Month: March 2015

For my intervention, I put a dozen beach balls on the ground of the freshman quad and watched to see what people’s reactions would be.

I sat with them for about 25-30 minutes and people mostly just ignored them. There were around 25 people out of the maybe 50 who walked by that actually interacted with them. Many of the people just walked by without even glancing at them, and most others just kicked at them a bit as they walked.  There was also a truck that just kind of drove through without making any effort to go around them. Luckily none of them were particularly in the way.

There was one girl who was walking with a friend and she stopped to kick a few of them. She yelled for her friend to wait, but he kept walking, so she moved on. A different girl however, was REALLY into the beach balls.

She made a game where she wanted to see how far she could kick them, but didn’t get any of them too far due to the fact that a lot of them had deflated a bit and the wind kept them from going in a straight line.

One guy simply picked one up and walked away.

I think for the most part it would have been better to get bigger beach balls, and maybe to get more of them. The place I bought them from said they were supposed to be 14 inches in diameter, which was obviously a lie. I also would have waited for a less dreary day. Over all though, it was fun to watch people walk by and just absent-mindedly kick at the beach balls, and it was funnier that so many people just ignored them.

Final Implementation

The Great Sign Hunt was an open invitation treasure hunt which consisted of five posters put up in a loop. The hunt could be started at any poster with instructions  on each directing the player to a twitter feed where they would post their progress. The first player to complete a loop of the posters would be the winner, earning themselves a gift card prize. From initial planning, the scope of the hunt was brought down to accommodate convenience for the player, as well as simplifying the clues from riddles to general destinations. Both of these changes were an attempt to make the game easier to complete as participation was expected to be low.

The posters were put up in Curry Student Center, the Library Classroom stairwell, Churchill Hall, Hayden Hall, and Ell Hall. The posters were designed to appear like an old treasure map both to fit the project theme and to catch attention by being different from all of the modern posters found elsewhere on campus.

An example poster that was put up around campus

Results

After two days, I have received one tweet of one of the posters. No one has completed the hunt which is disappointing however at least there was some participation. Perhaps the various building hopping was asking too much of the player  and an even smaller area would have been more successful.

Its tik-tac-toe with insults! A brand new form of gamer-shaming! A game that goes to show that even with all these years of cultural evolution, we’re still a race that loves to abuse.

Jokes aside, this game trivializes and opens the door for a list of discussions regarding the cultural impact of certain actions and words. The game is centered about two players that are insulting each other with their own cultural insults. The first insult, represented by the glove, is based upon a medieval challenge, usually based in France. While the common turn of the phrase is “throw down the gauntlet,” knights would often challenge each other by tossing down silk gloves.

Gloves were considered a shield for higher nobles- a shield against dirt and perverted degenerates that was everyone else. Tossing down gloves was considered a great insult to the challenged.

The second insult is represented by shoes. In this case, we have Indian chappals. The form of this insult does no matter, as long as it is represented by a shoe. The shoe in Islamic culture is considered much like the glove in old French culture- it is a shield against dirt. Except, in this case, the dirt is actual dirt. Because shoes are used to move around, it is considered a grave insulting to meet someone’s face with the base of a shoe.

For example: before the US invasion of Iraq, an important hotel had a mosiac of President Bush sr. set into the floor of its lobby.

When the US army invaded, this floor was blown apart and then replaced with a mosaic of Saddam Hussein.

The game forces the player to insult through their actions, but makes these actions seem benign until their meaning is fully explained.

THE PLAN

The plan for this game was to get a group of friends together and give each player a pack of post-it notes. Each player would get their own color, and be told to explore a traditional Supermarket and seek out items that would seem vegetarian to them. They would then check the ingredients of the product to see whether or not their instinct was correct. If the product they selected has meat in it, like a Twinkie, then they would need to write the meat product on their top post-it and place it on the product before moving on. Once a player has placed five post-it notes, they report to the game master, a third party with no real stake in the outcome of the game. If someone were seeking to make this into a competitive game, these times would be the competing factor determining who winner and losers were.

The goal of this was to make people that are unfamiliar with vegetarian dining see how difficult it is to deal with being vegetarian in America.

Additionally, the idea was to also leave big post-its with an explicit statement about the meat contained in each of these products, most of which are bought without much thought. This adds an extra element to the intervention, one that persists after the intervention takes place.

THE STRUGGLE

The unfortunate thing about being Vegetarian is that most of your friends are aware of your limits, and are therefore more educated about what to look for in a vegetarian product. This foreknowledge ended up ruining the “raw experience” I originally intended to create. That said, it did result in a few surprises.

For instance- chewy chocolate chip cookies are often back with Egg involved. Like cake, these cookies need a pliable bonding agent, which made this image all the more entertaining:

Chips ahoy Chewy Cookies do not actually have egg in them. Does this make the product an healthier? HIGHLY doubt it. But this does make them conducive to a vegetarian diet.

Another issue with this idea was that having too large a group would attract too much attention. Our third playtest had five players, and that got management involved, claiming that we were marking up products in a manner that the management approved. This may have also been instigated by one of the previous playtests, during which I tried to use Sharpies on the products themselves.

i was forced to buy cookies.

I WAS FORCED TO BUY COOKIES.

Our second playthrough, we tried using Sharpies on Post-it notes. We stuck with the post-it notes ideas, but ditched the Sharpies because the markers kept bleeding through the Sticky Notes we purchased.

Finding volunteers for this intervention was also a major factor. Scheduling kept on messing up our plans to test out the game. Additionally, after the first playthrough elicited a negative response, most of my friends got a bit camera shy.

Most of them did not want to play again anyways, as these playtests were performed during times when the Grocery store we used was extremely busy. The crowd became a much bigger factor in the intervention than I had expected, as the human traffic often ground the gameplay to a halt. Most of the players often ended up shopping on the side as well, but that was because most of them actually had shopping to do.  This made the times difficult to gauge.

Another huge factor involved with the success of this project is the fact that people have different ideas of what is vegetarian. Vegans, Ovavegetarians, those Vegetarians-to-whom-fish-isn’t-meat- there are a lot of different definitions of what is really ok for Vegetarians to eat. Unfortunately, the group I managed to assemble seemed to share similar views on vegetarianism, even though I made it a point not to define the term in any way before starting each game.

THE RESULT

The game I ended up properly recording was a smaller game, with three players  around lunch time, when the store was reasonably empty. The players all went ahead and went about tagging faux-veg items.

The Plan:

For my intervention I walked around the show floor of PAX East 2015 taking pictures of people on their 3DS video game consoles. I would then upload those pictures to a Twitter account I created called @On3DSatPAX with the hash tags #On3DS and #PAXEast2015. I managed to take 35 photos total, although some photos contain multiple people on their 3DS consoles.

I didn’t verbally tell anyone about my Twitter account, what I used to communicate was a feature of the 3DS called “Street pass.” Street pass works when two people with 3DS consoles are close to each other where upon the both send a digital avatar for the consoles, known as a Mii, to the adjacent persons 3DS. The Mii can then be viewed with a personalized message. I made a Mii in the likeness of Mario, gave him the name “On3DSatPax,” and gave him the message “Find Mii Twitter.”

So for Friday and Sunday of the PAX convention I walked around PAX with my 3DS in my pocket taking pictures of people in the hopes that they would get my message and see themselves posted on Twitter.

The Strugle:

The 3DS does not allow the use of @ symbols in the use of either the name or the message of the Mii, not that it mattered because both the name and the message used the maximum allowed characters. So I tried to compromise in a way that was both clever, and relatively easy to understand the meaning of.

Something I did not realize before doing this was that a 3DS can only store up to 10 street passed Miis at anyone time. Meaning that if someone was not checking their 3DS regularly, there was a good chance they would not receive my Mii or my message due to the amount of people at the convention also street passing with each other.

The Result:

By the end of the convention I had four followers, who I assumed to be bots and spam accounts, and had recieved only two messages, which had nothing to do with the subject of my Twitter account. I also have know way of knowing if anyone saw anything I posted due to my Street Passing, and seriously doubt that anyone who did recieved my Mii bothered to read its name or its message (I usually don’t). You can see the documentation of the intervention here: https://twitter.com/On3DSatPAX