DISSERTATION: The Escape Suitcase is started!

autoethnography, critical making, dissertation, Process Writing

Well, it’s been a while!

Yes, I finished reading the Puzzlecraft book, and it was helpful for conceptualizing the kinds of puzzles that I want to put into this game.

I also decided on the number of puzzles: three multi-step puzzles. At first, I was looking at five or more, but I realized that I am hoping for each puzzle to take 5-10 minutes to solve and for a total playtime of 30 minutes, so that meant thinking about how much I could realistically expect players to do. Each individual step won’t take so long, but figuring out the clues and what they have to do will hopefully take enough time to be satisfying without being frustrating.

I don’t want to spoil anything about the puzzles, so I won’t write about them here, but there are three distinct ones and I’m decently happy with the “hybrid” aspects, which was something I struggled with before. The question I found myself asking was “why does this need any digital components” or, alternatively “why does this need physical components?”, but designing some aspects of the puzzles settled that for me.

One current challenge includes finding the right suitcase (but Enric has offered to show me a few that he has been collecting! Yay!), although I may make one myself out of wood because of the high degree of customizeability that would give me.

Another challenge, though I think I’ve nearly solved it (maybe!) is the narrative framing of the game. What’s the point and what are these puzzles about thematically? I want them to make sense. I think this is a game about “Opening Up” with a friend/to a friend/getting a friend to open up. Maybe. More on this as it develops.

So, I’m almost ready to start building prototypes. I’ve ordered some materials, including some locks, and a tiny touch screen, the new Raspberry Pi 4, some other stuff… It would unfortunately spoil some of the puzzles if I told you more about the materials, I think.

More as it comes!

DISSERTATION: Project 03 has started!

adventures in gaming, autoethnography, critical making, dissertation, Process Writing, research

Last week, I managed to break through and figure out what I want to do for my third and final dissertation project! It’s a suitcase game where you have to unlock a variety of small boxes, encounter messages from previous players, and leave messages of your own about particular themes/prompts/topics.

Now that I’ve come up with my concept for my last project, I am researching whether something like this has existed before. There are definitely “escape rooms in a box”, but these are largely cardboard boxes with items that you then take OUT of the box and use to solve the puzzle. The box itself seems to matter very little — and I think that’s an affordance that could use more exploration.

What makes this challenging as a constraint is that there isn’t going to be a lot of physical space or surface area to work with. But I think that as long as I colour-code things and clearly signpost the connection between the clues and the boxes, it’ll be fine.

So today is a day for researching. I’m immersing myself in escape room literature, looking at Escape Room boxes, guides and philosophies about designing escape rooms and types of puzzles. It’s fun! It’s exciting — and that matters a lot when you’ve been feeling burnt out. The fact that something feels right and good is nice.

Recently, a peer of mine (Scott DeJong) who saw my design sketch about the new project recommended looking into Scott Nicholson’s work with Escape Room boxes in classrooms, and I’m now noticing that his work also comes up from Escape Room designers, which is neat! Scott came to my queering game controls panel at CGSA a few years ago and his insights were really interesting.

There’s a lot of puzzle advice out there, both generally and specifically for Escape Rooms, and I am definitely already breaking the rules because I am using such a constrained space, so I will have to play up other aspects like colour-coding (for example) to clearly signpost what goes with what.

I’m about to go down some rabbit holes… See you later!

CGSA 2019 Recap

autoethnography, dissertation, Process Writing, research

Hi folks,

So, I just got back from CGSA (the Canadian Game Studies Association) in Vancouver, BC, which I followed up with some hiking and sightseeing on beautiful Vancouver Island. The conference was pretty excellent, and the past week has been extremely relaxing and good for me. (I’ll post my CGSA talk and slides eventually.)

Now, though, it’s time to get back to my dissertation work, and to be honest, I am a little worried — by now, I’m supposed to be three and a half months into my new project, but I’m not. As I’ve mentioned before, there are a lot of reasons for that. I lost the first month of project 02 to exhibiting and traveling in Europe followed by running last year’s QGCon. I lost December and January (months four and five) to burnout from the RCMP work that I was helping Tom with, as well as to getting ready to teach in January… And then, I needed two and a half or so extra months to finish TRACES.

I could have opted for a less-finished prototype, but I felt a strong connection to the project, and I really wanted to make it as “finished-for-now” as I could. I am very, very happy with the end-result of the project. But it took time.

That’s time that I didn’t use for Project 03, or for dissertation writing. Now, I know (and so do you, if you look back on this) that I have been writing this entire time, but I haven’t been writing formal chapters.

I’m happy that I did use my CGSA presentation to write a few thousand words about archival practices. I think it’s a good initial first go with some strong thoughts, and I did get some suggestions for who I should be reading/looking into from the audience, including: Dene Grigar from U of Washington/Vancouver, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Jennifer Douglas (who writes about the subjectivity of archivists and on documenting workspaces and personal libraries at the NYC Public Library)… And I was reminded of a few sources that I should definitely be citing, such as Donald Schon (inescapably awesome work), and Barr, Khaled and Lessard’s MDMA work (I don’t know if it’s formally published somewhere now?). Adrienne Shaw’s Encoding and Decoding Technology sounded liked something I’d be interested to read, as well as Kat Holmes’ Mismatch.

John Sakloske brought up questions of ephemerality that I didn’t agree with but will certainly have to address. Raph’s Delete Jam (happening tonight) also brings these questions up, philosophically and affectively.

All this is to say that I am not sure that I am on track to finish writing or to defend by May 2020. I will try to finish my next project in three months, but I don’t know that I will. From there, I have to write about 50 000 words, which, honestly, isn’t too bad, but I know that I have a lot more to say than that, and that this will all need editing. I also have a lot to analyze in terms of materials. I have to get many hours of audio transcribed in order to analyze it with grounded theory. But I think I will have to only include a sample of that in my dissertation as an appendix.

Right now, I haven’t been as in-touch with Rilla, my supervisor, as I would like. Since she’s on maternity leave and the work is still plugging along, I guess that’s okay, and we’ve already talked about what would happen if I didn’t finish on time (the answer is pretty well just to remember to save up a little money so that I can finish at the end). Money is a bit of a concern because Tom hasn’t yet found a full-time job (he’s doing some worthwhile part-time work in the meanwhile). My budget is in order but it depends on Tom being able to pay his half of the bills. He’s still also working on the various complaint files that he still has to have a part in.

So, I’m trying to figure out what this project is about. This morning, I was thinking about themes like connection/intimacy, as well as interpretation. I was thinking of electronic motion and vibration. They’re two areas that I haven’t done a lot with yet that my peers, like Ida and Squinky, have been doing neat stuff with. One idea that came to my mind as I was half-awake was a game where you have to interpret the motion of a digital/electronic device. More on this to come! One concern that I have is that I wanted to try out a game with clearer outcomes and win/lose conditions than the previous one, and this direction doesn’t seem to be going that way. I don’t want to rest on my laurels! Another concern is that working with the technologies that I did for TRACES involved a lot of trial and error and programmatic problem-solving that was more difficult and time-consuming than I anticipated, so I wonder whether it would be better to work with a technology that I already know.

More as it comes!

The TRACES trailer is out now!

autoethnography, critical making, dissertation, playtest, playthroughs, Process Writing, research

Hey folks,

After last week’s playtesting, I spent this week working on this trailer for TRACES! I am so excited to be able to share it with you!

Photos forthcoming once I get the chance to edit them!

I learned so much this week — got a better handle on Lightworks, learned how to do some basic colour correction in Resolve…

Soon, I’ll have to move on for now from TRACES to my final dissertation project. I have been trying to think a bit about what I’ll be making, but so far, it’s still wide-open!

Happy watching! I still have to figure out how to add subtitles on Vimeo — I’ll be working on it! It’s important to me to have the video be as accessible as I can make it. I just have to manage my bandwidth right now.

DISSERTATION: Playtesting TRACES and ACT ‘NORMAL’ this week!

autoethnography, critical making, dissertation, playtest, Process Writing

I’m happy to be able to say that tomorrow and Thursday, TRACES, along with its companion larp, ACT ‘NORMAL’, will be playtested this week!

It’s been a hard road since September 1st — I easily lost three productive months (September, December, January). Technically, May is the 9th month since I started TRACES. I am hoping the next creative project goes more smoothly and fits more neatly into the 6-month timeline that I have planned for it. Actually, I am hoping to be able to use this last project to end up back on track in terms of writing the dissertation component of this project.

We will see if that happens — at this point, I think that I have to accept that doctorates are hard, doctorates while dealing with systemic issues doubly so, and that they take time. I have to be careful about how I plan my time in order to avoid burnout (I really came up to the edge of it during this project around December and January, largely because of issues related to Tom’s work). Learning to take a step back and limiting my involvement with the things that I do not have energy for is an important lesson.

Meanwhile, I have seventeen players lined up to play this week. That’s amazing! And I think it’s plenty of data for my purposes, although there will certainly be future playtests if I can manage it.

Some of the challenges around playtesting this game are that, ideally, it would be played in a crowded, busy space. The challenge with that is not wanting anything to break or go missing, or to get in trouble for playtesting publically where I’m not allowed (since I will basically gaffer-tape the sculptures in various positions where they won’t damage any paint). Getting the space that I did get is not going to be possible as often as I would like — it’s unusual for a solo project to be allowed to use the space in that way.

I guess that brings me to the Companion Larp for TRACES, which I wrote in order to try and solve the issue of not having a crowd to play in. In a nutshell, I am asking people to play characters/caricatures of people they would expect to meet in 2019.

What else should I be recording for posterity in this post? A lot of the records are in github, in the version history of documents I’ve been writing.

I guess I am just, at this point, overwhelmed with how much care I have for this game. I really feel like I’ve put myself out there in a way that feels vulnerable and exciting.

Oh, I guess it’s also worth mentioning that the “final for now” version of the Escape Room that I have been helping with is up and running as of today.

I have no idea what I’ll make next, but I haven’t stopped collecting the molded pulp paper forms when I get the chance. I’ve got some excellent ones that Marc and Gina gave me recently. For now, I’m focusing on doing the best job that I can playtesting and documenting this game that I care for so much.

Sandra’s Keys

portfolio

(2019.)

“Hey Mom, sorry that I missed our last visit… It’s exhausting to get you into the car with your mobility issues. I’m not sure when it became my job to taxi you around.”

Sandra’s Keys is an educational escape room about older adult mistreatment developped in collaboration with ACT Concordia, CREGES (Centre de recherche et d’expertise en gérontologie sociale) and RECAA (Respecting Elders: Communities Against Abuse) for the B/OLD conference. I consulted and helped to co-design on this project.

[PROJECT HOME at ACT.]

TRACES

portfolio

(2019.)

Greetings, Traveler!

You have been chosen to return to Earth’s early 21st century in order to collect trace residue from participants in our experimental research program for further analysis. You must be very excited!

TRACES is a physical-digital hybrid game experience about time travel and trans experiences in a Western 2018/2019 context. It uses RFID technology and custom interfaces to guide players through a space while they are being observed and approached by the denizens of 2019.

DISSERTATION UPDATE: Plugging Away at It

autoethnography, critical making, dissertation, Process Writing, reflective games, research

Still working away on TRACES!

Yesterday, I edited the rewritten objects (2,5, and 7) and reached out to people to voice-act them. Some of those folks will only be available as of April 19th, so I’m back to working on the sculptures again. I’ve got two left to make and honestly, I need a bit more inspiration.

Today, I had an impromptu conversation about the project that I didn’t record (because it was impromptu) with one of TAG’s visiting artists, Jonathan Chomko. We talked about the goals of our respective projects, and, talking aloud, I identified three “pillars” for TRACES:

The first, as I wrote about when I started the project, is “Alienation” — which is one of the feelings that got me started thinking about this project in particular. The second is “Exploration” (and speculative fiction, exploring the space, etc). The third is “Recognition”, but as in, recognizing yourself in the game, or identifying in some way with the game (this one being aimed at other queer and marginalized folk).

Alongside that, I want people to feel like they’re doing something sort of covert, and like they have to watch what they do in the space.

I also expressed my worry that the game will somehow wind up feeling like an audio museum tour (I really hope this is not the case) because of the scanning of sculptures and accompanying audio. I think the kind of audio and the objects in question will prevent this, but it is something that was briefly brought up at the Arcade 11 playtest. I don’t find the comparison flattering.

So I kind of want to bring in more “game-y” rules. Maybe some kind of way to track what audio has been collected (my nightmare) would work, but I don’t think so. Maybe some kind of reward? Maybe some kind of rule for how to behave around the objects? Maybe something else? Possibly I need to help players get into character more? I’m looking for low-cost (timewise and difficulty-wise) ways of making the players more involved.

Maybe I’ll get the chance to talk this over with some other folks at some point in the near-future.

Meanwhile, here’s hoping I can get two more sculptures ready to paint!

Here’s what the task list for the game is looking like:

– Finish and paint sculptures, add RFID tags to them.
– Record and edit Audio for 3 re-written objects
– Amend the JSON dictionary for the game
– Measure timing for the text and speech in the game and adjust those variables accordingly (hopefully it’ll be similar within one object).
– Update the Raspberry Pis with the new code and audio files and hope they don’t break.
– Playtest!

DISSERTATION: Playtest Crunch

autoethnography, dissertation, playtest, Process Writing, Uncategorized

I have an unsurprising confession to make: in the time since my last blog post, I crunched to get a version of TRACES ready for playtesting at Arcade 11.

You can follow the traces (ha) of my digital programming crunch here: https://github.com/jekagames/traces

Between each commit, I was working with all the different broken processes unless I was sleeping.

The other physical object-making crunch that I engaged in is evident on instagram.

Everything took longer than expected. There was a lot to do to get the project ready — and the fact that each task took longer than I expected it to — each and every single task — was a constant source of stress.

The documentation for each of the libraries that I was using was incomplete, poorly-written, or assumed knowledge that I didn’t have (or was never meant to be combined in the ways that I needed). They’re usually open-source of course, and I appreciate that people have other jobs and other work, but when your constructor uses the same name for the variable and the data type without explaining, that’s really difficult to parse (looking at you, socket.io).

For the installation of certain things on the Raspberry Pi, I got it to work once and I’m not sure why it worked, because it wouldn’t work again on the other machines even though I followed the same instructions. So, instead, I cloned the card. I’m a bit nervous about when I have to update the code and the audio files and such. I hope it’ll go okay.

My 3D models would look fine in theory, but would have physical limitations or issues when I actually printed them. I had to redesign one particular object something like 4 or 5 times — and wait in between each re-design to print it to see what problems arose.

So, I expected to have around a week to build certain parts of the project and instead wound up with 24 hours. What a mess.

I am very, very grateful to the people that helped me — by volunteering their voices, by helping me with programming, by physically building things with me.

Right now, that’s these folks (quoted from my credits):

“VOICE ACTING
System Voice – Natural Reader (modified)
The Handler – Jess Rowan Marcotte
Object 10 – Ash Cheshire
Object 09 – Thomas Deliva
Object 01 – Gina Hara
Object 05 – Enric Llagostera
Object 02, 08 – Jordan McRae
Object 03, 04, 06 – Lukas Rowland
Object 07 – Dietrich Squinkifer

3D-PRINTED OBJECTS
Jess Marcotte (20×4 LCD cover, Arduino Uno Case top)
brandroid64 (Brandon Bowles) (Customizable Raspberry Pi 3 (A+/B+) Case)
djminnesota (Dan Johnson) (Arduino Uno Case bottom, modified by Jess Marcotte)

SPECIAL THANKS TO
Enric Llagostera and Dietrich Squinkifer for their help with all of my programming questions and for helping me debug.”

Some of that will change, though, now that I have had the chance to playtest. I have some internal playtest notes, both physically written down and that I took of my general impressions after the playtest.

Obviously, the sculptures that Tom and I made in 24 hours are not the final sculptures. I actually spent a fair bit of time calling around and contacting Molded Pulp product companies to try and find more of the kind of molded pulp that I had from our dishwasher (that I turned into objects for the game). It turns out that most local packaging companies do not make molded pulp products. One company only made 2 products, which they sold by around 20 000 units at a time: 4-cup holders and egg cartons.

So. I went to a caterer’s store and bought molded pulp takeout containers and plates in a variety of shapes. The nice thing is that they’re compostable, so I feel okay about using them for that reason since I imagine there will be waste/mistakes (though I will be painting the final sculptures). I do have a few leftover shapes from the products I had. I’ll try to work them into what I make.

So. That’s on my list. Making molded pulp takeout container sculptures. Nice.

The next thing on my list is finishing 2 more controllers to accompany the first one that I made fully. I managed to make 2 for playtesting — one that I had fully finished and one on a wooden form that Tom helped me make. So, that’s something I still have to do.

Then, from there, I want to try and further synchronize the text that’s displaying with the audio. I think that means adding another database entry and passing a variable into it in milliseconds that also changes when a specific object from the database is called, and for me to individually check how fast the text needs to display compared to the speaking voice of whoever voices a particular object.

That brings me to two very important other items: first, it seems that some of the voices were a bit distracting to players, so I will likely have to re-record those. Certain voices may also need to just be a tad louder.

Second, it seems like some of the objects are overly didactic, leading to an overly didactic impression of the game. With some playtester advice in mind, I will be thinking about whether I should cut certain objects, about whether to add or change certain stories, and whether to shorten certain parts (like in the introduction — I think I will cut a bit out from there).

This project really changed gears in November 2018 and became more about the rise of fascism in North America, in some ways. I think that I need to return to my goal of telling the stories about trans people (particularly nonbinary trans folk) in our times. The rise of fascism is a part of that, but I think there’s a little too much of it in there right now, which is why it’s coming across as didactic. Also, I was trying to write from the perspective of people coming to the past to study it — so I guess the didactic tone in that way is part of that. But I guess I need to bring it back to the characters and personal stories.

There’s a lot to do! But I do think it’s worth taking the time to do it before I move on to the final project.

DISSERTATION: Time Marches Ever Forward But Now So Is My Project

autoethnography, critical making, dissertation, Process Writing

Just dropping a note to say that work on Traces is going well — I’m actually hoping to have something playtestable for the very beginning of March, so I’m busily working away on all fronts — I’m soldering components for the scanners and screens, installing software on raspberry pis, writing code, thinking about sculptures and recording audio, thinking about displaying the script on tiny screens, thinking about the aesthetics of the controllers and how they’ll all fit together… There’s a lot afoot.

It’s exciting to be in a thick of it, even though I’m keeping a hectic pace. I would love to have something finished in time to playtest at Arcade 11 — that’s currently my goal. I would be right on track for six months with this project if I finished by then, which is kind of incredible given the delays and difficulty I was having with it earlier.

Squinky helped me with some programming last week. I also had to figure out how to work with the Uno clones that I bought (the Metro 4 Express from Adafruit), which didn’t work as expected out of the box. I had to write in a new board definition in one of the libraries I’m using and disable a different library that didn’t play well with it (the servo library). Squinky also helped me get audio working.

One on-going concern is that I have a 4-line LED screen, but I have to be careful about the max number of characters it will display because it will simply cut text off. I will have to write something that trims the dialogue to the right character length and then shows the next bit of dialogue at an appropriate pace. That will probably require some massaging. I’m sure it’s possible, but I think I’ll likely need help figuring it out. I’m currently waiting on USB backpacks for the screens that should arrive tomorrow so that I don’t have to fiddle too much with the wiring and can control the screens through one of the serial ports.

I was recently chatting with Enric Llagostera, who helped me to challenge my assumptions around what the controller could look like. I had given a lot of thought to what the objects the player scanned would look like, but other than wanting something functional that won’t overheat the components, hadn’t given thought to how the scanner would look beyond that. I had thought that I wanted a very raw look, that showed the components and looked sort of future-hacker-Shadowrunny. I’ll be trying to rethink that while, again, not overheating anything and not interfering with the functionality of the boards and such.

I also have to do some thinking about the dimensions and designs of the objects — they do have to be a certain distance away because of the range of the scanner (I don’t want the tags to interfere with each other). But I also don’t want the objects to be too huge, necessarily. I am thinking it could be cool for some of them to be installed with either suction cups or double-sided tape, so that I can vary how I position them in the space.

Well, I’m going to keep at it! Here’s hoping I manage to get it all done.