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Tracking Ida

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Tracking Ida

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Content Tracking Ida By Lishan Amde Master of Fine Arts Interactive Media & Games Division School of Cinematic Arts University of Southern California May 12, 2017 Tracking Ida Page 2 of 23 Table of Contents About the Game ............................................................................................................................................ 4 Overview ................................................................................................................................................... 4 Part 1: Puzzle Solving ............................................................................................................................ 4 Part 2: Role Play .................................................................................................................................... 5 Part 3: Finale ......................................................................................................................................... 5 The Story ................................................................................................................................................... 6 Jordan Moss .......................................................................................................................................... 6 Ida B. Wells ............................................................................................................................................ 7 Blending ARG with Installation ................................................................................................................. 7 Bringing the Archive to Life ....................................................................................................................... 8 Goals ......................................................................................................................................................... 9 Prior Art ..................................................................................................................................................... 9 Running the ARG ......................................................................................................................................... 10 About the Research Project ........................................................................................................................ 11 What Went Well ......................................................................................................................................... 12 The game itself ........................................................................................................................................ 12 Getting players to collaborate ............................................................................................................ 13 Serving a diverse set of learning styles ............................................................................................... 13 Immersion and Hand-On Artifacts ...................................................................................................... 14 Production Successes .............................................................................................................................. 14 Collaborating with an Interdisciplinary Team ..................................................................................... 14 We really did it .................................................................................................................................... 15 What Could Have Gone Better .................................................................................................................... 16 Logistics of Running the ARG .................................................................................................................. 16 Challenge of combining physicality with online activity ......................................................................... 17 Documentation ....................................................................................................................................... 17 Being true to the “This is not a game” aesthetic .................................................................................... 18 Playtesting on our target population before KDHS ................................................................................ 19 Scheduling and Management ................................................................................................................. 20 Tracking Ida Page 3 of 23 Lacking Strong Vision Early On ............................................................................................................ 20 Downfalls of Iterative Design .............................................................................................................. 21 Too much emphasis on installation .................................................................................................... 21 IRB Scare ............................................................................................................................................. 22 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................................. 23 Tracking Ida Page 4 of 23 About the Game Tracking Ida is an educational alternate reality game (ARG) inspired by the pioneering investigative journalism of Ida B. Wells in the 1890s. It piloted at King Drew High School in Watts, Los Angeles in March 2017. Players study the example of Ida B. Wells’ crusade against lynching and apply her strategies to an investigation of police and vigilante killings today. Along the way, they solve puzzles, comb through historical archives with the help of a phonograph, role-play as investigative journalists, and harness social media to spread awareness about an issue affecting their community today. Overview Part 1: Puzzle Solving In part 1, players navigate a trunk full of Ida B. Wells’ belongings. The trunk contains the salvaged pieces of Wells’ investigation into Memphis lynchings--what she was able to preserve after her newspaper office was burned down by a lynch mob in 1892. Players search for Wells’ investigative tactics, which she safeguarded against her persecutors in nested and locked compartments. Players solve puzzles in order to unlock each compartment. The first puzzle contains a set of headlines from two newspapers describing the same story: the Memphis Free Speech (Wells’ newspaper) and the Memphis Scimitar (a popular white newspaper). Players match the polarized headlines describing each event and arrange them into a story in order to unlock the next compartment. The second puzzle involves a set of letters to the editor and an audio recording of Ida’s voice, which must be put together to find the lock combination. The audio recording is in the form of a phonograph cylinder, with an accompanying note urging the Moss family to find a Tracking Ida Page 5 of 23 library that will play the cylinder and remarking that Wells has heard libraries in California are open to negroes. The players are of course already in a library so they ask the librarian to let them borrow the phonograph. The phonograph was handmade for the game to look like a real phonograph (inside, it’s actually powered by an Arduino), but we planted it at the library so that the players would have to find and access it. Part 2: Role Play In order to unlock the final compartment, players must put Wells’ investigative tactics into action: in part 2, players go out into their community and conduct interviews with folks who work with police killings. This work can be through personal experience, legal means, activism, social services, art, etc. For the sake of our pilot at King Drew High School, we arranged a field trip to the Watts Labor Community Action Commission and invited a diverse group of interviewees for the students to interview. These interviewees included community organizers, mothers and fathers of youth who had recently been killed by the LAPD, journalists who cover police-community relations, and more. Players role-played as investigative news teams, with each student taking on a specific role (Producer, Videographer, Public Relations Specialist, and Reporter). When they arrived at King Drew, we had press passes for them with their names and team names. Players record the interviews using cameras and tripods which we provided on-site. Using their footage from the interview, players prepare a 3-minute highlight video to show in class and to post on social media. Part 3: Finale In part 3, players return to Wells’ trunk to type the headlines for their interviews on Wells’ typewriter. After a few players type their headlines, a key falls out of the typewriter. In Tracking Ida Page 6 of 23 the fourth compartment, they find a cylinder vinyl record with a message from Ida B. Wells. They play the cylinder on a phonograph that was hand-made as part of the game. They also find artifacts that have to do with Jordan’s family history (more on this later). The Story Jordan Moss Players are guided through this experience by Jordan Moss, whose great great grandmother worked with Ida B. Wells in the 1890s. Jordan is a graduate from King Drew High School and is now away at her first year of college. She’s troubled by recent police killings striking closer and closer to home--first 18 year old Richard Risher getting shot by the police near her home in Watts (the same neighborhood as the students who played the pilot), and now another Black man getting shot down the street from her college. She looks towards Ida B. Wells’ work for guidance because of the family connection. Her grandmother finds Wells’ old trunk in their attic, and Jordan recruits players to find investigate the trunk and find information on Ida’s tactics while she’s away at school. Jordan communicates with the students via email and social media throughout the experience, asking students for their help and helping students figure things out when they get stuck. A bonus layer of story about Jordan exists for those who pay attention to detail: Jordan is the descendant of Thomas Moss, close friend of Ida B. Wells, who was lynched in 1892. It was the lynching of Thomas Moss and Ida’s investigations into the matter that launched Ida into her global campaign to end lynching. Articles about Thomas Moss are part of the first puzzle in part 1 of the game. In the final compartment, players find a handkerchief with “T. Moss” embroidered, and a photograph of Ida with the Moss widow and children. Tracking Ida Page 7 of 23 Ida B. Wells The story of Ida B. Wells has filled many volumes. This game centers on the pivotal time of her life when she first began her antilynching campaign: 1892. 1892 is the year that Ida B. Wells’ close friend Thomas Moss is lynched in Memphis, and she begins to investigate. After she publishes a scathing response to his lynching and the conclusions of her investigation, a white mob comes to lynch her. Luckily she was away traveling when they arrive so she remains unharmed, but the mob does burn down her newspaper office and threaten to lynch her if she starts trouble in Memphis again. At the time Ida sends the trunk to the Moss family, she is just about to move to New York to begin her life anew writing articles for the New York Age with a broad national audience. Blending ARG with Installation Alternate reality games are defined as transmedia experiences in which “take the substance of everyday life and weave it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world” (IGDA ARG SIG 2006). In Tracking Ida, players solve puzzles using real archives, interview real people and make real videos that they post on social media, but it’s all prompted by a semi-fictional protagonist who has a semi-fictional mission. An important element of most ARGs is that they employ the collective intelligence of a diverse community. The puzzles in Tracking Ida are designed such that each person takes on a different role. There are multiple steps: figuring out the task at hand, solving the puzzle, finding the code in the puzzle solution, and physically entering the code into the lock. Each of these steps is do-able when a group of people puts their heads together, but nearly impossible to Tracking Ida Page 8 of 23 accomplish alone. Similarly, for the role play portion of the game, each player takes on a specific role in the newsteam, and these roles are balanced for equal participation. With traditional alternate reality games (ARGs), there's a pyramid of engagement, with the majority of players classified as "lurkers"--people that watch others play but never themselves engage—and only a select few actually participating in solving puzzles. Because Tracking Ida aims to educate, I didn’t want to target only a few players and risk “preaching to the choir.” As such, I limited the game to tasks that could be completed with folks in the same room—although some tasks are performed online, like posting your team’s video to social media, everything happens when you’re in the room with other players. The platform for this engagement is not a website, but an installation. Bringing the Archive to Life Tracking Ida centers on real events and uses real archives. The articles lining the walls of the trunk all come from real newspapers from the time, articles that were important to Wells’ journalistic research. The headlines in the first puzzle use language directly from real headlines whenever possible. When the exact article we needed didn’t exist, we created the article using a combination of secondary sources (like history books) and primary documents (seeing how the same topic was covered by a similar newspaper, etc). There are no surviving copies of the Memphis Free Speech—the angry mob got what they desired; they erased the work Wells was doing in Memphis from the historical record. This project is in part about reclaiming history destroyed—using the archives when we have them, and re-imagining the archives when we don’t. Tracking Ida Page 9 of 23 This historical restoration was made possible through a strong collaboration with Jasmin Young, PhD candidate in history. Jasmin served as subject matter expert and co-writer for Tracking Ida. Most of the archives used in this project came from her dissertation work, which focuses on Black women’s armed resistance in the 20 th century. Goals Tracking Ida was created for Black youth who have limited access to radical tellings of history. The game is hands-on (historical artifacts, primary documents, immersive set design, etc) with the intention of helping youth learn history in a way that feels proximate and real-- something that is not often experienced in history class. Our intention is sparking intrigue that could lead to them choosing to learn more in the future. The game also targets those who may be aware of societal ills but do not feel compelled and/or able to do something about them. Tracking Ida aims to increase the civic engagement of players by giving them a taste of activism in a compelling and immersive environment. The game exposes players to the history of Black resistance and connects that history to present struggles. The game aims to make history accessible through a relatable narrative, in which the protagonist is from the same neighborhood as the students and is dealing with the same issues that the students are dealing with. The game offers students media literacy skills to cover social and political events with a critical lens using writing, media making, public relations and overall news production. Prior Art One successful study has been done on the effectiveness of games like Tracking Ida. The Source was a 5-week ARG used as summer STEM instruction for youth of color in Chicago. The Tracking Ida Page 10 of 23 project was a collaboration between The Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the University of Chicago (Univ. of Chicago, 2014). They performed an evaluation using both qualitative and quantitative methods and published results in the Journal of Play (Jagoda et. al, 2015). This study has been a model of sorts for us as we conduct research on the game. Running the ARG Tracking Ida ran for one week at King Drew High School (KDHS) in Watts, California. We took over three sections of 11th grade US History class: periods 1, 3, and 5. KDHS operates on a block schedule, with only a few classes meeting each day, making the planning of this ARG a logistical nightmare. Luckily the school administrator who helped make this possible, Tabitha Thigpen, saw this as a unique learning opportunity for her students and worked hard to make things as smooth as possible for us. Approximately 80 students at KDHS experienced Tracking Ida from March 21-27, 2017. For the puzzle solving portion of the game, which requires an intimate setting, we had groups of students take turns going to the school library to spend thirty minutes with the trunk. We quickly learned that this wasn't enough time for players (despite having play-tested it at this speed— more on this later), and had to double the size of the groups in order to give them double the time with the trunk. For students who were waiting their turn to play in the classroom, we had them participate in the "Companion Curriculum" portion of the experience. Jasmin Young, PhD Candidate in History with whom I collaborated closely on this project, took over the class. She brought in political cartoons from the Reconstruction Era for the students to dissect for day 1. On day 2, she brought excerpts from Ida B. Wells' first published book: Southern Horrors. She had Tracking Ida Page 11 of 23 the students take apart this dense text line-by-line, and used that as an opportunity to get into Wells' complex investigations. We held Part 2 (the field trip) at the Watts Labor Community Action Commission, located just five minutes from KDHS. Players worked in teams of four to interview different people. We had two rotations, with each interviewee being interviewed by two groups of students from the same period. Each period of class (1, 3, and 5) had a separate group of interviewees, making the list of interviewees about 10 long. It was a ton of work getting all these interviewees to get together—like planning a conference for one day of a game. Emilia Yang, PhD candidate in Media Arts and Practice, did an amazing job of getting these interviewees together. In future iterations of the game, we will probably have less labor-intensive ways of doing this, like having students meet interviewees on the interviewee’s own time. For part 3, we were back at KDHS. We had each news team talk about how their interview went, then each team approached the typewriter to type up the headline that their news article would have if they wrote an article about their interview. It was during this time that the key fell out of the typewriter and the players unlocked the fourth compartment. About the Research Project Because Tracking Ida has goals concerning learning and impact, we wanted to measure if these goals were being met. I enrolled in CTIN 510 Research Methods and am collaborating with fellow student Gabriela Gomes to conduct research on the running of Tracking Ida at KDHS. We are doing this with the guidance of both our instructor, Dennis Wixon, and Marientina Gotsis, our faculty advisor for the Institutional Review Board approval process. We conducted focus Tracking Ida Page 12 of 23 group exit interviews with students after each day of the experience to determine their thoughts and feelings about what they had experienced. We are currently conducting an ethnographic study to evaluate the educational impact of Tracking Ida and whether the experience shows promise toward increasing civic engagement. Our 3 main focus areas are:  Empowerment & action: Does this experience inspire youth to become more engaged in their communities? Is there any sort of transformational impact?  Accessibility and personal connection: Does history feel more accessible through this immersive/narrative-driven experience? Do students feel more connected to what they're learning?  Curiosity & interest: Are players curious about the history they learned? Are they interested in learning more? As the production at KDHS only just finished this week, and exit interviews only just finished two days before the submission of this thesis paper, we do not yet have the results of the qualitative coding of the exit interviews. I look forward to co-writing a separate paper with Gabriela which will go in-depth about our results later this semester. What Went Well The game itself As stated above, the research component of this project has only just begun. Many of my conclusions below are preliminary—a proper analysis of whether we met the goals of the game will be performed in a research paper later this semester. Tracking Ida Page 13 of 23 Getting players to collaborate Focus group interviews confirmed that collaboration was an integral part of the game. An unexpected outcome is that when asked what they learned from this week-long experience, many players reported that they learned the importance of collaboration and learned how to be better collaborators. The class which we took over to run Tracking Ida was one in which students had been working independently on quiet assignments for most of the year. Many players expressed that they were used to working alone in their classes, and that Tracking Ida took them out of their comfort zones and forced them to collaborate. Some of the players with quieter demeanors expressed that this game had gotten them to break out of their shells and be a better collaborator. Serving a diverse set of learning styles Observing the ways different groups of students collaborated, some interesting trends emerged. Of the three sections of class that we took over, two were standard US History classes and one was an Honors US History class. The instructor predicted that the honors students would progress through the game much more quickly than the rest. We discovered, however, that the opposite was true for any task that required puzzle solving. For puzzle solving, it seemed that the students who were excelling at school didn’t handle the lack of structure very well. They tried to create a semblance of structure by having players take turns reading the text from artifacts aloud, ignoring visual clues in the process. The students in standard US History, on the other hand, used the lack of structure to their advantage. Each player had a different way of contributing, with people shouting out ideas as they came up, and people more often thought outside of the box. Tracking Ida Page 14 of 23 For the role-playing portion of the game however, the tables were turned. The students in honors class were better prepared because they followed instructions and emailed Jordan on- time, meaning they got their interviewee assignment earlier and had more time to prepare. In this way, the game was balanced for students at different levels. Immersion and Hand-On Artifacts Some students believed they were touching the belongings of Ida B. Wells. And even those who didn’t fully believe it expressed that this experience had them fully immersed. A consistent theme across all exit interviews is that students were accustomed to reading about history in books, and that being able to see, feel, and hear about Wells’ history in this hands-on way made the history feel much more relevant to them and to today. Production Successes Collaborating with an Interdisciplinary Team Tracking Ida was born out of collaborations between graduate and undergraduate student game designers, historians, and artists of color. This was my first time recruiting a team from such diverse backgrounds, and the collaborations worked out very beautifully. Jasmin Young, PhD candidate in history, served as subject matter expert on the project. We cowrote the three puzzles in the game together, and used the archives she had already accumulated for her dissertation to write two of them. The collaboration was exciting for both of us: I had never worked with a historian before, and she had never worked on a game before. There were moments when we both got super excited about what we were making. When we made our last puzzle, the only one that required archives she hadn’t already acquired for her Tracking Ida Page 15 of 23 dissertation, we sat side by side combing through newspaper archives for the articles we needed to piece together the story. There was a moment when we started getting really into the investigation, feeling like reincarnations of Ida B. Wells herself, seeing everything in the historical record as a potential clue to the puzzle. I had a blast working with someone who’s so passionate about her work, and she had a blast seeing the me and the other designers bring her archives to life. Another strong inter-departmental collaboration was with Marton Robinson, MFA candidate in studio art in Roski. Marton took charge of materials design for the project and helped me make structural decisions about the trunk and phonograph. It was awesome working with someone who was an expert in the materials we were using and who had worked with antiques before. Marton is interested in bringing in more interactivity to his projects so the collaboration was fruitful for him as well. We really did it This was a massive production. There was the creation of the installation, which involved a bunch of historical artifacts, a phonograph, and multiple complex puzzles. There was the archive element and bringing in real history. There was the ARG element and interaction with Jordan, the protagonist. There was the actual running of the game at KDHS, which took a miracle (aka the sweat and blood of graduate students) to pull off. There was the filming of a documentary for four out of the five days we were at KDHS. There was the research element— exit interviews and analyzing their transcripts. Tracking Ida Page 16 of 23 The fact that we made all this happen is a tribute to the amazing team that I had the pleasure of collaborating with. Each individual took ownership over parts of the production, and somehow we pulled this off. What Could Have Gone Better Logistics of Running the ARG Before we ran the week-long experience at KDHS, most of our polish work focused on the game itself—polish that certainly served its purpose (who knows, maybe without that polish the immersion would have been broken)—but took precedence over polishing the process of running the game. While we did rehearse the running of the game itself, we underestimated just how tight of a production we needed to run. I think we prepared as much as we could have, given that none of us were experienced in running ARGs and this was an experiment of sorts, but in hindsight we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. In our exit interviews, we ask the question “What was your least favorite moment in the experience.” Hardly any of the moments students told us about had to do with the game itself, they had to do with how the game was run. They expressed frustration at the amount of time they had to play during their turn, or the number of people they had to play with, or the clarity of instructions from the host on how to get to the next part of the game, or the amount of time it took them to receive an email they needed to start their next mission. It’s tough to make time to rehearse things that seem straightforward, like the transition from a google chat to sending an email, when your task list is infinitely long. It’s easy to wave off rudimentary aspects of running an ARG as “easy” and choose to only rehearse the Tracking Ida Page 17 of 23 complicated parts. In hindsight, our rehearsals should have started earlier and included every painstaking moment of running the game. Challenge of combining physicality with online activity For the installation portion of the game, students played in groups of 6-12, but during the role playing portion of the game, all 20-30 students in the class were in the room at once, broken up into their groups of four to complete their interviews. At the installation, players were aware that another group of players had already solved the puzzles that they were trying to solve before they got there. Although players were still excited and managed to suspend disbelief, there was some messiness here that I think could be solved through some careful thinking and testing. Documentation During our week-long production at KDHS, our crew was spread thin: we needed one group to run the game and another group to shoot the documentary. This all happened during business hours, when most people in our network had classes and other obligations—we had to pull favors from all our classmates and friends to make this possible. When we returned to school the following week, one professor exclaimed to me, “You kept the whole department busy!” Much more planning and staffing went into the game than into the documentary, which I regretted after we finished. Many preventable things went wrong: battery failures, cameras dying, hours of footage with no sound, etc etc. What’s worse is we decided not to shoot one of the days when Part 1 was happening (we figured we would have plenty footage of this same part of the game from other days), and this turned out to be the most successful day. Everything went right, players were incredibly immersed, and players’ reactions that day were priceless. In Tracking Ida Page 18 of 23 hindsight, we should have planned to document every single day just in case our footage from another day failed (which it did in fact do). I write this paper as we’re first beginning to edit the footage, and we have hours of amazing footage to work with. Nevertheless, with both installation games and ARGs, the game lives on mainly in the documentation. I think documentation for this kind of experience, particularly when we have so many people play at the same time, should be a primary concern. Being true to the “This is not a game” aesthetic The framing of an ARG is super important. On one hand, “this is not a game.” On the other hand, we needed permission from parents before the experience began—media releases, field trip permission slips, and research consent forms—and thus had no choice but to explain to some extent what students would be experiencing. To make matters worse, the students were already aware that I was a game designer because the instructor had brought this up early in the semester to get students excited about what they would be experiencing. We did not fully appreciate the tension between these two framings of the experience early on—it wasn’t until students started to play that we realized the dilemma. Some students believed (or at least made us believe that they believed) that these historical artifacts were real and that Jordan really did need our help. Other students, who may have read the permission slips more closely or who had been paying closer attention to the words of their instructor, were “in the know” and saw through the act. This didn’t break the experience—even students who knew it wasn’t real expressed that they had been fully immersed—but it may have disappointed a few students. Tracking Ida Page 19 of 23 Playtesting on our target population before KDHS Due to the audience that we have access to on a regular basis, most of the people we got to playtest Tracking Ida at all stages of the project were college students and grad students in the Interactive Media and Games Division. Although we tried to get some high schoolers and non- designers for an informal playtest a few weeks before launching at KDHS, this effort led nowhere and we eventually settled for playtesting with adults and designers again. The first time a minor ever played the game was when we were already at KDHS. Testing on adults and designers meant that people played the game extremely fast and didn’t need as much collaboration to get the job done. This led us astray in two ways: because the didn’t need many people to complete a task, we thought the original headlines puzzle wasn’t robust enough to keep six people engaged. As such, we created an expansion puzzle, with the same mechanic but a different set of articles, with the intention of splitting up the playtesters between the two versions. When we got to KDHS, we decided to take this puzzle expansion out of the game because it was causing the playthroughs to be incredibly long. The second way this led us astray is that we planned to push people through part 1of the experience in thirty minutes, a gross underestimate. We eventually fixed this by having students play for twice as long, however, this meant we had to accept twice the population in order to get the throughput we had planned for. Had we known that this was the speed we needed to accomplish, we would have made other arrangements that didn’t require having so many people at the trunk at once. We knew from the beginning that playtesting with designers was a bad idea—we had no misgivings that this was the way to go. It just took a lot of work to break out of that habit and in the grand scheme of things we decided there wasn’t time to do that kind of recruiting for our Tracking Ida Page 20 of 23 playtests. After seeing how much time we wasted making the expansion puzzle, however, I realize this should have been a priority. Scheduling and Management Lacking Strong Vision Early On Tracking Ida is not the project I pitched to faculty in my second-year spring semester. I pitched an entirely different project, and came up with this project during a casual writing assignment, when all the pressure of pitching my thesis was off me and I finally had time to think. It wasn’t until the summer before thesis year that I decided, against advice from one or two faculty members, to make this my thesis project. I am very glad I made that decision—this project has been incredibly rewarding and fun to make—however, changing course late in the schedule had its consequences. I entered my thesis year still in the ideation phase of my project. Ideation probably only needed a few people putting their heads together, however, because recruiting for thesis teams comes early in the semester, I had already recruited my production team, which was large: our first meeting had nine people in attendance. I now had to manage nine people and make them believe they were in good hands when I didn’t have a true idea of what this game would become. While some team members moved fluidly from ideation to preproduction to production, others probably preferred to join a team that already had a plan. In the process of figuring out what the hell this game was, I didn’t utilize my team very well. There were some people who had approached me about the project and I recruited them even though I didn’t know if I’d have a role for them in the real project, simply because I knew they were incredibly talented and awesome people to work with. A couple of those people ended Tracking Ida Page 21 of 23 up leaving the project not because they wanted to, but because I didn’t have real use for them. I regret the disappointments and wasted time this caused. By mid-October, I had a strong vision of what this project was and who I needed to complete it. The team had shrunk to six core people (though it did later grow to 10+ as our needs grew). Downfalls of Iterative Design During fall semester, we made a semi-polished looking version of the headlines game and trunk compartments which eventually got thrown out. At the time we made it, we knew it probably wouldn’t be final, but decided to make it anyway because we wanted to be able to test the game with some semblance of the art we were planning for. In spring semester, we had to re- do this art in addition to designing the rest of the game. In hindsight, we should have built out more of the game in paper and done more puzzle design work early on, leaving more of the art for the spring. This of course wouldn’t have made for as impressive of a winter show, but it may have been better for the production process. Too much emphasis on installation Tracking Ida had many components, of which puzzle design was only a part. Production- wise, however, the installation and puzzle design got nearly all our production time. It was something easy to obsess over: it was the part of the project that was most legible as a game by our peers, the easiest part to playtest and get feedback on. As such, the role playing aspect of the ARG got very little planning and was unpolished by the time we launched at KDHS. We should have developed these aspects of the experience in tandem or found a way to limit how long the we could be in production for the installation and puzzles. Tracking Ida Page 22 of 23 IRB Scare The research portion of Tracking Ida was in danger of getting cancelled because we were waiting on approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) before talking with the kids. We got that approval on the second day of running the game at KDHS: exactly enough time to print the consent forms and start interviews on Day 3. As many people who have gone through the IRB process could have predicted, the process took much longer than usual and we should have started earlier. I unfortunately waited until the spring semester to apply because I was enrolled in Research Methods for that semester and needed guidance on how to plan the project and apply. Those professors, however, probably would have guided me in this process no matter when I had asked, and I could have gotten the process started in the fall. It all worked out in the end—we got to complete our exit interviews without having to adjust the schedule much—but it was a high- risk endeavor that could have been avoided. Tracking Ida Page 23 of 23 Works Cited IGDA ARG SIG (2006). Alternate Reality Games White Paper. International Game Developers Association. Retrieved March 30, 2017, from <http://www.christydena.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/igda-alternaterealitygames- whitepaper-2006.pdf> Jagoda, P., Gilliam, M., McDonald, P., & Russell, C. (2015). Worlding Through Play: Alternate Reality Games, Large-Scale Learning, and The Source. American Journal of Play, 8(1), 74-100. Retrieved February 20, 2017, from <http://www.journalofplay.org/sites/www.journalofplay.org/files/pdf-articles/8-1-article- worlding-through-play.pdf> University of Chicago (2014). The Source: A 5 Week Alternate Reality Game at Univ. of Chicago. Tiki-Toki Timeline App. Retrived March 30, 2017, from <http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/177300/The-Source-A-5-Week-Alternate- Reality-Game-at-Univ.-of-Chicago-copy/>

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Asset Metadata

Creator Amde, Lishan (author)

Core Title Tracking Ida

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 05/08/2017

Defense Date 04/06/2017

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

Tag alternate reality game,Black history,game design,Ida B. Wells,installation game,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Watson, Jeff (committee chair), Gotsis, Marientina (committee member), Lemarchand, Richard (committee member), McHugh, Maureen (committee member), Roberts, Sam (committee member), Scott, Liane (committee member)

Creator Email itslishan@gmail.com,lishan.amde@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-371116

Unique identifier UC11256163

Identifier etd-AmdeLishan-5322.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-371116 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-AmdeLishan-5322.pdf

Dmrecord 371116

Document Type Thesis

Rights Amde, Lishan

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