Week 11 reflections
From CTIN482
Our prototype demo gave us invaluable feedback for us to take our next step. Judging by the way people interacted with our guitar, it seemed that they were less concerned with whether the right note was played according to the sheet music. Rather, it was fun to just experiment and click on the buttons to make random music. I guess the experience would've been different if we led users by their hands and gave them visual cues to play a certain note. While that would be a good tutorial feature, it puts much more emphasis on education through restricted learning with a 'strongly suggested' process, hampering user exploration and fun factor. We also received similar feedback about our visual hand. While this hand serves as a cool piece of artwork and education tool for finger placement, the time and effort put into it doesn't contribute to user playability or make the game more fun. So, the group is back to brainstorming how we can incorporate multi-player elements into this little music game. By establishing a team-oriented goal, and perhaps some competition, how will this all pan out in the end? Last but not least, what is the player's incentive for completing a song? How can we create a reward system that will have players coming back for more?
-Maria
CENSORSHIP:
CHANGES: The Censorship project has made a few steps since the last post. We have now locked down the general shape of our censorship object: a stamp. Since the goal is to make the player with the object feel like the censor, giving them something which feels oppressive is important. A giant stamp, ready to slap a big (metaphorical) "RESTRICTED" on unapproved speech allows the player to get into the role of a censor more easily than, say, a wooden ball would have.
In addition to the aesthetic change, the function of the censorship object has changed. Certain undesirable behavior, such as the ability to add "addword" to the censored list (thank you, Bjorn), and having the censor be censored by his own stamp, is now detected and dealt with before it affects the function of the stamp. Additionally, the stamp now emits a particle effect when it fires, which serves the triple purpose of being eye candy, giving a "reason" why the censored party flies away, and clearly identifying who is doing the censoring. These functional changes will be important for interactions where multiple people have stamps.
QUESTIONS: We were thinking of changing the flinging so that the censored party is flung in a straight line away from the censorship object when they say a restricted word, as opposed to flinging them straight up, as the stamp does now. I have one main concern about implementing this idea: It's not as much fun.
The censorship stamp, first and foremost, is a learning tool. When the audience is being entertained, they are much more likely to experiment, learn, and retain the lesson. When the flinging is straight into the air, it's a wacky moment that people remember. When it is to the side (or even at an angle), it doesn't have the same oomph. Back in the early stages of testing, I set the fling so that it flung the censored party sideways, and it lacked the same impact as the upwards fling, to the extent that people sometimes were unaware they had been flung.
While it makes more sense in terms of real-world thinking to have the push be directly away from the censor, I think we'll keep the fling as it is.
Reality is a tool. Sometimes useful, but easily set aside when another tool does the job better.
-Erik
The Stage - Wrapping Up
At this point, the main mechanics of our Second Life sound stages are in place. Users are able to use the scenes to stage and film a famous scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. Our biggest problems now lay in usability and accessability.
The biggest obstacle is providing an easy way for avatars to film game footage from Second Life and view it in the island. We are using a program that saves the footage to the computer, which then must be accessed and viewed outside of Second Life. Right now there really is no program or technology that allows us to film and view footage in-world. How will users who don't have this program film and access footage? We did want to enable people to use their filmed footage to edit machinema in Second Life. But now it looks like the footage will have to be saved and edited outside of Second Life. In order for someone to be able to post videos they made from filming our scenes, they need to:
1) use a seperate program to capture the footage of Second Life gameplay 2) edit the footage on a seperate outside program 3) post the edited machinema to TouTube 4) embed the YouTube link in Second Life
Ugh. I really don't see any intuitive ways around this. I've found some helpful sights about filming in Second Life. Unfortunately they don't solve our major problems:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Movie_help
We'll have to see how effectively we're able to incorporate the recording element of our project. Additionally, we need to provide people with clear indicators of how to use our scenes. Unfortunately, we're running into some limitations of Second Life that we may not be able to find a way around in these final weeks. We're probably going to focus on polishing our two scenes, documentation, and adding signs, tutorials, etc. in our space to give users a clear idea of how to use our scenes.
-Jeffrey Pfingsten
There is perhaps no phenomenon in art or nature that better demonstrates the uncivilized id of mankind than violent griefing. That there is something deeply satisfying about randomly butchering people’s avatars in online games is compelling evidence for an inherent biological need for causing meaningless violence.
It should come as little surprise to anyone that griefing is not, as is commonly assumed, a recent invention. Archaeological evidence points to griefing as being a quite common practice among primitive man; indeed, many was the Neanderthal whose last utterance was a poignant and despairing ‘OMG N00B’ before his head was caved in by the large club of a griefer. However, the phenomenon of griefing is not just restricted to man. In fact, the first griefer known to modern science was the saber-toothed tiger. The fossil record shows that with its large canine teeth and powerful jaws, the saber-toothed tiger was uniquely adapted for pwning j00 - and pwn it did, terrorizing human settlements for hundreds of years with impunity, in what can be perceived as an extremely drawn-out form of camping. Though the topic is often glossed over in history books, some of the most famous people in history were griefers. Alexander the Great created the greatest empire in the ancient world by griefing every civiilization he came upon. The world LOLed at Napoleon for being a tad on the short side, but nobody was laughing when he proceeded to grief everything west of the Urals.
The point is, griefing is not an unhealthy behavior, nor is it an aberration of the otherwise loving nature of mankind. Wrong. Griefing is beautiful and natural, and I propose that it should be an integral part of our island in Second Life. It's just pointless to deny the human instinct for rulebreaking and schadenfreude, and the beauty of the internet is that it lets us break rules and cause meaningless suffering without actually having suffering the consequences. Let's all come together as one big family of griefers and griefees, and make the Cinema School Island the best damn place for senseless violence in all of Second Life.
(In the next installment of this two-part miniseries, we’ll look at griefing within Second Life, a phenomenon on which the author is uniquely qualified to elaborate.)
-Akshai
