how/by whom is its value determined?

• what are some of the pros/opportunities and cons/challenges of this system? 

We focused our research on alternate currencies, looking at bitcoin in particular as a model.

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Alternate Currencies

One form of immaterial labour is using alternate currencies to pay for goods and services. These currencies are often specialized to a particular area and the exchange rate is decided by that small group of users.
A real world example of this is BitCoin.

"Bitcoins are a digital currency used as an app Bitcoin are digital coins that provide advantages such as e.g..
- its transfers directly from person to person using the net, without having to go to the bank.
- it is accessible in every country.
- without going to the bank means fees are much lower.
- it comes with no limits or conditions

What is being exchanged and how/by whom is its value determined?
Bitcoin has equity characteristics in that the value seems to grow as the whole Bitcoin ecosystem grows as it is an network of miners that are able to verify transactions an receive something back in return newly generated coins that then carry on the network an people like miners will perceive some value. Bitcoin mining provides a reward in exchange for some useful services that required to operate a secure and safe payment network for people to use anywhere around the world.

How it works?
- using bitcoins you can buy an sell bitcoins in lots of different currency - sending bitcoins as simple as sending out an email.
- you also can buy anything with bitcoins.
- bitcoin is secured by individuals called minersminers verify transactions, miners are rewarded by verifying newly generated coins for verifying transactions online.

Bitcoin Benefits?
- Bitcoins a great way for businesses to minimise transaction fees its free and easy to use.
- Bitcoin opens up a new platform for innovation.

https://www.weusecoins.com
(Kajal Patel)

An example of how this kind of system could be implemented in a local context:

"With Massey microtransactions, Massey students will be able to convert real money into a virtual currency the allows ONLY Massey University Students  to purchase goods and services that further improve or assist students in their years of study. This system will work like ordinary microtransactions with the ability to also earn back this virtual currency by completing a services or by providing  physical goods."

For Example, say Adam converts his real money to the online currency MM’s in order to find a second hand textbook for his 3rd year paper, and Jen is looking to sell her 3rd year textbook for some MM’s in order to purchase some study tips off another student. It seemingly works as an online data base where students can find tools to better their study through collaboration within Massey University    

Exchange Visual Representation

(Sam Short)