Image by Ronja Moss, 2012.
So Muse Finder the twitter game is a joint project between Ronja and myself that started off small and got really big really fast. The game version is a bit like a tour. A group of people travel through Melbourne, checking in at various locations (via QR tags) and choosing from the options that come up as to what kind of art they want to create in that space. Their creation is then uploaded and hash tagged for easy finding afterwards. The choices they get to make at each location look like this:
The aim of the game was to get people into a physical environment creating content for a digital environment, to get their creative juices flowing by providing a framework of inspiration, and to get a bunch of cool people to create a bunch of really cool stuff. We succeeded on all three counts I think.
We ran a guided tour of the game for this assessment, but also as a prototype of the app for development later. We started at the shot tower and explained the rules to our group. We also explained where we wanted the app to go eventually. Then at each location, the group members scanned the QR tag and were directed to choose options presented to them (like in the decision tree above). Then a description of the task was presented to them and they had 5 minutes to create their art and upload it.
The game worked really well and we got some useful feedback for the development of our app at a later date. We documented the experience for our digital story.
Although everybody tweeted as part of the game, a problem with the Just Sayin’ app (which we were using to upload out text, sound, photos and video) means that none of the tweets can be searched via their hash tags. This is something we will correct for the app by integrating our own media uploader instead of relying on 3rd party apps. Some of Anke Willems tweets from the tour can be found here if you scroll down a little (just to prove we did tweet).
So when we ran the tour, what worked? We asked our group for feedback and got some awesome responses. Overall what we all though worked well was the group aspect (unexpected), the actual interaction required with the physical and the choices given to the participants.
Some stuff that didn’t work so well included the Just Sayin’ app we were using to upload (not something we could control, but something we can certainly improve for the next version of our app/game), the internet connection for some people on certain networks (which will remain unnamed, and to be honest was also out of our control) and it took us almost twice the amount of time we thought it would, even though we generally stuck to the time limit of 5 minutes for creating.
I’d love to run this tour again, once we have the next version of the app ready to test out.
Zoe MacLean 