University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Getogether

(USC Thesis Other)

Getogether

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content Edelman 1 GETOGETHER By Bryan Edelman A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF FINE ART (INTERACTIVE MEDIA AND GAMES DIVISION) Examining Committee: Tracy Fullerton, Thesis Chair Interactive Media & Games Division Richard Lemarchand, Thesis Advisor Interactive Media & Games Division Loan Verneau, Thesis Advisor Mobius Digital UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA APRIL 2015 Dedicated to my grandmother, Anita Stevens (aka Encarnacion Perez) Edelman 2 Contents Introduction..................................................................................................................................3 Run-On In Three Dimensions.....................................................................................................3 Run-On In Two Dimensions........................................................................................................5 Pivoting........................................................................................................................................7 Getogether Games......................................................................................................................8 Thesis of the Thesis..................................................................................................................12 References................................................................................................................................14 Edelman 3 Introduction For my thesis question, I explored how the people we know change our world. Since most of us spend a lot of time around others every day, I thought it was important to analyze and express how those relationships affect us through an interactive lens. Interactions with the people around us shape us fundamentally in all aspects, and I wanted to explore them from an experiential standpoint. Analyzing the subject from a traditional, ethnographic research standpoint was a straightforward task, but how was I going to explore it as an interactive experience? As I had set out to make a digital project that could be consumable on multiple iOS and Android devices, independent of each other, I decided to make the relationships come from interactions with non-player characters (NPCs). Additionally, as a genre, level-based Runners seemed to be the best example of an interaction paradigm I could use, because the game's speed could keep the narrative delivery at a steady pace. It could create a sense of urgency that I had hoped would increase the connection between the player and NPCs. Run-On in Three Dimensions The game I started creating was called Run-On, a level-based Runner where players traveled through an abstract, colorful environment, finding characters along the way. The player would then help the NPCs through the environment via the follow-behavior that the NPCs performed; they moved and jumped on a slight delay based on what the player's character did. Physical obstacles needed to be overcome by getting both characters through without having them get pushed off the screen to the left side by the geometry of the levels. If Edelman 4 NPCs reached the left side of the screen, and were about to fall out of view, they would call out for the player to help them before being whisked off-screen, gone for good. Initial screenshot of Run-On Feedback gathered from playtesting showed that players felt burdened by leading characters around. Some playtesters would go so far as to continuously allow NPCs to fall off the screen so they would not be following along so closely. This was clearly not the way I had hoped the experiment would go. Instead of enjoying the company of the NPCs, players did not want them around and felt that they were active hinderances to the experience. Further development of Run-On in 3D. Edelman 5 Run-On was also a downtrodden and confusing experience. Up to this point, the game was focused on helping characters with their problems by moving them through environments. However, that manifested as colorful characters talking about sad subject matter for a large amount of the game. In addition, the game's controls were of console- controller-like game feel on a touch device, creating a mismatch between what the tablet devices were useful for, from an interactive standpoint, and the game, narrative, and aesthetics themselves. The ambient nature of the experience mixed with the sad and often confusing monologue from the characters answered the question of how people change your world, but the answer it supplied was that they bring you down with their problems. That did not feel like the answer to my question that I had been searching for. I decided to take the question in a different direction. Run-On in Two Dimensions An art style, a perspective change, and several character ideations later, I designed the second version of Run-On, eschewing its three-dimensional design for a simpler, cleaner, 2D style. Its world was inspired by the colorful world of the previous iteration, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll) and the Cartoon Network show, Adventure Time (Ward), among others. With an interaction scheme was designed from the ground up to take advantage of what the tablet interface afforded to players, I set off to make those interactions feel good. Players were able to swipe and maneuver their characters with playful interactions, receiving delightful output. After iterations on this art style, world design, and level structure, Run-On Edelman 6 was ready for Winteractive, the Fall thesis show. The evolution of the art style, from eft to right, leading up to Winteractive. Feedback from Winteractive was largely positive, with most players completing at least half of the content in the demo build of the game and a handful of players completing the entirety of the experience. Praise was given to the emotional tone of the world and its colorful, fun-loving nature. Particularly, it was a hit with women and children, in part due to its colorful and relaxed tone. However, in conversation with each other, players were unable to talk about the later sections and characters in the game, because they could not finish all of it; the difficulty level got higher as the demo went on. People who were less experienced with fast-action games had to restart the stage repeatedly before getting even a short distance through the content. This became an inherent problem to creating an isolated experience: players could not see the content if they were not good enough at the game, nullifying any sense of shared experience. Additionally, if I was trying to answer the question, how people change our worlds, why was the experience isolated to individual devices playing content by themselves with no interconnectivity? It did not make sense; I was wrong. Edelman 7 Pivoting That is when I decided to pivot the project. I reframed the manifestation of the thesis to not just create a digital depiction of how I believed people changed our worlds, but rather to give people the opportunity to change each others' worlds through interactions and physical proximity. Specifically, I was now targeting captive audiences, like people sitting at Basketball games or concerts. I wanted there to be a reason for as many people as possible to play a game together and for that play to be based somewhere besides a living room. Getogether's current logo. Thus, Getogether was born. Using a large amount of mobile phones, Android and iOS, I created simple, input-aggregated games that used the elegant design of touch and swipe mechanics. Inspired by the likes of Twitch Plays Pokemon (Anonymous) and Renga (wallFour), with their use of aggregated input, both digital and analog, I set out to create a system that could accommodate large-scale, interactive games at location-based events with the goal of creating shared experiences among the players. Interaction could be simple and quickly understandable using slick, mobile interfaces, utilizing simple touch and swipe interactions, with which the target audience was familiar. I thought that if I had people playing the same game together, they would change each others' worlds not only in the outcome of the game, but also in regular communication with each other before, during and after the Edelman 8 digital experience itself. Left: thousands of players interacting with Twitch Plays Pokemon; Right: multiple players interacting with Renga using laser pointers. Getogether Games The games I created for Getogether offered interesting new interaction paradigms. Games had to be simple but also engaging, and, if the system were to be scalable, share simple and similar player interactions across each other. This was an entirely-different way of thinking than the design considerations of Run-On. Players wanted to have their contributions known, which got harder as more players were in a Getogether game. In all, I created four different games using a server-based architecture that allowed me to have mobile phones sending simple input, coupled with a second-screen experience where a main display interpreted and showed output. The first of these games was Ball in the Hole, my initial experiment in aggregated gameplay input. Players had to cooperate to move a ball through a 2D, top-down maze, getting it into a hole at the other end. Feedback from Ball in the Hole was largely positive, with players enjoying the course- correcting nature of the interactive experience. When the ball would sway too far to level- restarting obstacles, participants yelled out for everyone to move in the opposite direction. Edelman 9 Completion times of the maze varied wildly, with the majority of players finishing within three minutes, although some groups went longer than five. Left: players move the blue ball through a maze in Ball in the Hole; Right: players move a mouse out of danger in Dodge the Foot. As a follow-up experience, I resolved to simplify the input, due to the amount of difficulty that some groups had with Ball in the Hole's obstacle-laden maze. Taking notes from Nintendo's WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames!, I opted to create a short, quirky game that would end in a predetermined amount of time, Dodge the Foot. Players all controlled a mouse on a sidewalk, their input moving them only left or right, as they dodged a patrolling foot, as opposed to the 360-degree input from Ball in the Hole. After a ten-second timer had expired, the foot came crashing down onto the sidewalk, shaking the screen and killing the mouse if it was within its collision area. Feedback from Dodge the Foot was moderately negative. Players felt too limited by their choices and inability to see their own effect on what was going on in the game. Although they enjoyed the swiping mechanics, as they had with Ball in the Hole, players wanted to be able to do more, and have a greater interaction with the player object itself, in this case, the mouse. Armed with the knowledge gained from these two games, I decided to try a new kind of input aggregation. Instead of making everyone's input affected one object, I would allow for Edelman 10 each player to be able to see their input as it was received by the game. Players would be able to see their individual contribution. Players shoot blue bullets from the planet at enemy, orange squares in Radial Space Invaders. Radial Space Invaders came out of this idea. Each player could swipe in a direction and see their effect on the scene, as bullets would come flying from the center planet, out towards the enemies in the direction they swiped. There was an observable, calculable amount of feedback that could be seen alongside everyone else's input, and if the player wanted to make sure their input was seen, they could fire in a direction that no one was shooting as confirmation. As an interaction paradigm with a small number of people, this worked very well. Feedback from players suggested that they were happy with the observable effect they had received. However, as the amount of players increased, it became difficult for players to discern what was the result of their own input. So, I decided to take a page from some of my previous, non-Getogether games and create an experience that was fundamentally different than the entirely-cooperative paradigm I had set up in the other experiments; I made a Getogether game that was competitively multiplayer. Edelman 11 Teams are pitted against each other and must swipe in their direction to survive in Swipe of War. One of the final games I created was entitled, Swipe of War. By far one of the most successful Getogether experiments, Swipe of War was incredibly simple. It employed the game design of Tug of War, the physical game, by way of swiping on mobile devices to depict movement in your team's direction, with predefined team groupings assigned as green or red characters, respectively. After ten seconds, the team who had the gold ribbon on their side of the middle line was the winner. Unlike previous Getogether games that could, and make more sense to be, played individually, feedback for the game provided support for it being a cohesive, enjoyable experience. Before Swipe of War and its focus on creating simultaneous, competitive play for large groups, the games were relegated to being interactions that could be done with just one player, with the arbitrary rule that everyone should participate. Swipe of War's design was directed to leveling the playing field by making all of the participants the only active agents in the scenes that could affect the outcomes of the game. It was a paradigm that seemed to be a natural fit for the kinds of interactions that I was creating; this felt like the right direction for what Getogether games could be. By allowing the same kind of competitive multiplayer action that I was familiar with from my previous work, I was able to bring that sense of fun and Edelman 12 immediacy into a game with a large, simultaneous user base. Thesis of the Thesis With Getogether, I was able to use my skills to a greater extend than on Run-On. Throughout my three years at USC's Interactive Media & Games Division, I have made several games. The ones that garnered the most attention were always very ludic, immediately-fun experiences. Regardless of visual complexity, I have found that interactive experiences that are instantly engaging must be more reliant on game feel and pure delight than other, long form, experiences, which is a mindset that the Getogether games employed. Games were designed to be immediately understandable and fun, so as to continuously engage as many players as possible. The nature of pure, ludic play that the Getogether games employ highlights a multiplayer/social direction for my work. I find single-player experiences stagnant, because the rest of our world is connected through various forms of technology. If all other forms of technology have become more social, why has the majority of the game industry failed to keep up the pace? Although there are networked games, and new experiments in the way that it is manifested in-game, with experiences like Journey and Dark Souls taking a less traditional paradigm of online multiplayer gameplay, the settings in which we play these games has not changed. Each player is normally isolated in their own physical location; the initial goal of Getogether was to break that tradition. Getogether is an experiment in trying to make the world more interactive. Technology has been leading us to connect us to each other and allow us to interact, performing actions that we could not do before. Initially, that was relegated to simple, instantaneous messaging, Edelman 13 because the infrastructure was too weak. However, I believe that, as our technology increases, we will want to participate in more activities as a group. This kind of interactional shift has already been occurring in software industries outside of games. Word processing used to be a solitary experience, with a file residing only on the creator's hard drive. Now, thanks to cloud computing, we have Google Docs, which allows many collaborators to simultaneously make changes; it's a shift in thinking that has changed that interaction. Getogether's strength rests in the new kinds of interactions that we can accomplish with elegant input and aggregated decisions in more playful contexts. Edelman 14 References Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, New York: MacMillan. 1995. Print. Dark Souls. Tokyo, Japan: Namco Bandai Games, 2012. Video Game. Journey. Foster City, California: SCEA, 2012. Video Game. <http://thatgamecompany.com/games/journey/> Renga. United Kingdom: wallFour, 2012. Video Game. Twitch Plays Pokemon. Anonymous. Twitch Plays Pokemon. Twitch.tv, n.d. Web. <Twitch.tv/TwitchPlaysPokemon>. Ward, Pendleton. "Adventure Time." Cartoon Network. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.CartoonNetwork.com/video/AdventureTime/index.html>. WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames! Kyoto,Japan: Nintendo, 2004. Video Game

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Dissonance

PDF

Super Opera Squad

PDF

Light at the End of the Tunnels: level design and its relationship to a spectrum of fear

PDF

Come with Me: a cooperative game focusing on player emotion

PDF

Smile medicine: the playful approach to failing fast

PDF

Your presence is present enough: a thesis project postpartum

PDF

Chaos

PDF

Traversing the Green ward

PDF

The illusion of communication

PDF

Garden designing a creative experience with art and music orchestra

PDF

There You Are: an exploration of storytelling methods using in video games

PDF

The Observatory

PDF

The Death Mask: a study in interactive mystery

PDF

Bottles

PDF

Isolation

PDF

Inclusive character creator: an exploration of inclusive design for 3D character creators

PDF

Fall from Grace: an experiment in understanding and challenging player beliefs through games

PDF

The make of The Surveillant: a thesis project ""postpartum""

PDF

Reversal: expressing a theme through mechanics

PDF

My friend and me

Asset Metadata

Creator Edelman, Bryan (author)

Core Title Getogether

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 07/31/2017

Defense Date 04/09/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag audience,crowd,Games,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Fullerton, Tracy (committee chair), Lemarchand, Richard (committee member), Verneau, Loan (committee member)

Creator Email beedelma@usc.edu,edelmanbryan@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-622141

Unique identifier UC11304033

Identifier etd-EdelmanBry-3780.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-622141 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-EdelmanBry-3780.pdf

Dmrecord 622141

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Edelman, Bryan

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA