Urban Game and Storification
The “Being Grunberg” Case Study
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SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF
SCIENCE
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July 11, 2015
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Dr. Frank Nack
Daniel Buzzo
Urban Games and Storification
The “Being Grunberg” Case Study
1st 1st Author
1st author's affiliation 1st line of address 2nd linesPaul Schmidt
paul.schmidt@student.uva.nl
3rd Author
3rd author's affiliation 1st line of address 2nd line of addressTelephone number, incl. country code
3rd E-mai
ABSTRACT
In an urban game with its infinite number of possible game states, either the pre-authored storyline cannot keep up with the unpredictable number of game states the player can evoke or it is limiting the player’s choices and possible game experience. The urban game Being Grunberg was developed by an interdisciplanary group of studtents and tested by this paper’s author to investigate the relation between interaction, storytelling, and story forming in real world environments. The paper establishes five key hypotheses that drove the design as well as the analysis of the game. It outlines the game design, describes the actual game play, and provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the game. The major finding is that urban games facilitate and stimulate storification, but that the design of the player role has a significant influence on this process both during play as well as in post-play reflection.
1. INTRODUCTION
Being Grunberg is an urban game inspired by narrative–driven
urban games, such as Pie’ Veloce, Massive Multiplayer Soba [6],
Zombies Run [19], or Corridor [9], and Dutch writer Arnon
Grunberg’s writing paradigm that reality influences fiction and vice versa. The aim of this work was, besides documenting and explaining the development of an entertaining story-driven game the author designed with a group of other students from the University of Asmterdam (see also 3.2 Design), to research the role of interaction in form of urban gaming in the future of literature. The game development process, the resulting game structure, and the gained experiences during play aimed to shed light on the question: What is the relation between interaction, storytelling, and story forming in real world environments? This article focuses on the findings from the analysis the author conducted on the data he recorded regarding the idiosyncratic storification [2] of players who played Being Grunberg and its influence on the design of narrative-based urban games. Five key hypotheses that further drive the design as well as the analysis of the game are derived from literature study and later validated or falsified with the recorded data. The author outlines the game design, describes the actual game play, and provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the game. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings and future work.
2. RELATED WORK
This study is influenced by research on urban and pervasive games, interactive storytelling and storification, and social interaction and narrative.
2.1 Urban Games
Coppock et al. [6] define an urban game as a pervasive game “specifically designed for urban environments”[p. 123], while they describe pervasive games as games “taking place in an expanded spatio-temporal and social situation”[p. 123]. Waern et al. [18] argue that urban games “blur the traditional boundaries of games”[p. 19], because they expand the realm of games in these three ways: spatially, when they do not have a clearly defined game world; temporally, when the game’s start and end points are not clearly defined; and socially, when there is no clear distinction between player and non-player. Thus, urban games are not limited to Huizinga’s conventional concept of the “magic circle”[12], in which games are set up in and limited to “a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally”[p. 10]. Urban games make use of urban spaces and combine physical and technological gameplay [14]. That does not mean they are bound to a certain location. Engl et al. [7] mention “location-free” urban games that can be set up practically everywhere. Most urban games are therefore mobile, which is realized by mobile devices the players carry around. While these mobile devices are an essentials means of facilitation for urban games, Flanagan [8] stresses that the focus always lays on the „lived experience“ rather than the game’s technological aspects.
2.2 Urban Games and Storytelling
According to Chatman [5] any narrative can be understood as a communicational process which is organised around surface structures (expression) and deep structures (content). Both structures are composed out of substance and formal components, where substance represents the natural material for content and expression, but form represents the abstract structure of relationships which a particular media demands (see fig.1). In this framework an urban game can describe a story (though Juul [13] claims games cannot tell stories). However, Aylett et al. [2] showed for storytelling in virtual reality, which shares with urban games the aspect that a player is moving quite freely in an environment not restricted to what is physically there, that conventional theories of narratives do not apply because the created reality establishes immediacy, which calls for real-time interactive storytelling, thus a dynamic and procedural narrative. Ryan [16] states that interactivity in general means that the player can interact and make choices with the system while it is running.
Figure 1: Chatman's model of narrative elements
Therefore storytelling has to be aimed at an active user instead of a passive spectator. Aylett et al. [3] argue that in interactive storytelling the storyline can emerge from the user’s interactions with the game world. This “emergent narrative”[p. 2] is hardly an authorial artifact like conventional theories would treat any narrative, but rather an internal “storification”[p. 2] process constituted by the user’s interaction with the game world and its elements (see fig. 2).
Figure 2: Aylett et al.'s distinction between conventional and interactive narrative [3, p. 117]
2.3 Urban Games and Storification
One way to kick off storification is making the players reflect on the game after playing [18]. Gentes et al. [9] claim that narrative-driven games should inspire specific storylines in the way that players create a story according to the material provided by the game (see also a similar approach by Nack et. al. [14] for interactive mobile storytelling). This can be achieved by the special relationship players of urban games have with their game world. While the game world consists in everyday objects and scenes the game adds a virtual layer to the everyday world when its objects stand for something more than what can be seen. This ambiguity, which also holds for the temporal (are we playing right now?) and social aspects (who is a player, who just a passer-by?) can elicit a player state that Waern [18] calls “apophenia”, during which the expectation of meaningful connections between places, people, objects and actions create meaningful narratives where there is none prescripted or even intended by the game maker. On the one side apophenia can be fostered by giving the player goals without telling her how to achieve them, giving the player useless information, and encouraging extrovert roleplay. On the other side the negative effect of fear of embarrassment on apophenia and story creation should be avoided by e.g. making the players feel part of a larger group and encourage them to go perform over the
top to assert a feeling of actually performing rather than really behaving like this.
Scheible et al. [17] argue that it is the game’s usability that fosters storification. The higher the overall usability of the game the easier it should be for the player to engage in story creation. Providing the player with a topic and clear game goals, giving feedback on the emerging storyline’s quality, and creating high immersion should therefore help the player with her process of storification.
2.4 Social Interaction and Narrative
Waern [18] states that it helps story creation if the player identifies with her player role, which can be facilitated by having the player engage in player-to-player interactions via communication or game mechanics. In similar lines Aylett et al. [2] affirm that it is in general a good idea to encourage the player to engage in social interaction, because people’s interactions are what creates narrative.
Aoki et al. [1] argue that a game that fosters story creation has to avoid having the player getting locked up in “experiential bubbles” [p. 1] where she is so immersed in her private game experience that she is not available for possibilities of interaction with others anymore (e.g. when the game contains audio that fully occludes the environment’s ambient sounds and speech from other people). It should be easy for the player to engage in social contact; therefore the player’s effort to be made for interaction should be kept as low as possible.
Waern [18] as well as Hansen et al. [10] state that instructed actors or bystanders can improve social interaction level. Especially if the player is expecting to meet non-players that were planted to improve her game experience she might enter a state of pronoia, where she deliberately searches for social interaction with bystanders in order to not miss part of the game. This works particularly well if, as Flanagan [8] suggests, the player is encouraged by the game instructions to seek social contact with others throughout the game.
Callaway et al. [4] propose to have the game build narrative tension that is not resolved in the progress. The player will then turn towards other players to seek for the anticipated relief. Overall the average player can be expected to have a welcoming attitude towards social interaction as the social aspect makes an experience more enjoyable for the participants.
2.5 Conclusions from Related Work
The conducted literature study points to design principles for how to encourage story creation by the player of a game: facilitate game reflection, invoke a state of apophenia, high game usability, player identification, avoid fear of embarrassment and motivate players to engage in social interaction. The question remains: Why does the player need to create a story, why should the urban game designer try help the player’s storification process? While different kinds of structural paradigms exist, ranging from the simple fully pre-scripted one way-plot path the player follows along during play, to complex structures of plot graphs with numerous interconnected nodes that the player can potentially visit according to her decisions during the game (see fig. 3), all of these storylines are predesigned authorial artifacts.[16]
Figure 3: Ryan's different kinds of plot graphs [16, p. 101]
In an urban game with its infinite number of possible game states, either the pre-authored storyline cannot keep up with the unpredictable number of game states the player evokes or they are limiting the player’s choices and possible experience. As it is the player who expands the urban game spatially, temporally, and socially, I hypothesize that it is also the player who can establish an expanded story space and provide the urban game with a narrative that suits its limitless nature and simultaneously the player’s story needs and expectations. The remaining research question for this paper is: How to facilitate through story concepts, presentation techniques and game mechanics a player’s storification process while playing an urban game? The game design mainly follows five hypotheses, based on findings in the literature, to achieve best possible player storification:
H1. Story creation can be facilitated by having the player reflect on the game after playing.
H2. Story creation can be facilitated by high overall game usability.
H3. Story creation can be facilitated by high player identification. H4. Story creation can be facilitated by having the players engage in social interactions.
H5. Leaving the player with narrative tension by not giving her all the information makes her engage in social interaction, which facilitates story creation.
3. BEING GRUNBERG – AN URBAN
GAME CASE
3.1 Rationale
Starting at the point of Grunberg’s notion on the relation between fiction and reality, based on his experiences as a writer and war correspondent, namely that fiction and reality cannot be separated but blend into each other, the game had to be set in a real environment and had to be designed around events that are actually likely to happen in that environment. As the game was inspired by his literary work, it was decided to set in in the historic city of Amsterdam, namely the infamous red light district de Wallen. In addition, the game should facilitate player-to-player interaction in the Waern [18] and Aylett et al. [2] sense to stimulate narrative generation. The game design aimed for providing a fully functional urban game but also for evaluating the
storification processes of the players in relation to the provided story concepts, presentation techniques and game mechanics.
3.2 Design
Being Grunberg was designed as a role-playing mystery game to
be played outside in the Amsterdam red light district (de Wallen). It revolves around interactions between four different characters types; the human-trafficker, the illegal immigrant, the marechaussee, and the ‘good’ family father. Players interacted with each other in order to achieve two different objectives: 1) to collect role-specific items and 2) to gather five hints that could solve the game’s mystery. Players receive points both for the role-specific items they gather during game play and for the given solution of the mystery. The player with most points wins the game.
The game design was conducted by an interdisciplinary group of 16 Humanities and Science students of the University of Amsterdam of which the author of this paper was part. It followed a rapid prototyping approach with changing work groups and task division, where each new version was tested on usability as well as playability by roughly 15 people from inside and outside the game designer group. The development process took from January to February 2015. The essential key concepts of the final game design are: location and meta-narrative, roles, props, interaction, system.
3.2.1 Location and Related Mystery
The red light district is a top tourist attraction, renowned for its entertainment, sex and drugs, and the feel of crime, and is hence of general interest. It is a lively place that offers a rich set of stereotypical characters that could be transferred into role descriptions. Due to its history it offered enough models for a mystery in which the game could be rooted. It is an ideal environment for blurring the lines between reality and fiction (see fig. 4).
Figure 4: De Wallen by night
Following the approaches of Hansen et al. [10] and Waern [18] we extended the ‘magic circle’ through integrating real locations into the game. The players could enter several bars and tourist sites, including a place that functioned in the game as a window similar to the prostitute cubicles. Some of these locations were safe and some unsafe, meaning that players had to watch out for other players in roles that could do ingame harm on their own player role (for details see Player Roles). Furthermore all the locations were prepared with actors that the players could interact with and receive certain tips, parts of the mystery solution or other valuable game items from.
In accordance with the environment the following mystery was created (none of its personage was ever visible during the game, which added to the sphere of the red light district – a place where crime cannot be witnessed but can only be sensed). None of the four main character types was directly involved in the kidnapping mystery but each of them was influenced by it in various forms.
0. Someone was kidnapped this morning. (not part of the ingame hints, but part of the introduction story, see „Play“).
1. On 23rd October there was a Syrian family smuggled into the Netherlands.
2. The family Aziz still has debts from their journey.
3. The kidnappers are Farid Aziz and his sons Hassan and Hakim. 4. Amira Aziz (17 years old) was recently forced into
prostitution.
5. The kidnappers demand airtime on NOS to tell their story.
3.2.2 The 4 Player Roles
The design of the 4 roles was based on stereotypical characters associated with the location but were also developed for practical playability issues. Each of the four characters had its own goals and means, represented in form of short snippets of personal history (see section Interaction and Related Props). The differences in goals and means establish a set of relationships that should facilitate various types of interactions and interest in the other roles (see fig. 5 and also the interaction and prop section below). However, since there was no controlling game authority virtually all interactions were possible between any player roles (as long as the player possessed the necessary props).
Figure 5: Player Role relations and main interactions
Brave Huisvader (Well-behaved Family Man) - The Family Man
is the middle-aged father of two teenage daughters. The love in his marriage has vanished and he is in constant relationship struggles with his wife to whom his children turned to. He visits de Wallen on the search for control and feelings of power and therefore pursues to have paid sexual intercourse with the illegal prostitutes in the red light district. The Family Man is not directly involved in the kidnapping mystery, but wants to help deliver the golden tip in order to regain his family’s appreciation by being crowned “the hero of de Wallen” by the grateful detectives. The Family Man gains points for collected sex ritual cards. Therefore he looks for Illegal Immigrants and tries to avoid the Marechaussee who can fine him.
Ongedocumenteerde Vremdeeling (Illegal Immigrant) - The
Illegal Immigrant is a middle-aged mother of a son. They are refugees from a Middle-Eastern country and came to the Netherlands through illegal human trafficking. She has to sell her body in order to gather enough money for buying a fake ID and
provide a safe future for her and her son. The kidnapping mystery is a personal problem for her, because the planned police raid will bring policemen asking for IDs and residence papers. She wants to solve the mystery to make a deal with the police: the golden tip in exchange for a chance to stay in the The Netherlands as a legal citizen.
The Illegal Immigrants main objective is to gather money to be able to purchase a fake ID. Therefore she needs to find Family Men who she can sell the sex ritual cards for play money. Naturally, she has to avoid the Marechaussee.
Marechaussee (Border Policeman) - The Marechaussee is an
ambitious and career-driven member of the border police who is currently stuck in a bottom-level field job. Following his conviction that he knows what is right and fair for the people – and himself – he strives to fine as many illegal activities as possible in order to quickly earn his well-deserved promotion to higher leagues of crime fighting. The kidnapping mystery is his chance to show his superiors what he is worth. Therefore he is desperate to deliver the golden tip.
The Marechaussee looks for Illegal Immigrants, Family Men and Human Traffickers engaging in illegal activity to give them a fine.
Mensensmokkelaar (Human Trafficker) - The Human Trafficker
knows everything that is going on in the red light district and he does not miss a chance to enrich himself. While he exploits immigrants, uses family fathers‘ cravings, and fools around with the Marechaussee, his only worry is that he might lose grip and other scoundrel take what is rightfully his. The Trafficker is the police’s first suspect in the kidnapping mystery. Therefore and because he wants to find out what is going on in his field of influence, he needs to gather the clues to the mystery’s solution to whitewash his good name and make sure to retain the established order on de Wallen. The Trafficker earns points for money. Therefore he sells fake IDs, blackmails illegals and trades information to the police. He has to watch out to not get fined as this might decrease his influence.
A detailed game mechanical comparison between the four player roles can be found in Table 1 in the appendix.
3.2.3 Interactions and Related Props
─ Character description card – This card was handed out to players at the beginning of the game and it contained an extended role description, similar to the description provided above. It briefly summarizedthe characters backstory, listed their goals andmeans, and provided the rules for interactions. ─ Coins – This represented the money in the game. The total
amount was restricted on what was handed out to each character at the beginning of the game. The coins were designed in a way that they could not be easily reproduced, e.g. by copying.
─ Sexual interactions - Sex is seen in this game as a universal currency that allows to bribe, to buy (e.g. a faked ID), or to get information. If two players have sex, they have to hug for a minute, ending with an Eskimo kiss. The one who offers has to give the other a certificate of the sexual transaction (sex ritual
card, see fig. 6). Under normal circumstances she would then
receive what was agreed on in return from the other player, such as money or information but she can be cheated. The design of the sex-certificates covered 18 different cards, each with the image of two silhouettes having sex in particular positions. Thus, although the sex was symbolic, the players were still confronted with the awkwardness of it related to the
way it needed to be negotiated and finally performed in the special public environment of Amsterdam’s red light district.
Figure 6: Two players performing the sex ritual (left) and Sex
Ritual Cards (right)
─ Fake and Real ID - The smuggler has IDs that he can sell. The fake IDs looked almost the same as real Ids (see fig. 7), with the exception of a code and a picture. When an ID is sold, a picture needs to be drawn in the blank space in order for it to become a ‘real’ ID. Both the fake and real IDs were designed to look like real-life ID-cards, in order to make the game as realistic as possible. The rule of having to draw a picture on the fake IDs was imposed to make the transaction last a little longer. This made it easier to catch the participants in the act.
Figure 7: Real ID
─ Fines and Shame Batch - The Marechaussee can hand out fines to other players for illegal activities. Illegal actions include: illegal sex, selling fake IDs, possession of fake ID, not having papers, and corruption of colleagues. The Marechaussee needs to catch other players in the act. This means he has to arrest players while they are hugging or drawing images on IDs. When making an arrest, the Marechaussee writes down the name of the person who is arrested in his fine pad (see fig. 8) and sticks a shame batch (a loud-coloured post-it note) with the fine reason on the player. The offender was not restricted from lying, running away, taking the batch off, or doing whatever he dared to to avoid the fine.
Figure 8: Fine Pad
─ Information Trading – The actual description of the kidnapping was available through 5 information cards. Each of the characters had access to one of the 5 hints that needed to be collected. As information in a game was restricted to the amount of characters represented (see Table 1 in appendix), they had to trade the information with each other. They could do that in any way they wanted, while the player had to infer the complete kidnapping plot at the end of the game.
─ Map – It showed several important locations the player should know about, as they provided spaces for information exchange or meeting relevant types of characters (see fig. 9). Maps were adapted to specific roles, as they also contained per role one place where special actors provided information in a real world setting for the particular role.
Figure 9: Player map of the Human Trafficker
─ Actors - Throughout the playing area, actors were present to help the players and also to lend a feeling of authenticity and immersion, blurring the line between the real and the game world (see fig. 10). There were two type of actors. The first were the home-base actors, whose main role was to provide the players with information on how to play and provide the first hint of the mystery. The second category were actors who were accessible to everyone. This included a few beggars who walked around the Oude Kerk, and the actors at the home-bases of the house father (a bunch of drunkards) and the human-trafficker (two pimps), who thus fell into both categories. The purpose of these actors was to not only give hints on playing tactics, but also to stimulate interaction by referring different players to each other.
Figure 10: A player (l.) talking to an actor (r.) playing a Beggar
The distribution of props to each character at the beginning of the game as well as the distribution of character types in each game is described in Table 1 in the appendix.
3.2.4 Location-based Audio System
For increasing the pervasiveness of the game we provided, in addition to the character card, also location-based audio tracks to each player role. For that we made use of HearUsHear [11], a location-based nonlinear storytelling platform and app for iPhone 4 and higher and Android (version 4 and higher). Through the use of GPS and iBeacon/Bluetooth devices one can align sounds on a location in the city with an adjustable volume radius (see fig. 11).
Figure 11: Developer view on the audio walk of the Illegal Immigrant; the yellow circles indicate the sounds' proximities
In that we could facilitate every player role with additional information about his or her history and her surroundings to increase the identification of the player with the role in the game world. Those sound clips were provided by the game narrator,
who also facilitated all characters with the context of the mystery at the beginning of the game. The exact positions of the virtual markers that triggered the playback were hidden from the player’s view, but she was shown the area where audio could be found and the respective audio track started to fade-in on the player’s headphones whenever she walked into the proximity on one of her role’s audio markers. Hereby the player was unconsciously guided through the game world.
3.3 Play
On Monday 23rd of February 2015 the final game was played by 70 participants in the city centre of Amsterdam. Players had to register via the game website (http://beinggrunberg.nl/) so that they could be assigned to three different time slots. During this registration process they were also randomly assigned a player role. They also had the option to download the audio guide application on their mobile phone ahead of time.
In total there were three player groups of around 20 people and therefore three complete runs of the game. Each of the groups experienced the following six stages of the game:
1. Pre-game Workshop - After signing up at the Bijzondere
Collecties building in Amsterdam and filling in a pre-game
questionnaire, one group at a time was guided to a large room where they took part in a pre-game workshop. The workshop was guided by two well-known Dutch actors, Halina Reijn and Pierre Bokma, and consisted in simple team-building assignments, like a group version of the trust fall exercise (see fig. 12). The workshop lasted for around 20 minutes and aimed at allowing the players to identify the people they play with, making them more open for social interaction between each other and prevent fear of embarassessment as mentioned already in the Related Work section [18].
Figure 12: Pre-Game workshop
2. Introduction Story and Walk to the Starting Position - A guide then took the group outside where everyone was asked to switch on their smartphone, set up the headphones, and start the first audio track on the HearUsHere application (see fig. 13). This audio track introduced the players to de Wallen, and to the game’s kidnapping mystery storyline: A person was abducted and the police is preparing a raid on de Wallen in order to solve the mystery. All people on de Wallen (so all the players) are asked to identify themselve and report what they know about the mystery at the Detective’s Office in 90 minutes. Furthermore they heard about the four kinds of characters types they were going to meet in the game world. While listening to this story introduction the players were walked to the starting location Café de Dam, a small bar at the edge of de Wallen.
Figure 13: Players setting up the audio app
3. Role Assignment and Interaction Introduction - At Café de
Dam each player received her role related envelope, which
contained the character description card, the player map, and the role-specific props. Then the players listened to a speech given by one of the game guides (see fig. 14) and learned that from now on a roleplay is being played and that they better watch out who to trust and to keep their own role secret. The players were introduced to the three game interactions, e.g. how to perform a sexual act with demonstration, and advised to make use of those to gather as much information as possible to receive points when they have to report at the Detective’s
Office.
Figure 14: Game guide’s speech at Café de Dam
4. Free Play - Players were then released into free play (see fig. 15). Most players first walked to their homebase, indicated on their respective map, to get some tips from actors there on how to play their game and obtain further information on the kidnapping mystery. Then the players explored the different game locations and engaged in the game mechanics’ player interactions to get closer to the mystery solution and to obtain items. While the players in the beginning were introduced to the game interactions, player roles and different objectives, there was at no time any authority watching over the players’ adherence to those rules. Therefore a great deal of unpredictable role-play behaviour was possible and expected and any adherence to game rules was merely by the players’ self-regulation. However, unknown team members observed the players to investigate their behaviour.
Figure 15: Players of Being Grunberg during Free Play
5. Game End (Detective’s Office) - After 60 minutes of game time players had to gather at the Detective’s Office. There each player was asked individually to provide their name, role, and fill in the Ingame Story form. This form consisted in one open question, asking the players to give their version of the kidnapping mystery solution they pieced together from the collected clues (if they could provide all five mystery clues they would receive extra reward points). The players could choose to write a consistent story or simply line up the hints in a logical order, either on a provided laptop computer or by hand on a sheet of paper.
6. Post-Game Reflection - After the players reported at the
Detective’s Office they were told that the game is over and
were sent back to the Bijzondere Collecties building. There all the props they obtained throughout the game (e.g. play money and sex ritual cards) were collected and counted. In the meanwhile the players of a group gathered in a separate room and held a post-game reflection. This reflection consisted in 10 minutes of free talk about the player’s experience in the presence of Arnon Grunberg (see fig. 16) and afterwards 10 minutes of filling in a post-game reflection report. Finally the player of the group with most points was announced as winner and rewarded with a signed copy of Grunberg’s newest Dutch book.
Figure 16: Arnon Grunberg (top left) with players during
Post-game Reflection
4. ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
Evaluation and reflection of the game experience, as well as analysis of the storification process within players, was an essential part of the game design and play. The participants were asked by the author of this paper to fill in a total of three different evaluation documents: an Ingame Story report (where players had to tell the story about the kidnapping based on the clues they
collected during the game), a post-game Reflection Report (where players reflected on the happenings, events, and interactions they experienced during their play time) and finally a post-game evaluation form (intended to give us feedback on their play experience and the game’s usability). All three questionnaires can be found in the appendix.
In addition the hints and items players acquired during the game were recorded along with the individual scores on playing success, and statements done during the post-game reflection. Demographic information about the players was collected during the game registration procedure.
This article concentrates only on those aspects of the collected data that are relevant for the main research question and the related five hypotheses as outlined at the end of the related work section.
All tables that show the recorded data are to be found in the appendix for reasons of space.
4.1 Analysis
In total 70 result sets were received, thus each player contributed. However, as the different evaluation types happened at different moments in time data analysis had to happen with different set quantities. Below the type of data gathering method per document and the amount of sets are outlined.
─ Ingame Story Report: A one-question-report that contains the player’s idiosyncratic story of the kidnapping mystery meta story based on the collected hints during play time. This data was used to identify if the role-playing urban game stimulated storification. Based on Chatman’s story component model (see fig. 1 above) the ingame stories were coded to find out which hints the players found, but also how many words, persons, places, events, actions, relations and motivations they invented on top of the information supplied by the hints. For every of these newly invented story content elements one inventiveness point (IP) was assigned and cthe Ingame Stories were categorized into five inventiveness levels (I0 with IP<1: “none”, I1 with 0<IP<14: “very low”, I2 with 13<IP<19: “low”, I3 with 18<IP<34: “high” and I4 with IP>33), where I0 represent stories that describe the kidnapping story just in the provided terms. Also the written words/newly invented words (i.e. words not given by the collected hints) ratio for each story was calculated. As this report was part of the game 70 units were received. However, only 34 stories achieved IP>0, meaning that 36 participants merely listed the hints in a logical order.
─ Reflection Report: Five open questions concerning the player’s experience during the game. Preceded by a 10-minute free reflection talk on individual game experiences with all players of one group present. For the data analysis the number of fully answered questionnaires and the word numbers of the answer on question two („Can you please tell us the story of your game?“) were counted. The data recording also investigated if the player answered the questions as the role character or from their own personality reflection on the played role. In total 49 answered Reflection Reports were received.
─ Post-game Questionnaire: This was filled in directly after the
Reflection Report and investigated the usability and playability
of the urban game. The questionnaire included Likert-scale, multiple choice, open and ranking questions where players were asked to rate the game’s usability, importance of different game elements and their own enjoyment. In total 41 responses on the Post-game Questionnaire were received.
4.2 Findings
This section presents the findings, separated by focus, namely, general, storification, and player roles.
4.2.1 General
The general findings from the Post-game questionnaire are: 92.8% of the participants stated that they had fun with Being
Grunberg (score 4/5 or 5/5) and 90.5% said they liked the game
(score 4/5 or 5/5). BeingGrunberg was considered as a game (mean 4.24/5) rather than an interactive play (mean 3.4/5). The importance of the game and storytelling elements was evaluated as such: physical interaction rituals (1.64th important), four different player roles (2.58th), actors (3,25th), story clues and meta-story (3.83rd), location-based audio clips (3.94th), and post-game evaluation with (5.42nd).
4.2.2 Storification
Table 2 to Table 7, which can be found in the appendix along with detailed descriptions, present the storification relevant findings of the data analysis related to the five hypotheses outlined at the end of the related work section.
4.2.3 Player Role Evaluation
In Table 8, which can also be found in the appendix, presents the findings for comparing the average performance of the 4 character types for various storification attributes along with other recorded role-specific data.
4.3 Data Evaluation
4.3.1 Storification
The results in Table 2 (see appendix) show that the reflection phase created a 41% higher story output in comparison to the
Ingame Story, meaning that more players were able and willing to
invent an at least partly new story after reflection (see fig. 17). This does not indicate any effect on story quality though, as it was only investigated if players reported a story or not. Thus, H1 can be accepted. 34# 49# 0# 20# 40# 60#
Ingame Story Reflection Report
Figure 17: Received answers on Ingame Story and Reflection
Report
Table 3 (see appendix) shows that players who experienced problems during gameplay wrote about the same amount of words in their answers to the Ingame Stories and Reflection Reports. Players of the group with the most problems actually showed the biggest ratio of newly invented stories (see fig. 18). This could indicate that more obstacles generated during play might have a positive influence on storification and that obstacles do not necessarily have to be in character. Hence H2 can be accepted.
66%#
44%#
80%#
0 problems 1 problem 2 problems
Figure 18: Percentage of Ingame Stories with newly invented elements for players with different amounts of experienced
ingame problems
Table 4 and 5 (see appendix) show that there was no correlation between behaving like a different person and writing the Ingame
Story from the player role perspective. Furthermore Ingame Stories written in character do not significantly differ from the
ones written out-of-character with respect to inventiveness and length. However, behaving like a different person during play seems to have an effect on story creation. Players who reported that they behaved like a different character were more likely to invent a new story (or new story elements). This partly proves this criterion’s significance, but in total H3 could not be validated. Social interaction was one of the key aspects that were identified as storification stimulator and hence implemented in various forms into Being Grunberg. The only social element the data recording was able to measure, though, were the Interaction
Rituals. The players reported via the game element ranking in the Post-game Questionnaire on how important these rituals were for
their game experience. Therefore at most an indirect validation or falsification of criterion H4 can be provided. It was found that players who ranked social interactions as most important were much more likely to invent new story elements for the Ingame
Stories (see fig. 19) and also had higher average word numbers on
the story in the Reflection Report. Assuming that players who found interaction mechanics more important also engaged more in social interaction it can be said that this criterion proved valid in
Being Grunberg. Thus H4 can be accepted.
69%$ 40%$ 1st - 2nd important game element 3rd - 6th important game element
Figure 19: Percentage of Ingame Stories with newly invented elements for player group who ranked social interactions as 1st to 2nd important and 3rd to 6th important game element
Players of Being Grunberg experienced different levels of narrative tension as all of them were informed that there are five hints hidden in the game, but most players only found an incomplete amount of them. As Table 6 (see appendix) shows the player’s new word quota decreased with an increasing amount of found hints. This is not surprising, though, as players with more found hints wrote down these hints in their Ingame Stories, which naturally made for lower new word per written word quotas.
Players with none or one found hint showed highest inventiveness in Ingame Stories and players with all the hints had a low average IP-level. This also seems reasonable as a player who is asked to report a story, but has nothing at his hands, has to make up something. What is remarkable, though, is that players who lacked only one hint also showed a very high inventiveness (see fig. 20). Assuming that narrative tension is very high when only a small part of the story is missing, the data recorded during Being
Grunberg would support the validity of this criterion and hence
H5 can be accepted. 3" 3" 2,4" 2" 2,8" 2" 0" 1" 2" 3" 4"
0 hints 1 hint 2 hints 3 hints 4 hints 5 hints
Figure 20: Average IP-Level of Ingame Stories of players with different amounts of found hints
4.3.2 Different Player Roles
Apart from employing the five story creation criteria in Being
Grunberg the players were assigned four different player roles
with different characteristics and different preconditions for game play. The recorded player-specific data for each of the roles is supposed to establish which stereotypical roles best stimulate storification based on a set of parameters.
Table 8 (see appendix) shows that the Human Trafficker and the
Marechaussee have better scores in most of the parameters than Illegal Immigrant and Family Father. Especially the Family Father scored rather low on most of the parameters. This holds for
both: amount of written words in Reflection Report and Ingame
Story and inventiveness in Ingame Stories (see fig. 19).
There are two parameters that can be excluded as a possible reason for this difference between player roles: the amount of fun players had and the number of problems they experienced, as there are no significant differences between player roles. Also not responsible for the low scores of Illegal Immigrant and Family
Father seem to be the parameters that measured ingame success
(points), player identification (ratio of in-character answers and number of players who behaved like a different person) and number of found hints as either both roles differ heavily in these parameters and/or one of the roles scores significantly higher in these parameters than Marechaussee or Human Trafficker who have better values in word numbers and inventiveness.
Since the differences cannot be explained by the other measured parameters the cause has to be found in the game-mechanical differences between the roles: It can be assumed that Illegal
Immigrant and Family Father engaged most of all player roles in
the sexual intercourse rituals and were the roles that had to be most afraid of the Marechaussee. Furthermore they by far made the biggest group of players in the game, which sets interaction in a competition context.
The Illegal Immigrant might not have had an intrinsic motivation to solve the game’s mystery, as she would have only pursued to in order to obtain an ID, which she also could obtain by just buying it. Equally the Family Father was mainly interested in collecting
as many sex ritual cards as possible. The mystery solution was only a bonus for him. On the other side the Marechaussee was directly motivated to solve the mystery as her main desire was a promotion, which she could only earn by solving the mystery. Also, if she acted in character, she was most inclined by her player role to actually attempt to solve the mystery (as this is what a Marechaussee does). The Human Trafficker also had substantial motivation to have the mystery solved as the kidnapping took took place in her scope of power in an area that is under her control. It can be inferred that roles that were more directly involved in the mystery and had less distractive other goals were more supportive to make up a long and good Ingame Story, as they received more source material through higher and more diverse interaction rates. So it could be assumed that giving the players (or their respective player roles) intrinsic motivation to make up a good story facilitates story creation in urban games.
4.3.3 The Ideal Player Role
Table 8 (see appendix) shows that the Human Trafficker is by far the most successful role when it comes to storytelling. It seems natural that player roles in urban games with focus on storytelling should be designed with role sets that follow the Human
Trafficker pattern, namely that a player is able to freely explore
the game world, positively interact with every other player, and is not driven by the fear of losing the game. Generalizing the Human
Trafficker’s role characteristics, it is possible to establish the
following guidelines that an urban game character designer should use when creating roles:
1. Design the role so that its “narrative space” is not limited to a small set of themes and motives of the overall play narrative space.
2. Keep the goal space of the role small so that the character can focus but synchronize it with the narrative constraints to minimize the potential obstacles (mainly existential) for the character.
3. Support player conflicts in the context of the narrative environment.
4. Synchronize the interaction means (props) so that a maximum of interaction moments with other characters can be achieved.
5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This paper presented the urban game Being Grunberg that explored the process of storification in the context of a story-based game in a real world context. It concludes that an urban game like Being Grunberg enables players to create their own storyline while playing both during the game as well as in a post-game reflection phase and that it is hence the player who can establish an expanded story space and provide the urban game with a narrative that suits its limitless nature and simultaneously the player’s story needs and expectations. The recorded storylines from the Ingame Story and the Reflection Report questionnaires show, though, that this process of storification worked out in different degrees for different players.Five different criteria that should foster storification in urban games were tested and it was found that players are more willing or able to tell a story with parts they invented themselves after reflecting on the game, after behaving like a different person or role during gameplay, by having the players value social interaction higher and by providing the player with very little pre-made storyline or very high narrative tension.
Next to the tested criteria it can be concluded that players with player roles that have an intrinsic and positive motivation in their backstory to make up a good story are more inventive and report longer stories than players who are just informed that they can earn points by engaging in storification.
Concerning the ideal player role that enables the best player storification by allowing the player to safely explore the game world, seek interaction with every other player and motivates her to solve the game’s task by potential reward rather than punishment it is necessary to investigate further if it is possible to employ these characteristics in all player roles to make for ideal overall storification. The first step in future work is to test if the characteristics abstraction of the ideal player role was correct and if these characteristics alone made for the good storification numbers in this particular role or if it was rather the imbalance between one very free player role and three others that have a less comfortable position in the game. For future work reruns of the game are necessary where also the other player roles are allowed more freedom, safety and positive reinforcement. In those play reruns (either Being Grunberg or new settings) it has to be ensured that a particular role is not coincidentally played by players who happen to be more creative than the other participants. The author of this paper is aware that the testing population was rather small, in particular the role the ideal type was finally based on. More test runs with more players are needed to validate this paper’s findings.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author of this paper thanks the 15 other students of the game design team for Being Grunberg: Dania Awin, Sabrina Beek, Esra van Beelen, Charlotte Bouwman, Nelleke Buitendijk, Maartje Geels, Rick Groenen, Anne Hofstra, Serina van de Kragt, Alasdair MacLeod, Steven Nijman, Erik Post, Joey Schouten, Merel Simons and Arthur Teutler. He furthermore thanks Arnon Grunberg for establishing and guiding the game design project, Frank Nack for guidance during the writing of this paper and the staff of Bijzondere Collecties for providing a proper working environment during the making of Being Grunberg. He furthermore thanks everyone involved in making Being Grunberg the unique one-time event it turned out to be on the 23rd February
2015.
7. REFERENCES
[1] Aoki, P., Grinter, R., Hurst, A., Szymanski, M., Thornton, J., & Woodruff, A (2002). Sotto Voce: Exploring the Interplay of Conversation and Mobile Audio Spaces. Proc. ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Minneapolis, MN, April 2002, 431-438. ACM Press.
[2] Aylett, R., & Louchart, S (2003). Towards a narrative theory of Virtual Reality.
[3] Aylett, R., & Louchart, S. (2007): Being there: participants and spectators in interactive narrative. ICVS'07 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Virtual storytelling: using virtual reality technologies for storytelling, 117-128. [4] Callaway, C., Stock, O., Dekoven, E. (2012). Mobile drama
in an instrumented museum: inducing group conversation via coordinated narratives. The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia - Mobile Digital Interactive Storytelling table of contents archive, Volume 18, Issue 1-2, March-June 2012.
[5] Chatman, S. (1978). Story and Discourse – Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Cornell University Press, Ithaca/London, 1978.
[6] Coppock, P., & Ferri, G. (2013). Serious urban games: From play in the city to play for the city. In Tosini, S., Tarantino, M., & Giacardi, C. (Eds.), Media and the city: urbanism, technology, and communication (geography, anthropology, recreation). (120-134). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
[7] Engl, S., & Nacke, L.E. (2013). Contextual influences on mobile player experience – A game user experience model. Entertainment Computing, 4(1), 83-91.
[8] Flanagan, M (2009). Critical Play – Radical Game Design. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009. [9] Gentes, A., Jutant, C. (2011). The Game Mechanics of
Pervasive Applications: Visiting the Uncanny. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. Volume 18, Issue 1-2, 2012. [10] Hansen, F. A., Kortbek, K. J. & Grønbæk, K. (2008). Mobile
Urban Drama – Setting the Stage with Location Based Technologies. Interactive Storytelling Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 5334, 2008, pp. 20-31 [11] HearUsHere (2015). http://www.hearushereapp.com/ [12] Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play- Element in
Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955), 10.
[13] Juul, J. (2001). Games Telling stories? A brief note on games and narratives. The international journal of computer game research. Volume 1, July 2001.
[14] Nack, F., El Ali, A., van Kemenade, P., Overgoor, J., and van der Weij, B. (2010) A Story to Go, Please.The 3rd International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS), November 1st – 3rd 2010, Edinburgh UK. [15] Parry, N., Bendon, H., Davis, S.B, & Moar, M.(2008).
Locating drama: a demonstration of location-aware audio drama. Lecture notes in computer science, 5334, 41-43. [16] Ryan, M.-L. (2006). Avatars of Story. Electric Mediations,
Volume 17, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London 2006.
[17] Scheible, J., Tuulos, V., & Ojala, T. (2007). Story Mashup: Design and Evaluation of Novel Interactive Storytelling Game for Mobile and Web Users. MUM '07 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Mobile and ubiquitous multimedia, 139-148.
[18] Waern, A., Montola, M., & Stenros, J. (2009): Pervasive Games – Theory and Design. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA, 2009.
Appendix
This appendix contains all the recorded data organized and explained in eight tables
and the original Dutch versions of the Reflection Report and Post-game
Questionnaire.
A) Tables
Table 1. Detailed game mechanics for the four different player roles in Being Grunberg.
Huisvader Immigrant Marechaussee Human Trafficker
Coins 10 0 5 5
Hint 1 0 0 0
ID yes no yes yes
Special items - Sex ritual cards x8 Fine stickers and notepad Fake IDs
Explicit advice at start to interact with other role
members 1 2 1 2
Amount of players with this
role in one session 35 % 35 % 15 % 15 %
Ratio helpful vs. harmful
other players 77 %/23 % 62,5 %/37,5 % 86 %/14 % 85 %/15 %
Table 2. H1 (Story creation can be facilitated by having the player reflect on the game after playing.) related
findings, where the Ingame Story presents results of extended stories still in game time (Detective’s Office phase), and the Reflection Report describes the amount of returns during the Post-game Reflection phase, after participants have reflected in a group about their game experience for 10 minutes and then reported the story of their game.
Ingame Story Report Reflection Report
Responses 34 (49%) 49 (70%)
Table 3. H2 (Story creation can be facilitated by high overall game usability) related findings based on the
Post-game Questionnaire, where the number of reported problems are compared with the average and median of the
word number of the Ingame Stories; Reflection Report (only question 2: “Please tell us the story of your game.”); and the percentage players per reported number of problems who invented something new in the Ingame Story (stories with IP>0).
Number of Reported Problems and number of players with this problem
Average number of new words Ingame Story Median number of new words Ingame Story Average word number Reflection Report question 2 Median word number Reflection Report question 2 Quota of Ingame Stories with IP>0 0 (12) 90 99 45 41 66% 1 (18) 52 0 32 31 44% 2 (10) 113 70 40 33 80%
!
Table 4. H3 (Story creation can be facilitated by high player identification) related findings using the the 3rd
question in the Reflection Report (behaved like a different person during the game) where the yes and no answering player groups are compared based on the average and median word number of Ingame Stories and
Reflection Report (only question 2); and the percentage players per reported number of problems who invented
something new in the Ingame Story (stories with IP>0). Behaved as a different person? Average count of new words Ingame Story Median count of new words Ingame Story Average word number Reflection Report question 2
Median word count
Reflection Report
question 2
Quota of Ingame
Stories with IP=0
yes (40) 67 53 43 41 66%
no (10) 78 19 29 31 50%
Table 5. H3 (Story creation can be facilitated by high player identification) related findings looking at the Ingame
Stories with IP>0 (n=34) and determining the amount of players who wrote in-character or out-of-character view
stories then compared both groups on the new word/written word quota, the average IP and average IP-level for the Ingame Story.
Ingame Story written in-character? Average new word quota Average IP Average IP-Level
yes (13) 0,82 26,8 2,5
no (21) 0,8 25,2 2,5
Table 6. H4 (Story creation can be facilitated by having the players engage in social interactions) related findings
using the Post-game Questionnaire question on the personal importance of Interaction Rituals for the experience and compared the high importance (1st-2nd) with the low importance ranking group (3rd-6th) based on the average and median word number of Ingame Stories, Reflection Report (only question 2) and calculated how many players per answer category invented something new in the Ingame Story (stories with IP>0).
Ranked importance of Interaction Rituals (position 1 to 5) Average number of new words Ingame Story Median number of new words Ingame Story Average word number Reflection Report question 2 Median word number Reflection Report question 2 Quota of Ingame
Stories with IP=0
1 - 2 (26) 82 60 38 39 69%
3 - 6 (10) 89 12 31 33 40%
Table 7. H5 (Leaving the player with narrative tension by not giving him all the information makes her engage in
social interaction, which facilitates story creation) related findings based on the numbers for each group of players
associated with the amount of hints collected during the game and compared each group on the average IP-Level and the average newly invented words per written word quota of the Ingame Stories.
Number of hints found Number of players with
this number of hints Average IP-Level Average new word quota
0 3 3 0,98 1 3 3 0,95 2 12 2,4 0,82 3 5 2 0,79 4 9 2,8 0,72 5 2 2 0,68
Table 8. Player Role-specific Data
Storification Attributes Family
Father Illegal Immigrant Marechaussee Human Trafficker
Number of Players 19 26 13 8
Average Points 328,6 264,2 196,4 435
Newly invented Ingame Stories/players quota 42% 46% 54% 88%
Average number of new words Ingame Story 39,6 49,3 94,5 59,6
Median number of new words Ingame Story 0 0 53 54
Average new words/written words quota Ingame Story 0,33 0,39 0,47 0,62
Average IP Ingame Story 10,1 10,9 21,8 15,1
Median IP Ingame Story 0 0 10 13
Average IP-Level Ingame Story 1,1 1,2 1,7 1,6
Ratio of in-character answers of Ingame Stories with IP>0 25% 50% 29% 43%
Average amount of Hints found 2,8 2,2 2,7 3
Proper answers on Reflection Report question 2/players
quota 63% 77% 77% 88%
Average words Reflection Report question 2 32 42,3 43,9 44,8
Median words Reflection Report question 2 34 38,5 36 43
Ratio of players who behaved like a different person
during play 58% 90% 90% 71%
Average amount of Reported Problems 0,9 1,1 0,9 1
Average reported Fun Level 4,3 4,25 4,25 4,4
Average reported Importance level of Ingame Interactions
B) Questionnaires
B.1) Reflection Report
! ! ! Het!verhaal!van!jouw!spel! ! 1. Hoe!was!jouw!dag!op!de!Wallen?! ! ! ! ! ! 2. Kun!je!ons!het!verhaal!van!jouw!spel!vertellen?!Wat!ervaarde! je,!wie!ontmoette!je!en!wat!deed!je!met!ze?!(5!zinnen!aub)! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 3. Heb!je!je!als!een!ander!persoon!gedragen!vandaag?!Op!welke! manier?! ! ! ! ! ! ! 4. Heb!je!het!gevoel!dat!je!het!verhaal!van!het!spel!beinvloed! hebt?!Op!welke!manier?! ! ! ! ! ! ! 5. Denk!je!dat!het!verhaal!van!het!spel!ook!een!goed!verhaal!zou! zijn!in!een!boek?! Naam:!B.2 Post-game Questionnaire
Being Grunberg Ervaring Vragenlijst (Master
Thesis Questionnaire)
This questionnaire is part of a Master Thesis on Being Grunberg of one of the students who built the experience. Please fill it in to support the research that is done on Being Grunberg. If you want to help, but do not have the time to fill it in now, please leave your e-mail adress:
What is your name?
Your name is only used to match this questionnaire with the other two questionnaires you filled in. It will not be used for any other purposes.
1.
Leg in uw eigen woorden uit wat u vandaag hebt gedaan.
2.
Ik heb plezier gehad met Being Grunberg.
Geef voor de volgende stellingen aan in hoeverre deze betrekking hebben tot uw Being Grunberg ervaring.
Mark only one oval.
1 2 3 4 5 Helemaal mee oneens. Helemaal mee eens. 3.
Mijn ervaring met Being Grunberg voelde aan als een spel spelen.
Mark only one oval.
1 2 3 4 5 Helemaal mee oneens. Helemaal mee eens. 4.
Being Grunberg Ervaring Vragenlijst (Master Thesis Question... https://docs.google.com/a/student.uva.nl/forms/d/1hRuuiBV...
Mijn ervaring met Being Grunberg voelde aan als een interactieve theater voorstelling.
Mark only one oval.
1 2 3 4 5 Helemaal mee oneens. Helemaal mee eens. 5.
Ik voelde me comfortabel met het gebruik van een smartphone tijdens Being Grunberg.
Mark only one oval.
1 2 3 4 5 Helemaal mee oneens. Helemaal mee eens. 6.
Ik heb tijdens Being Grunberg problemen gehad met de weg vinden.
Mark only one oval.
1 2 3 4 5 Helemaal mee oneens. Helemaal mee eens. 7.
Welke smartphone software hebt u?
Mark only one oval.
Apple iOS Android Other: 8.
Heeft u problemen ondervonden tijdens Being Grunberg?
U mag meerdere opties aankruisen.
Check all that apply.
Geen problemen
Technologische problemen Problemen met de weg vinden Problemen met sociale interactie Problemen met de locatie Problemen met de rekwisieten Other:
9.
Being Grunberg Ervaring Vragenlijst (Master Thesis Question... https://docs.google.com/a/student.uva.nl/forms/d/1hRuuiBV...
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