Callie’s Page


This is my blog from my first semester at ITP. I have since switched to a Notion blog which you can view here.


Fall 2024


Intro to Physical Comp:



Intro to Comp Media:



Hypercinema:






Week 9 → Final ideas



Brainstorming / inspiration 


My project partner Julia (from Pedro’s section) and I met to brainstorm project ideas, and found that we were both very drawn to projects that would create a group experience or invite collaboration.

Ideally, this experience could be delightful or surprising in some way. We felt like an interesting way to accomplish this would be introducing opportunities for betrayal/trickery (a la Mafia, Among Us, etc). What if there’s a shared experience where each user has their own input, but their choices are hidden from the others? This could introduce a lot of variety to even a simple experience. 

The Exploratorium in San Francisco has a couple of exhibits like this, where a group of players each get their own input: 

Team Snake:
 https://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/team-snake

Freeloader (it even incorporates trickery as it’s based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma):
 https://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/freeloader

I especially liked the Freeloader example because it’s not just a fun group game - it also teaches the participants about Game Theory.

This got us thinking about other somewhat-educational concepts that could be a good jumping off point for a gamified experience. Our favorite idea was a game based on the tragedy of the commons, the economic/environmental concept that unchecked access to a shared resource will lead to overuse and destruction of that resource. The most common examples are pasture lands and overfishing. 

 




Final project concept


Our final concept is a cooperative and educational game based on the tragedy of the commons. The setup is a 4-sided table where each player gets their own button. The button is hidden from the other players, so that no one knows who is pressing their button or when. An overhead projector (or screen, depending on technical feasibility) displays a p5.js sketch running the game. 

We would want to playtest the exact mechanics & numbers of the game, but the basic premise is that the players are “fishing” from a shared pool. Each round lasts 10 seconds, and after each round the amount of fish in the pool will double the amount of fish left from the previous round. The goal is to accumulate a certain number of fish, and players take a fish by pressing their button. 

If everyone immediately takes many fish, the pool will be depleted and all players will fail. Will the players cooperate to ensure that there will be enough fish to reproduce for the next round? Or will there be cheaters who betray the group? 

We’re interested in the social dynamics of the experience, and the potential for varied outcomes each time it runs. We’re also hoping that the aesthetics of the game and the fabrication will have a pretty high level of polish since the controls are quite simple. 





Some preliminary inspiration for the aesthetics: 


Some preliminary fih motion exploration:




Open questions / considerations


(Thanks to Yeseul for helping us generate some of these questions)

  • Is the fishing randomized? Does the user know which fish they are getting when they press the button?

  • Is there a tracker for each user to see how many fish they have so that they know how close to the goal they are? Or should they just try to get as many as possible in a certain number of rounds instead of a set goal? If there is a tracker, how would that remain secret from the other players? Should it remain a secret, or should there be some way that players can get “exposed? 

  • We should do more research on existing games. Seems like there are some out there, but we are curious to see how they are structured. 

  • Is the projector a practical idea? We like the idea of the aesthetic, but we should test it out early on because it might affect the rest of the fabrication if we need to abandon the projector. Need to check what the ER has. 

  • How will the game communicate the "reproduction" part of the stages? Do we want it to be communicated?

  • After the game, do we want people to learn about / think about the tragedy of commons? Or, should they get enough from the game experience itself?