Hey everyone in VM606 who may be reading this. I’ll be updating the blog on my final project site from here on, so you can go check that out and comment on the progress. The working title is “Let’s Go For A Walk” (just to fill the title space) – I wrote about the beginnings of it last week, and I’ve been working on it since last thursday. I’m still working through a lot of the concepts so I’d love some feedback. Thanks! Here’s the link to the site: http://www.fourstringfilms.com/plymouth

In recent months (at some point recently, I’m not sure when), YouTube added an annotation feature to their video uploads, which allows users to add notes and links in their videos. I was initially intrigued by this as a good marketing tool and a way to make a video not dated (e.g. a promotional video for an event now can be a video with no date-related text with annotations added over it on YouTube). Then I stumbled upon a really cool thing people are doing with this function: Games. Check out this one (just an example of the interactive feature):

Yes, it’s rather clunky, especially if you have a slow internet connection, but it’s a really interesting concept. So I got thinking about the idea of ‘authored space’ that Evan talks about, and how I’m very interested in applying that idea [very roughly] to a space that’s important to me, but in someway different than using computer graphics – some way to integrate video with  some of this new/digital/interactive media in an interactive documentary game.

So here’s my rough plan: I’m going to make an interactive video tour / exploratory documentary that lets users navigate around Plymouth via YouTube. It won’t be entirely interactive (i.e. there will not be direct control of motion), but the video will be from a first person perspective as though the viewer is the character walking down the street. I’m still working through the concept, but I hope to make this an ongoing project about my hometown (and America’s Hometown….), for which I will create a frame work as my final project in VM606. I plan on this being a web-based documentary piece about Plymouth touching on ideas of sightseeing, tourism and home (like calling such a destination home) – it will have  a dedicated Web site where users can play it embedded in a page.

The idea of teaching through fun is something an old traditionalist high school teacher might cringe at, but when we look at out-of-the-classroom examples, it’s clear that fun is a huge part of how we learn. Along with fun, we learn through challenge, and a lot of times the type of challenge we learn from is fun in some way, or at least in retrospect.

When I was younger, my friends and I learned about the value of imagination and exploration (thought we didn’t know it at the time) through our endless wandering through the woods playing various imaginary games. We also learned a lot of straight forward things like how to ride a bike in soft sand and how to climb trees. I believe aimless childhood exploration is an extremely important learning experience, whether the kid is learning practical things about their surroundings, or learning the value of exploration and questioning.

As a young adult, most of the things I enjoy doing I learned through fun, exploration, and challenge. Sure not every moment of putting on outdoor concerts in the summer is totally fun, but the experience is, and that’s how I’ve learned things about planning events, audio feedback, and how to make a band sound great outdoors. I’d also disagree with anyone who would say stress is not fun – sure some stress is just purely stressful, but personally a lot of the situations in which I thrive are very stressful, and like a game, I feel immense pleasure as I work to overcome that stress – it’s a game, I’m mario, and the stress is King Koopa.

As I was exploring the alternate reality game, EVOKE, I happened upon its creator’s web site. Jane McGonigal is an accomplished game designer, and as you might guess by the high-flying nature of EVOKE, she’s got quite lofty goals. “I’m trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032,” she said in her blog. I started exploring her web site and stumbled upon her ART page, which has the page title “Cookie Rolling”.

At first I thought she was just making words out of cookies (which is cool), until I read the description. This game designer is taking on the ironically unconventional task of creating a game that exists outside of a computer. Granted, the display of the game is online, but she plays it herself in the real world. The game rules are outlined a the top of the page: She must write all 1406 words in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus with cookies, one by one, in separate cities anywhere in the world. People tend to consider a game to be something you either play on court, a board, or a playing field of some sort. This game takes aspects of each common game type and creates a world-wide adventure and puzzle game, which is displayed with accessible layers of detail on this web page. I can see the similarities between this game and EVOKE, and it definitely fits into McGonigal’s style.