Beat-The-Freak

My final project is finally complete! Here's the link:

Beat-The-Freak

Project Abstract

What is the easiest way to solve any sort of dispute without physical conflict? Clearly the answer to this question is the age-old game of "Rock Paper Scissors". This simple, yet influential game is the basis of my final project for Advanced Interaction. I have created a Rock Paper Scissors game that was influenced by the Coney Island Sideshow. You will be able to select your freak, and engage in an intense Rock Paper Scissor battle as your unique character. As you play the game, if you win, you are rewarded with a fact about your freak. This allows you to learn about your character as you play. On the other hand, if you lose, you must submit a fact about yourself to the "Freak Selection Committee". All of these facts are saved in a database, which can be accessed by anybody. This interaction takes a well known game, and puts an intriguing and fun spin on it.

Progress... slowly

I'm making progress, slowly but surely. I have been working on a lot of character sketches. Below are a few of the sketches that I've done. The first one is a really rough sketch of Inked Inga, for the character selection screen. The second one is the same thing, just of The Amazing Gorilla Man. The third one is of Lobster Claw Larry. This is how his hand will appear in the RPS interface. When LCL throws out any symbol (be it rock, paper, or scissors) this is what his hand will look like. The symbol that he threw out will still hold its value, but it will always be this deformed hand. This will be a simple joke within the RPS game. Also, I've integrated the RPS Database into the interation as well. Now i just have to continue to design my characters and the interface as well. Here's the link to the updated RPS game. RPS Still a lot to go...

Freak Show

I've made a lot of progress on my final. This past weekend I took a trip to Coney Island to get a feel for the whole aesthetic that I am striving to achieve. It was pretty eerie seeing Coney Island during the winter time. The whole place was abandoned, and it was getting dark. After my trip, I went on www.flickr.com and found a bunch of really good photos from the Coney Island Sideshow.

I also began designing my character selection screen, as you can see in the image above. I've determined who my three freaks are going to be, and began to lay out facts about their backgrounds and their lives.

Inked Inga-
1. She got her first tattoo at the age of 6. It was a ___(TBD)____.
2. Currently she has 371 tattoos covering her whole body.
3. While pregnant her heroin-addicted mother accidentally injected a tattoo needle into her vein.

The Amazing Gorilla Man-
1. He was born with a coat of black hair covering his whole body.
2. In his high school yearbook he was voted "most likely to discover a cure for baldness."
3. In his youth he once attempted to shave his whole body, but he spent the next week with a hellish case of itchy stubble.

Lobster Claw Larry-
1. He was born with deformed hands that strikingly resembled lobster claws.
2. His deformity was exploited since an early age, he was a child star on multiple sit-coms including: ___(TBD)___, & ___(TBD)___.
3. Ironically, he is allergic to shellfish.

These facts are subject to change, but I am currently working on their backstories, and random facts about these tragic yet intriguing characters. I chose these characters because they will each have an interesting hand (which will be the only part of them that you see in the game, besides on the character selection screen.

I've also completed the code for the database portion of my Rock Paper Scissors game. While it is not designed to fit the style yet, it is fully functional as a database. Here's the link to it: Test Freak Database The concept behind the database will be that if you lose, you are forced to submit something about yourself to the "Freak Selection Committee".

I am continuing to design my characters, the interface, and the stories surrounding the characters.

Final Interaction: Rock Paper Scissors REDUX

OK, so I decided to change my idea for my final project. I've had enough of Baby Stanley for the time being. I decided to revisit my midterm project, the Rock Paper Scissors game, for the final interaction. I plan on improving this game to meet my original concepts. As stated earlier in my blog I had originally intended to make the losers have to submit something about themselves to a database, so that an archive of all of the RPS players is created. This will enhance the gameplay quite a bit. Not only will you be able to learn something about me, I will be able to learn something about you, and the other players, as well.



I also want to redesign the interface of the game. Right now, it is very bland looking, and it does not have a distinct style to it. I would like my Rock Paper Scissors game to have the feeling of an old carnival game, in a retro Coney Island-esque style. The image below is an example of the style I am trying to pursue.




I have most of the coding complete for my game, but I still have to create the database, work on a new layout for the game, and figure out how I want to incorporate the database into the interface.

The Ghost of Peter Stuyvesant Audio Tour...

This tour was an interesting example of an interaction. I enjoyed certain aspects of this walking tour. The concept behind this interaction is that you are on a audio tour of Peter Stuyvesant's farm that once stood in the lower East side portion of the Manhattan Island. While you walk around the area that was once the farm, you are supposed to call the telephone number given, and enter the corresponding extension for the area that you are located. To my understanding, this is supposed to give you a sense of the 17th century Manhattan experience. First of all, I did enjoy the idea of the interaction. I liked walking around modern day Manhattan, and experiencing the history of the location via audio clips. While this interaction intrigues me, the way that this tour was structured lacks in its depth. I feel like the audio clips almost do not have enough significance, and their quality is relatively poor as well. I would rather the audio clips to be more conventional in a sense, similar to a walking tour of a museum. If there was an ambient background sound of the 17th century farm contrasted with a historical statement regarding your current location, I think it would have been much more successful. Another downfall of this tour was the fact that there was only 1 telephone number. Did the designers of this interaction consider the fact that many people would be calling this number at the same time, thus clogging up the telephone lines? I don't think they did. To solve this problem there could be a different telephone number posted at each location. This would encourage people to hunt down the next telephone number in a scavenger hunt type interaction. This would add more excitement to the tour, and also make the technology aspect of it much more functional. I feel like the ideas behind this interaction are interesting, but the execution of the ideas were not as successful.

Interactive Storytelling?

For the final project I plan on making an interactive narrative piece. I will use my character Baby Stanley as my main focus. I really liked the concepts behind Fred, Liz, and Katie's Anti-Technology piece, and I thought it would be interesting if the ideas were executed using technology. I think that an interactive story involving my character would be a really fun piece. Right now the concept is still in the planning stage, but soon enough I will be outlining and writing my story.

Stickerama

So the sticker project went over pretty well. I really enjoyed this project. We started off making a collage of our path through the city, and ideas relating to this. In my collage I incorporated ideas from Natalie Jeremijenko's "Ooz" project where she studied the habits of birds, and illustrated their path through the urban environment. I also used Google Maps to diagram my exact path through the city. After this process, we each made a sticker design and printed copies of it. For my sticker I chose to depict a character that I have been developing, Baby Stanley. This character uncontrollably transforms into a baby devil when he soils his diaper. I figured that it would be an interesting idea if I were to create a sticker for both Stanley and his devilish alter ego. When I put these stickers up around the city, both stickers were present in each location. I felt that it created an interesting spin on the assignment, because when you found one sticker you knew there was another one in the same vicinity.

I found it very interesting when I noticed other peoples stickers throughout the city. It was a very fun interaction staking out other peoples paths. I really liked Paula's stickers. I thought it was very clever how her stickers reflected the surface that they were on. I took some pictures of a bunch of stickers, but I could not send them from my phone to my email for some reason, so no pictures on the blog. O well.

Also, I was happy to hear that my stickers were being noticed around the city. One of my friends actually recognized my character and began to spot them out around the area. Also, one of my professors from another class, who was familiar with Baby Stanley, told me that he saw my sticker in the subway! I was very surprised that people actually noticed them! I really liked this little assignment. Now every day during my commute, I get to look for my stickers around the city. It turned my commute into game!

A Reaction to Paul Virilio's Thoughts..

Paul Virilio has some interesting points that he addresses in the CTheory interview, but I don't know how much I agree with most of his views. I'm not too sure if I see what he's getting at describing everything as an "accident," or how he describes TV as a "Museum of Accidents."

He makes an interesting point regarding the future:
"We are entering a world where there won't be one but two realities, just like we have two eyes or hear bass and treble tones, just like we now have stereoscopy and stereophony: there will be two realities: the actual, and the virtual."
He continues to state the we have made reality symmetrical. I found this to be a really interesting point of view, and it raises some interesting questions. Is it in our human nature to strive for this symmetry, to bring order and structure to our lives or are we simply reacting to our technological advances?

He also makes it clear that he thinks virtual reality has taken the upper hand to physical reality. I do not agree with this. I think that we are still in a primitive state of technology compared to what it would have to be like for virtual reality to take the upper hand. He talks about how the Gulf War was the first time that the virtual world really played an integral role in our lives. I found it interesting how he says that "The site of defeat or victory was not the ground, but the screen." This makes me think about how important technology is to us, but we take it for granted because it is all around us. I have been raised around technology including computers, video game systems, automated objects, etc., and half of the time I don't even realize their significance because these types of things are so normal to my generation.

Virilio raises some very intriguing opinions on technology and "accidents". While I don't agree with everything he says, it has made me look at technology and the virtual world in a very different way.