The World as Your Canvas: Telling Location Based Stories

thank you hi everyone um on that note of of the the meetup thing uh at that same location tonight um we are going to be doing a little uh sort of casual meet up get together to chat more about um location-based games and location-based storytelling uh starting at around six o'clock uh so you guys are welcome to come and join us there and continue the conversation um and i'll remind you again at the end um so come find us in the wrap-up room after for where that location is i guess um cool that's not what i want to do that's what i want to do so my name is lucas johnson hey hi um i run a company called silverstream media we do narrative design um and consulting and things and have over the last couple years been embarking on the location-based game journey doing uh specifically location-based games at events and so we wanted to talk about how to

tell stories in location-based games again there is an evaluation that we ask that you please fill out because it's very useful to all of us you know the deal if you've been to gdc before um so with the explosion of pokemon go in this past year um it's brought location-based gaming sort of into the limelight but it hasn't started with pokemon go there's been sort of location-based gaming for decades everything from alternate reality games to we're seeing the explosion of escape rooms now too interactive theater there's all sorts of sort of interesting ways that you can create stories and game play in real physical spaces and uh when we talk about this and it's anywhere from you know pokemon go which is everywhere in the world to an escape room which is a specific room uh we have a very broad range of of types of experiences that we might want to talk about white matter tell stories in and they're all use similar

design ideas storytelling functions stuff like that that are similar across all of these types of games though of course there are differences and really when we're looking at this range the question is how specific is the location and that makes a big difference in the kinds of experiences you can create so to discuss these stories we've brought together this awesome panel that has joined me from a very wide variety of backgrounds and experiences which is super exciting unfortunately if you were looking at the website ahead of time or the paper thing sarah thatcher is unable to join us on the panel after all but she is being replaced by jenny here who is awesome and sarah will be hopefully hanging out at the wrap-up room after and or um the meetup tonight so you can talk to her then as well but let's just quickly go down the line uh to introduce our panel just uh state name who you are and the kind of thing that you work on jeff i'm jeff mcpherson i'm the creative director and co-founder of motivio

and it's a platform launching at gdc it makes it easy to build location ar games and that platform came about from our first location uh ar game code runner which was in 2011. uh steve peters i'm founder and ceo of no mimes media formerly done some work for niantic uh last year which you may have heard of them a little pokemon go thing uh they continue to be a client uh have been working mostly in the alternate reality gaming space but also more recently uh getting into a lot of the geolocation uh games in the last five years augmented reality that kind of stuff uh really whatever doing cool stuff uh in relation to locations uh that's that's kind of what we've always been doing my name is jenny gottstein i work for the go game and we've been designing interactive adventure games since 2001 so our games then look a little different than what they look like now we used to use pay phones in those nokia brick phones and now we use

all sorts of devices and we can turn buildings neighborhoods multiple cities at once into epic games with actors and interactive content and we run them all around the world so i design those games i also manage our game design team and come up with new games concepts like the zombie apocalypse disaster preparedness games and any number of applied play game types i'm rob morgan i'm a writer and i am a co-founder and creative director of play lines and we make interactive site-specific augmented reality theater in ar um using location-based data to make site-specific installations that users walk around usually using a mix of smartphone audio and real-world actors to do immersive vr theater experiences awesome so you can see wide variety of experience from uh lots of different

kinds of games which is super cool and one of the reasons that i wanted to keep this panel uh sort of a bit more of a discussion uh than little micro talks and stuff like that so we can try to get some interesting stuff interesting conversations going on so to start that conversation i think the most important question we have to look at when we're talking about storytelling for real locations is why why do we do this why do we take games from the computer screen out into the real world where there are people looking at you okay so i i've been talking about and trying to push location based specifically audio ar for a long time and that conversation suddenly got a lot easier about nine months ago for some reason and like and then suddenly it was easy to give an obligatory pokemon go meets description of what we were doing and the reason i've been pushing it for years when it we had to try and make it work with gps which only sort of worked

was that i just really love tweaking context and i really love the idea especially because the other half of my job is writing for vr i really love how easy it is to get users immersed in something where you don't work with opacity and replace the whole world with a virtual one but instead you just add digital elements to change people's relationships with their actual environment and with their walk to the shops with pokemon go or for us with like a specific venue you change people's perceptions of people around them and i really like how you can recruit in elements of set dressing or even the other people in the scene without them even knowing but turn them into something that makes the user feel like they're being watched or feel like they're being like more self-conscious than they would be otherwise so it's kind of like a newer form of context hacking that's what i really like about using real places did you say context hacking yes that's cool i like it's an it's an art term from like the nozzles i think but yeah i'm

bringing it back yeah it's like reality enhancement right really when when you're in the middle of a game like that everything is brighter because anything can happen and you're not sure what's a part of it what isn't and i think that rush is as compelling for the players as it is and sorry if i'm putting words in your mouth but i think it's as compelling for us too as as uh one thing that we commented on it's fun when the game games the game designer so that never happened apparently it only happens to me and no but but there's a sense of kind of lawlessness where you're going out there with a design but you have no idea what's actually going to happen there are so many factors and all of a sudden as the designer you are also in a game and i think that is maybe why we make ourselves why we're a glutton for punishment why we decide to design real world games and not games that are a little more controllable yeah um it's kind of like jazz

right it's kind of like a call and response it's kind of like stand-up comedy in a lot of ways um uh for me the reason why is in a lot of the stuff almost every project i've worked on the goal has been to make it make the player feel like the story is taking place in the actual world that they live in as opposed to on a screen somewhere whether it's in your hand or whether it's on your tv or something like that and recently with technology that's become i won't say easier but it's become more interesting uh and the possibilities have expanded there but i mean that's that's a win right when we can turn uh the world around us into into a play space and i'm a big advocate of you know public public play and um this has always just been when you can when you can be walking down the street and all of a sudden the game literally reaches out and grabs you whether it's a phone call that's what got me into it was my phone rang on the way to lunch one day in 2001 and it was the beast alternate reality game

calling me literally i wasn't expecting it and i forgot about lunch i ran back into my office got online to see what was going on and i thought this this they're onto something here and the rest is history you know it's like you know it's it's so personal it's it just it feels like such a personal experience i know a lot of you guys use audio uh in your games um it's like being a part of a magic club like each each player uh has their own little secret with pokemon that was the first time that i ever felt like whoa there's other humans here who are doing it too that was that was remarkable but prior to that you've got this secret that is uh in our game you were a spy and you're you're hearing uh the voice of your handler constantly feeding you information knowing what's going on around you similar like to i guess turn by turn gps except this was this was be careful make sure no one's watching there might be someone across the street that park he was last seen at the park and you're like there is a there is a park how did

he know so that's comes from like you know pulling map data and gps data and and you're it's so uncontrolled you have this factor that's so uncontrollable that your writing has to be very careful like like a second cold reading is a very good technique in that you suggest something rather than laying down a fact that could be wrong that will break the narrative and break the person out of it so you might see somebody you might see this you might see that but one of the things we would do is uh you might see somebody going for a coffee that guy or that girl was last uh you know seen handing off documents to a spy but we know that you're by starbucks we don't mention that so that we're going to like of course there's people with coffee wow yeah and you're rendering it in your head so it's a very very personal experience well and you mentioned something else that's really interesting is is that social aspect i mean we all probably saw when pokemon go came out whether or not you played it suddenly seeing people in the same space together i remember going down to the beach and like you know a couple teenagers walked by and said hey there's a

you know dragonite down there and it's like thanks like running right you know it becomes this very social experience right yeah i will add that the one thing uh about the why is for me i'm seeing with the proliferation of things like escape rooms and things like that i feel like the pendulum is starting to swing a little bit away from you know digital to more experiential you know people want to do things that they can you know we've had now we've got this little computer in our pocket and we can do cool amazing things but we wanted now that now folks are really kind of wanting to go organic and take that next step and get out into the real world and doing things that are tangible and so i think that's why escape rooms are getting so popular that's why go game is continues to go strong after all these years um and that's what's really exciting you know i've got great stories about you know the the literal walking down the street and something happens to you out of the blue and you're like all of a sudden you're a superhero in a game or you're a spy that's awesome that's awesome there is another factor here which is that reality is cheap and plentiful and

it has a resolution it has great graphics and it rarely glitches out and that means that like if you can just manipulate the player's imagination and like jeff was saying the player fills in the blanks and can start telling themselves a story if you just give them the right kind of cues and then they're telling themselves an incredibly vivid story that you didn't have to simulate or pay for or virtually and you're tapping into there's emotional baggage or there's memories especially when it's in someone's own neighborhood that you get to ride for free on like you know instead of you know when you when they pay a million bucks for a beatles song and a soundtrack it's not cause it's a million dollar song it's because they're you know they're trying to tap into all of that nostalgia that this audience has and you kind of get that uh you get that you get that for free you have someone saying wow at that swing set that my dad taught me at a beast came up and i yeah taunted him with yeah so so we're talking about storytelling uh in these kinds of games uh and we're

looking at you know pokemon go and escape rooms and stuff does pokemon go have a story you know light story like it's about a you know light game mechanic right you're you're a trainer and you're the story is you're collecting pokemon i mean that's pretty much it right unless there's can i pull the audience i'm really curious about that or we should yeah sure yeah put up your hand if you think pokemon go has a story controversial not a lot not a lot i i would say it it makes you tell yourself a story and that's the really the really powerful thing that it does and that story can be as in-depth as you like and you can engage with it at the level that you want but also the story that it gets you telling yourself is not incompatible with your immediate reality and so like it makes you if it if it can make you take the long road to the shops even though you only want a loaf of bread then it's doing that for emotional reasons because of competition or game design or something that it's making you do for an emotional reason that makes your like interaction with the real world less optimal but more fun at that point i think that's a narrative

of some kind totally when i saw it sarah in the back put her hand up to that question oh yeah she had made is is that these kinds of of stories are experiential these are the stories of you the player and your experience in this space so it's not it isn't always though often has some element of like true sort of authored narrative um but it isn't always about that but it still has that sort of experiential story that i think is is really key in in bringing in um that emotional response as you guys were talking about and then also don't forget the story that happens between so often you know you can play with friends or new friends and you create your own story and i there are moments where you you reflect on oh remember that one time where we did that thing and so you're building your story in real time with the help of the game so i think there's multiple story lines to to take into consideration and to really celebrate and kind of fan the flames not knowing where it may go so so one other thing the big major

design challenge the first sort of design challenge that you have to think about when doing a location-based game i think is how do you motivate someone to actually get up and go outside oh yeah um so it you know it varies on the context of the game so if it's a group activity that everyone has opted into you don't need to modify i mean it's everyone has has created this social contract so they're self-motivated um if you are trying to pull people out of their day-to-day and draw them into the game you have to use different mechanics to do that um so i think the first question you ask yourself is is this like a ready-made experience or as part of the game am i also recruiting people to buy in and and that requires different nuance and how the how the the narrative gets rolled out if there is a narrative um well even even with something like an escape room where there's that you know

you have already sort of bought into this experience i think there's still even that extra level of now we you know now you're in the room but we need to actually make you care i mean presumably you want to be there but there's still that extra especially if you're trying to do any kind of story line right i would say that yeah that's that's that's the key is we're you're there when you're there anyway we want to make you care and i think with the the question of how do you get people out outside was a huge issue because right it's the balance reward the balance of the reward is it worth it for me to get up off my couch and go outside to do this thing as opposed to i just want to be able to do it here and lots of stories from pokemon go of people realizing wait i gotta go out i gotta go do this like my avatar is now moving how do i do this so i mean there's two there's two ways to look at it and to me it's a balance it's like one there's gameplay that's casual when you're out and about anyway right oh i'm at the bank or i'm at the diner let's see if there's any pokemon around here and then as you get deeper and deeper into it and then as you get more into the game and it kind of hooks you then you will purpose yourself to go out and then you will find yourself pokemon

go is a textbook example of this lightning in a bottle right it's like now it's a social phenomenon now i'm going to go out and we're going to play with friends but it was that initial of i'm going to go out and play and sure there were people that immediately went outside but the whole point is it's this kind of you got to have both and pokemon had the ip advantage right the nostalgia of that a lot of things came into fact you know factory the ar thing and sharing it on social media people saw pokemon on the kitchen counter how do i do that and they download they download the app and and they initially play it as they're out and about but and then as they got deeper into the game and enjoyed it then they started to want to go out and do it so right it's this it's this checks and balance between those two and that built-in screen grab being able to take a picture i think was just marketing genius yeah brilliant you saw the image and you got it right away because they didn't do a lot of traditional marketing it was almost solely it was almost solely social media it really went viral and it was those ar screenshots that that caught on magikarp in the frying pan yeah because we do site-specific stuff i think we have like a different

experience of this because a lot of what we do is like do a fictional layer or a game layer that takes place within a conference or takes place within a festival and so a lot of the time we actually design our experiences to make our existing players the people who are already on the experience the best advert for the experience for everybody else because like 5 10 of the attendees will be playing it at any given time but our players are walking around with headphones on and we're also in the course of the story we're telling them getting them to do slightly weird things that make them stand out a little bit making them feel natural about doing the weird thing and that it makes sense to them in the context of the story but other people walking past are like those guys know something that we don't and that's really interesting then they get motivated so we create like vip areas that you can only get to if you know the password and you only know the password if you get to the end of the story in the audio and so people walk past at a technology festival and there's a bouncer and a velvet rope and they don't know what's going on and the only way to get in on it is to run our experience that works really well in terms of pushing people back into our experiences

but it's it only works because we're fight specific well and i want to get into sort of you know a lot of the the specifics narrative best practices and stuff but one of the other sort of major concerns that you have to think about even up front um is this now that we're in the physical world what kinds of things do we need to think about that we wouldn't need to think about if we're just making a mobile game where we're just making a computer game or something and i'm going to bring up uh maslow's hierarchy of needs here which was uh another tip from sarah um but so so in most games we don't need to worry about the bottom of that pyramid which are like the base needs of of being human you know you're sitting at your computer you're going to be safe if you need to pause and go to the bathroom you can do that but in a physical space suddenly you need to think about these other questions yeah i'd say we really well we really encountered that in terms of um as we were developing our first location

ar game uh the assumption that this is gonna be a physical space we'll make it the lock and key mechanic of you're going to go here you're going to go to a bank ah you were a hacker much like watchdogs but location based and before watchdogs and and you're like i can't get into the bank you don't have the code oh i remember i'm going to go now over to this location the starbucks i'm going to run my little hacking minigame and i'm going to get the key and i'm going to go back and and the moment we tested it we were in big trouble because there's nothing you know when you're playing a point-and-click kind of like uh oh that's the lock i remember the keys over here click or you know or or navigate with your controller that's not a lot of effort when you've walked two blocks with no gameplay and you stop and you're like go turn around go back and you're like you would not believe how awful that is as an experience just even when you forget your keys and you're embarrassed and you don't want anyone to notice that you're turning around nobody cares what you're doing but then imagine that you've kind of got this narrative going on and it was it was a deal breaker and it was like oh that's that was our assumption yeah no and that um that's something

that we bake into all of our games that travel has to be less than a fourth of the experience and if you travel you know to get from point a to point b and if you have to make people travel you have to fill that time with something that will keep them alight you know whether it be i spy missions that they're using the physical environment to find things so they're looking up and out or something that they're discussing and negotiating amongst their team or something that they're doing to prepare for the mission that's ahead um and then the other piece of just very boring logistical location based game stuff we always when the players are opting in and we we can touch them before the game so they're not we're not just pulling them in and they start playing we always send out something that primes them for dressing comfortably and weather appropriately because if you are uncomfortable you will have less fun that's directly related so we try to get people without spoiling the surprise and it takes different shapes depending on the game how you

communicate that information we try to do it as cheeky as possible but you have to make sure your audience is ready physically and emotionally and spiritually for the task ahead or else they're gonna they're gonna opt out yeah i'd say for for from my perspective you just gotta really be careful with the whole win state fail state and going off of what you were saying i mean yeah if you show up and it's like crap i forgot that key uh now i gotta walk back to two blocks you know that's terrible you gotta there's gotta be an alternative right it's like okay well maybe i forgot that but now there's another way i can do without having to retrace my steps right maybe there's another mini game that's where it makes whatever i had to do a little bit more difficult but i still i don't have to like go back or there's no there's no you can't you can't die in these games you know that's that's that's yeah that's the whole issue too it's like well it's not like a typical i'm playing fallout and great now i died and i just go back to the last save point there are no save points there's no spottings yes yes well yeah that'd be cool so

although yeah well and i think you know and looking at the the hierarchy of needs i think that might be why most escape rooms are you know around an hour in length because otherwise you need to think about the need to go to the washroom well i was gonna say we actually often our uh experiences take people into the bathroom of wherever the venue is because that's it's nice to kind of go into a space and you don't normally get told a story in there but we can have a virtual layer that happens in there and like we've done stories are you telling me we've we've had them that like you get taken in for a sexual encounter or like someone goes in and then they're like this is the kind of the moment in the story where a character breaks down and you listen to them kind of confessing something or being very upset then they use a restroom well this is the thing like originally it was kind of should we build in a bathroom break because the player is walking past and if they go in then they'll go off story so we build it in for that reason but it ended up being a really intimate and intense experience for people standing in the bathroom listening to the that was when we'd do the most intense moments in the story we're sitting right yeah and like

but that's the ideal is if the player is kind of there in a private space or they're staring at themselves in the mirror that's an enhancement and also yeah it's an opportunity to actually create the the possibility of the player not having to abandon the experience part way through to go to the bathroom it's built in right well that leads really well into sort of the next point that i wanted to make is okay so we're we're choosing to tell stories in the real world uh using the real environment so how do we do that how do we use the environment to enhance the stories that we're telling i mean the bathroom's a perfect example yeah sometimes i think it's an accident first and then you're like oh you can use the environment that way so um this one game that we have it's an espionage training game so in the course of the game the players are learning how to become world-class spies a la you know w7 matahari archer etc and in the in the beginning of the game we give them a couple of things that they need to keep be aware of and one we say all right

well there's someone out in the field who's who's trailing you and if if they capture you on film and if we see that film meaning the actor sends it to us then we will dock your team x amount of points so like watch your back you know like it creates the look over the shoulder function and i ran this one game in santa monica and i forgot to hire that actor like i just spaced there was other things going on didn't hire the actor so there's nobody walking around taking pictures of the teams but they still got that thing but it's in santa monica and they're tourists everywhere right so every time a tourist would take a photo the whole team would hit the deck and and so we realized actually you know what you don't have to hire an actor if you just put it in a in a well-trafficked area where you play where are you snapping away yeah so like the environment will leap out at you sometimes when you least expect it espionage is a great genre for location based as well i've noticed yeah yeah and one of the nice things about that is just that it it doesn't conflict with reality right when you're a spy and the stakes are so high in espionage

drama right there's one or two people uh that are playing out basically super powers uh you know at war and paranoia is very easy well i wouldn't say easy yeah why not it's easy to create in a location-based game when you're a good writer like you guys yeah yeah i tend to start all of our experiences with something like are they still watching or like something that kind of doesn't give you a lot of story but it puts the player in a heightened state and makes them more aware and yeah after a while you don't need the actor there like that that's such a cool story that's a great example learn from my mistake well and it's easy to do it's easier perhaps to do use the environment uh in the specific story when when you know what exactly the environment is you're doing well something where you know that there's a bathroom literally right there on the route our tech director dustin is here and he had a great phrase that what we do is often like reverse level design in that we'll often we kind of have to go to a venue beforehand and walk around or take a gopro and walk around and then kind of see what story emerges from the space which sounds very kind of wishy-washy

but really it's the best way to go oh there's a there's a phone booth there and it's out of use but we can definitely use that and drive the player that way and what are the natural geographical forks in this environment to create an interactive decision where you go this way or that way but that's an opportunity that we have that if you're doing like map api stuff you can't necessarily do yeah i'd say i mean for the stuff i've done it's been mostly site specific we you know mostly stuff for alternate reality games or whatever it's been like and there's always going out to scout the location and immersing yourself there and seeing what the location has to offer sometimes you'll have to do it remotely i've gotten really really good at google earth and different different other tools at your disposal but there's nothing beats actually being you know boots on the ground you know to see what's there and also to talk to people you get you know and and really opportunities present themselves that you never would have been able to research ahead of time so but but then making something that has to be a little bit not site specifically that's interesting it's like i always thought that that having that kind of um controlled

environment knowing where the environment that it's going to take place in was going to solve all our problems until i met you guys i realized oh you guys have a lot of the same problems and brand new problems and bringing a whole brand new problems whereas what we were doing is yeah our our games uh well it was a it was adapting to wherever we were in the world and so we had a system set up where um the writer would decide okay well this is sort of about a crooked cop who's laundering money so i'm gonna have a first choice second choice third choice fifth choice uh in terms of what's in the vicinity within a say a 200 meter radius is there a police station then i'm going to call that number one bump that to the top and it will call up audio specific to that it's not really a branch it's it's just an it's just adapting it'll say the the you know the the cop's got a um he's laundering money and he's got a stash there go break into the system or the police station uh not a lot of police stations around not a lot of hospitals around you know the a-list of the locations that i would like you know to to push to that player in

real time so then we go we go down we go down to okay is there a pool hall is there you know things that are traditionally associated with um um you know shadier activities i'm sure there's a very classy pool halls arcades used to be classy and and it goes down the list and we're like okay a bank okay then uh maybe a uh a church and i'm like i don't really want people going to a church and then hearing audio saying there's a crooked cop that works out of that church we'll mix that um and and uh but what it does what that approach does which is it's very exciting you know as a writer and a developer and is that you kind of have this magic level designer which is the world which is tinkering with your levels and you can fire up your game and play that that mission and go wow like it's unbelievable he's running a racket you know he's he's this cop runs a money laundering out of a laundry that's number one and then a car wash and he funnels the money from here to there and now what's interesting is it was a very niche game right and we're actually

saying we're suggesting that there's criminal activity happening at real locations uh as uh you know pokemon has brought this really to the mainstream it's now there's another responsibility we have to take is although it feels cool for the player uh we are kind of casting a narrative on top of a business that's not opted into it and we're gonna we're gonna touch on those ethical issues and stuff in a sec but you wanted to add something yeah i wanted to add just keep in mind though i mean we're talking mostly like gps locate location um remember there's a lot of different sensors in the phone they can also use in the location i mean what if what if it's not just oh there's a park nearby but oh taking into account the time of day or the temperature of where you are you know some what if some pokemon only showed up when the temperature was like below 40 degrees or you know if you're up a certain elevation or if if it's a really quiet environment or a really loud environment i mean there's all sorts of other cues from the location that you can then gather and bring into your game to affect the game play and you know it can sense i mean with a

narrative great how awesome would it be to know the narrative knows that it's starting to drizzle yeah you know it's starting to rain and yeah in the during the rain i mean that's one even from one of the args we did uh back in the day we had a blogger girl who was talking about driving up into the mountains outside of portland to go do this thing get the mcguffin and she mentions in it that she's a little worried because it's starting to snow outside and one of our players from portland says as he read that he looked outside and it was starting to snow because we wrote that in real time based on the weather look weather information that we had and it was just those little touches that again make it feel like this story is really going on in the actual world that i live in and you could tap into you know there's apis there's data coming from dark sky and so hyper local uh weather yeah and uh not to pitch my own company but we can provide that for you i like oh no well i i i think the as these games become more pervasive is we have more players out in the world playing actively i think the next

frontier is using one game as the environment for another game and one thing one experience that i had i was walking up a hill in san francisco you know at the height of everyone on their phones pokemon go and i was the only one going up the hill and i could see people come down the hill and they were coming in waves right they were with their friends on pokemon you know like heads down like using their phone and they were coming at me and all of a sudden it was like oh i'm an asteroids like you know kind of upstream salmon swimming the pokemon players and it became my game and so i think finding ways to cr to you know it's like tides right you know it creates these eddies that you wouldn't have anticipated so how can we how can we really play with those eddies that happen naturally or or um through game design i think social attunement and like attenuation is one of the easiest things to manipulate in people and it creates the most immediate effect in the same way that like saying to you you know if if we were

going to make everybody go around the room and turn and shake everybody's hand who's sitting next to all of you that would make this situation really awkward and then it would completely change your relationship with your immediate context and that's something that i want to do more and more with our games like a data set that we can scrape off the phone is how many other people are playing the game nearby within a like radius of 10 meters and at that point we can start generating like impromptu flash mobs because the most the most significant part of the the set dressing is the presence of other people because humans are really really attenuated to the presence of other people and whether they're watching and what they're doing whether they're watching me and am i being weird if you can like get the player thinking about that stuff then you can put them in a really interesting predicament and then that enhances your story or yeah you can play a game that takes place in your context that the other people were not even aware of but they're enhancing your experience at the real world that's a really cool one so obviously we can talk about this stuff all day and we have for the last couple days so you know please join us later to continue the conversation but i do want

to touch on while we're still on narrative best practices uh the use of audio because that's come up a couple times and i know a lot of what um several of us have used for telling the story and this comes to the question of do you want to create a game where your players are doing this as they're walking through this environment we're using the environment to help tell the story you want to make sure that the player is engaging with it so i know i mean you do that a lot with motive yeah we have a best practice we have a warning we call the desk bias or the desktop bias which is you're inevitably going to be developing this sitting at your desk and you're looking at that screen and going to want to iterate on it to make it prettier and prettier prettier and and and the end result can be that you've got a player you've designed a lot of visual cues that's staring at their phone and it's just it's it just takes away from the whole experience um and it's frustrating i remember testing when i and when that rain is hitting the screen you're trying to understand some characters motivation it's not quite clear and you're like what this but this sucks

so it's it's so critical to just keep going out there and keep going out there and i think the beauty about audio is it's heads up and and and that does bring up one other point which is when you use audio as your main way of telling your narrative the other forms uh you know of communicating in particularly text or found documents they drop in hierarchy and plot points and plot twists and clever things we thought the player would figure out by reading get completely lost and you guys have found that as well keep the story as story as simple as possible yeah when you're out there as well as we get onto pitfalls to avoid keep it simple or audio is is cheap and really effective and it's often not incompatible with the user's experience of the real world around them like if you have ever been walking down the street listening to something on your headphones and the right song comes on at the right moment that your reality is being augmented at that point i don't i don't really care what the data set is that's augmented reality and humans are really susceptible to having their reality augmented

and we just try and recreate that the heads-up effect of audio is really really important and also like you can do things that don't have to be physically possible they're as real and vivid as the player's imagination like that's why i love audio yeah no i think and and music because when we talk we say audio we're often talking about narrative you know go over here this is happening but music is is absolutely another character in the experience and as you guys are going out and designing think of music as this as this tone setter and it can do really interesting things with how scenarios are interpreted so in our games often and some of our games will take the media that the players create and in front of them if we all come back after the game we're live mixing sound effects and music to the photos and videos that they've already taken and the video originally may be something that's quite somber but the minute that you overlay the andy griffith theme it is a completely different experience

or you know if someone's boxing and you throw on rocky and people their face melt so it's something where i i think we think of it as kind of this orchestral background but it really does push narrative forward in ways that may be underexplored so moving forward on sort of pitfalls to avoid we've talked about some of these things already in the conversation you know not wanting to look uh not wanting to be embarrassed by what you're doing um keeping the story simple because people will lose a lot of details um not asking them to do too much or motivating them properly to get to get up and go um so so rather than sort of go through some more generics can i get a brief example from each of you of something to avoid doing that you've a ticking clock where someone has to get to a location and particularly if they're out in the wild there's there's there's vehicles it's just it's just too dangerous and you have a responsibility people will already kind of be in this in this world and going after

this objective and be motivated to move and step out and you know so that's a tough one because it's a nice go-to to be like gotta get there before the clock runs out that's a good one steve specific pitfalls yeah don't don't tell your players to dress up like the joker and go to the mall because they'll shut them all down and that happened to you yes well not being personal but we had players doing that yeah from what i hear yes on the advice of council i declined well i think you have to a pitfall is to assume that you're not going to make mistakes as the designer or you and your production team are going to do everything flawlessly never happens and also you know learn to kind of enjoy it um there's there was one epic mix-up that was very entertaining for me and i think it was sort of entertaining for the players but we had um a game in a

uh in vegas and you can't it's illegal to take um photos and videos on the casino floor so that was off limits for a lot of the play so we put a lot of our actors in rooms in the in the hotels and one mission teams had to go to a room and they walked in and they were going to get grilled on on sports trivia so we had an actor in there wearing a ref's shirt and a whistle and was just ready to like get in there and then another room they were told that it was a crime it just happened there and they had to go and they couldn't touch anything but they had to scan the crime scene for clues and then get out and then unbeknownst to them 20 minutes later they would be drilled on the details of the room but they also didn't know that we'd hidden a guy in the closet to jump out and and and he was dressed just he was horrifying he was so scary and so they were supposed to kind of like sneak around and then um get freaked out but i switched or or the the keys got switched right so the the wrong actor went to the wrong room

and so the sports the team expecting sports stats got scared like you know by this guy in the closet and then the the crime scene kids were getting grilled on like baseball things so you know i to this day i don't think they knew anything went wrong but you know fill in this role so so pitfalls i mean i think if you can design in such a way where if if nothing goes as planned it still keeps the magic going um if you only design in one direction and if the lock doesn't pick or the person doesn't show up then it all breaks your plate your player characters have no ai that's the problem they're humans and they you have no you that's the craziest thing you're like no you're not why are you doing that there's nothing about this game that means you're supposed to do that i just wanted to go this way well and that speaks to this question of you know in video games or traditional video games we can have invisible walls that stop you from going there and you can't do that in the real world people will just walk into that room

yeah if you if your story can't survive having any like any 10 20 second cl section of it if the player can't just miss that and your story can't survive that like it you only say everything once or like you have a reveal and you have to be there and if you're not there for it then your story doesn't make sense it's not like a movie like if if you have to pay attention to this section and you can't afford to have the player miss it it's just not a story that's suited for an immersive environment because the player will be distracted we use mobile phones they could receive a call and or like they could see a friend and take their headphones off for 10 seconds and we don't want them to be able to skip back necessarily because that doesn't feel very immersive either but you need a nice story that patches itself together and leaves enough space for the player to be doing some of the imaginative work but also that can survive you know it's not just dominoes if one of those dominoes doesn't fall the rest of them still need to go down the way you vaguely want them to and and it was mentioned the uh

you know people can just walk where they where they want they don't have an ai and then you get this problem with with griefers potentially yeah well and also too i'd say one on a serious answer the question instead of the mall thing um you know keep in mind kind of that where that the magic circle is and how it affects people that aren't in in on it in on the joke um always be mindful of context right how that how things appear to those who don't necessarily know what's going on when they see a guy you know on the street get a hood thrown over his head and throw it into a black van and scoot it away that's right and even if the guy was prepared for that and knew that was happening number one i don't think it's a great idea but for onlookers if you're doing it in a public place you know keeping the content i know the people that have said you know we're going to leave you a cache of you know it's going to be in an ammo box left on a picnic table you know in this this post 911 world we live in that sort of thing's not really a great idea for the people that aren't in on the game and so there are a lot of they're a lot more ethical considerations that you have to take

into you know take into consideration with these these sorts of things yeah so in a way you're designing both for the player and for whoever is around them yeah yeah inadvertent onlookers if you're doing a multiplayer thing um and someone was talking to me about a design that they had and it sounded like it was fun but one of the problems was multiplayer and you're scavenging and the items that you're scavenging could include things like a gun and you just have to imagine that uh all over the world out of context you hear these two guys going i got one i found a gun i got a gun did you get a gun yeah i did you get ammo i got ammo come on over here i've got a gun those other things are not those are the the kind of the byproduct of what can happen so we're in this kind of area where these tropes these these these uh things that are very handy to to to have in a game you have to think about will someone say that out loud standing apart consequences can become real yeah if you're not careful also beware of helpful players because we had a um the launch like the first launch of one

of our very first projects the first 15 minutes things started going haywire and we started getting bugs that we hadn't had before and it turned out that it was because we were using bluetooth beacons to provide very accurate very local location data so that users could like turn left or turn right down a corridor and have an immediate response and that would make represent an immediate choice that they were making and a user had found one of our beacons where it was supposed to be but thought someone might pick that up and do something with it so i'm going to pick it up and return it to the guys and not only were they then picking it up and moving it in order to try and be helpful this good samaritan they were walking around with it in their pocket around the start area looking for one of us to give it to which meant that our players were getting a load of false positives from the end of the story and the story was skipping and we've put in failsafe so that doesn't happen now but yeah that kind of players who sort of who wanted to go the extra mile you also need to build in a reward for them rather than so that everybody wants to feel like they know something that everybody else doesn't that's why espionage works so well so if you're going to let people see the

strings of your game that's not necessarily a bad thing but you need to reward them rather than go thank you i'll just go and put this beacon back where it's supposed to be um we're running a little short on time so i do want to move forward and speaking of legal and ethical concerns one of the big controversies that came up with pokemon go was of course you know issues around trespassing issues around privacy issues around you know putting a pokestop at the holocaust museum uh things like that how do we how do we avoid those issues as as writers and designers well first know that they realize they exist which doesn't exactly have occur to a lot of people um it is an interesting brave new world we're in because it does bring up the question of like the guy that wakes up one morning and his his garden in his backyard is now a poke stop to this you know multi-million dollar game that he never consented to and he's not making he's not sharing in the revenue but but somebody is using his private property to generate to make money off of

basically so there are these these questions that honestly have yet to be resolved uh in in a lot of ways um most people don't mind but then there is yeah there's the curator of the of the holocaust museum or where there's a moore memorial in the middle of town that was dedicated to you know a certain family that that you know that that all died in world war ii and it's very somber place and they they're they're all these little different use cases uh where it may not be appropriate to play a game and so right now there's it's easy right now you can say well we'll contact you know the makers of the game and we'll have them opt us out but then again if you're if you're another big a big player and you may have your own ip and you may have your own uh area where you may want not want somebody else's ip to be invading on yours i won't mention any amusement park names um you know that may be an issue there i mean so there are all these considerations that i think aren't going to go away they're

only going to get more exacerbated as we go on and there's going to be more and more of these games uh as geolocation games become more mainstream which i really think they are going to be now now that everybody knows what pokemon go is um so that that's that's an issue i mean yeah we have a way of blacklisting those those sites uh um using our tech but you know it's like it needs to be centralized is everybody you know who's constantly having people trespassing and have to figure out who published the game how do i get ahold of that person so yeah you're right that's a larger question so i i think about it like this that if you're playing pokemon go and you see a pokemon on the other side of a chain link fence and you can't get at it that is not the game not functioning as designed that is a feature that's not a bug that is the way that the game introduces exciting elements to make the real world more interesting the real world also introduces obstacles to make the game more interesting but the world is full of all kinds of fences and fences affect some people

more than others for reasons of gender or race or physical ability and the world is full of like unpleasant realities that some people have to deal with more than others and i think the minute we're working in augmented reality we have a responsibility to reality and the players reality and to take that into account and so if your game if it operates in reality that means that some people will have an experience of it which might be limited for example or might you know you might not feel able or comfortable walking around at night looking for pokemon in your neighborhood or someone else's neighborhood and that means that experience is locked off for you and we have to be able to take that into account and to kind of write art that can adapt to that or that at least you know takes into account yeah no i think it's important that anybody that's designing for these real world games is putting at the top of their list examining their own design bias and what

are you bringing to the table that you're unknowingly um laying on everybody who's playing and not playing this experience that you're crafting so i think surrounding yourself with intelligent people surrounding yourself with community organizations that know way more and better than you do um surrounding yourself with experts in various fields i also think there's going to be a lot of dialogue between urban planners and game designers which is going to be good and messy and great um but i think the first thing is to ask really really uncomfortable questions and see what happens yeah and hire diversely people will know things that you don't um so the last two minutes before we have some time for questions i do want to touch on uh briefly sort of the business side of this um you mentioned you're thinking you think that this will become a bigger thing now that pokemon go has happened do we think that was just a flash in the pan or is there actually market growth potential here

yeah it's going to work i mean okay pokemon go is lightning in a bottle there are a lot of a lot of things happening to contribute to its success i mean ip being the the foremost of that but what it has done it has become a success case and it makes it easier to pitch these projects so you can say oh yeah it's pokemon go meets harry potter or whatever you know and people will understand what what that is and so when we add to that new technologies are going to come come along eventually wearables are something's going to become acceptable socially and and and technologically i mean the the technology is going to increase and being able to use not only your location but being able to use augmented reality to you know do the thing and say yeah there's a dragon flying around and there's king kong up on the building and that that could give some really really big big potential again there's a little bit of unknown there's a lot of people still aren't quite sure but i mean it's not going to go away i don't think i mean people are going to try new things

try different things and the technology is going to go forward and i think it's a great thing obviously pokemon go made money um but is yeah is it can other experiences like this make money yeah yes um totally um so i think the go game has been a really interesting like trial balloon or or um test case and how play has been how the market of play has changed over the years um you know when they first started this is well before i got there it was just fun it was just to have a good time and send people enough to do goofy things in public and i remember being told around 2008 that shifted dramatically where all of a sudden the majority of our clients were coming to us and saying we're having a morale crisis because the world is crazy the economy is crazy people who are in the workplace are going through unprecedented levels of stress and pressure we need we need play

as a way to to to let go of that for a second just to take a deep breath and enjoy ourselves and and then you know since then it's changed again and again you know we see play being used as a recruitment tool we see play well we've always seen play used as an educational tool which i think is great and i'm passionate passionate about applied play about using play towards something that you wouldn't necessarily think it could be useful for and which is how the whole zombie disaster preparedness games came about because we wanted to tackle something that people have a natural aversion to how many how many people have an emergency kit okay good oh good more preppers than normal um but for everyone who doesn't by the way i didn't for a very long time i'm willing to wager that part of the reason why you haven't is because you haven't gotten around to it it's kind of boring to you know buy granola bars on your saturday um

or you're not doing it with friends it's intimidating even to think about the reality so using play to switch those emotions around and instead making preparedness something that is memorable and social and engaging and fun um you know there are so many different industries and and challenges that we could be taking the mechanics of play and applying towards creating new outcomes um so that and and we're seeing a demand for that which i think is really interesting people want to really maximize play as a tool to solve all these different problems okay so we have like two minutes left so we have time for like one question at each microphone for the first people that can have something about the the revenue thing just really quickly there is one really unique opportunity with that i've seen with geolocation games and then and pokemon go has started to do it is that presents itself and that is brand partnerships in a unique way i mean they've got the one of the first things was mcdonald's in japan saying oh we're going to have these special pokemon that only show up at mcdonald's

a multi-million dollar deal you know that was a a great example and that's not possible in other i mean that's the first time something like that has happened it's kind of a unique new way of you drop you know you grab people and you you point them to your brand and there's their their gameplay is enhanced by doing that so that's just the uniqueness and i think the dlc is viable yes obviously you have a campaign so we're going to be in the wrap-up room afterwards to continue talking we can talk about you know how to get started in this stuff because we don't have time but i just do want to take two quick questions so right there um just sort of i guess going off this topic i'm working on a game right now for a museum and i just wanted to talk about or ask you um sort of best practices for working with a client uh making sure that you're sort of incorporating uh whatever data or you know that they want to be conveying to their visitors or you know if it's a commercial project their clients or whatever um yeah because we've done kind of museum and place stuff in

listed buildings or buildings that are kind of historic or you know very protective of their fabric reassure the venue that you're not going to damage the fabric of the building that is if they're not saying it that definitely is something that they're thinking about and you know i mean hell is that the example of um is it minneapolis minnesota who tried to now ban pokemon go because the volume of people visiting the park damaged their parks which surely is then that's the park operating designed um but like just reassure them that that's not going to be the case and then it's just going to be a fun kind of foot traffic rather than a scary kind of foot traffic we will continuing answering that in the room right over here hi i am i'm a law student and my area of developing expertise is property rights and augmented reality games so i'm really curious to hear if any of you have had any actual legal problems and also how you interact with lawyers to kind of preempt these issues i know you guys all touched on it but i'm really interested i would love to talk to you offline after this um but we're not being requested very

strong disclaimers uh and constantly you know uh guiding the player uh reminding the player to be safe to actually try to effectively prevent a problem uh is one of the most important things i think and then if you have a backup uh user agreement but yeah that that takes up a big part of the design process is getting the proper permitting and and making sure your eyes are dotted and teaser crossed so i think it's definitely going to be a developing space where it's going to come it's you're in the right you're in the right place you are in the good works awesome thank you so much everybody we will be in the wrap-up room just across the hall and uh tonight at the secret location uh around six o'clock if you want to keep the conversation going thank you so much for coming guys you