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this is not a game!

coultonp | 08 June, 2006 16:35

In light of a number of the recent Blogs talking about the need for innovation in mobile games, and as a plug for the forthcoming paper at ACE2006 in Hollywood, I though I would share one of our latest game projects. The title of the blog is a reference to avant gamer Jane McGonigal who often uses it in relation to imersive play although here its represents a view of some traditional game designers who have a ‘this is not a game’ attitude in regard to some avant game projects and indeed it is a phrase that I have already encountered for this project.
 
The game is based on the surrealist technique of ‘Exquisite Corpses’ It has its roots in the parlour game of Consequences which was designed to be played by five to nine players after dinner in Victorian times. The surrealist version is generally played by four or more people who all have a pencil and paper. To start, each player writes an adjective, then folds the paper to hide this word and then passes their paper to the next player. The process continues until the sequence of adjective, noun, adverb, verb, adjective, noun has been completed. The sentences are then read out by the players.
 
We built on this game premise have adapted it to produce a mobile game called ‘thetxtbk’, which is based around the standard SMS message length of 160 characters. Each player takes a turn writing a contribution to the book based upon only the last 160 characters entered. In reality the system is based on WAP and the length of the message is entirely a design choice, we felt WAP still has a very negative image with consumers due to the disastrous launch on GSM, whereas text messaging appears universally understood. It also means practically any phone can be used to play!
To distribute the game we have utilized and SMS message which contains both an invitation and a link to the game as shown.
text book invitation sms
Once the player uses the link, the system detects that they are accessing the site from a phone and provides access through a series of WAP pages as shown. They are also encouraged to forward the text message on to a friend ( an attempt to look at viral distribution) at the end of the process.
entering your story

We have added other elements to the game to increase both the sense of community and a competitive element for hardcore gamers. In particular, the website offers both the ability to make an entry and also allows you to view the whole of the book, thus far,  to allow people to identify with the larger community of authors. There is also a list of contributing players and the number of entries they have made. We felt this was analogous to the high score tables which are often used to address the competitive desire of hardcore gamers and encourage greater levels of participation in games.

The game is already giving us some really interesting results on users and please fell free to contribute, preferably from your phone browser, or check out the website to read the masterpiece itself.

Although for some of you this concept may seem some what bizarre it highlights that there is still room for innovation in even the simplest technology.

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Re: this is not a game!

awoywood | 08/06/2006, 19:42

awoywood Cool ! Great idea.
It's like those open ended books you could read (and write) in the Web. Have you seen them? You read the book in an interactive way. You are the main chaacter and at the end of every page you have to choose one of many options. You may arrive to a page that hasn't been written yet, then you have the option to write it. The good thing about this options at the end of the page is that this way the story grows as a tree, leading to very unexpected roads...
BTW, nice, elegant web design...

Re: this is not a game!

coultonp | 09/06/2006, 06:08

coultonp Alejandro

Thanks for your comments its great to hear that people are enjoing and seeing the potetial of story based games. I havent seen the books online but its sounds like the stuff Steve Jackson started with the printed role playing game books which I always enjoyed myself. I will have to try some of the online stuff. We did think about allowing people to start new branches to this story by allowing mutiple enties from the last entry but decided that it would probably lead to too many dead ends.Although we may try that next time.
I cant claim credit for the wb design i was done by my PhD student Will Bamford who has been developing this project but I will pass on your praise.
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