fisharepeopletoo

Umm. Err. Umm. Err...

Over the last fifteen or twenty years British culture (certainly English culture, that might be a bit unfair on Scotland and Wales) has been a derivative of London's position as a command and control centre of globalisation.*

You don't think so? Come on, what is English culture?

Property, expensive restaurants (TV chefs, for example, are a derivative of a derivative, a sort of sub prime cut) and contemporary fine art.

Just the sort of one-off experiences and objects, with infinitely inflatable prices, that you need if you've made a fortune nudging 1s and 0s up and down wires and are looking for something to spend it on.

So. Umm. Err. Umm. Err. What now?

Maybe we can have a new culture? With a different sense of value?

But maybe after 20 years, there is nothing (and nowhere) left to support those other values?

*The Global City, Saskia Sasson, Princeton University Press, 1991

"Here is one I ate earlier"

One interaction I really wanted to have in Five Trees Forest was for two players to meet and for their sprites to hop between phones.

The Nokia 6131 didn't seem to be able to do that (without writing an application for the phones, which we didn't have the time or cash for), and the solution we devised of sticking chips on the back of the phones didn't work well enough to risk.

So instead I wrote some enchanted food into the storyline, and players meet to exchange chocolate bars with sprites trapped inside.

As it turns out, this seems to fit very nicely with the fairy story, Alice in Wonderland feel I've been trying to create.

And if you get a bit peckish during research and development...

"ithankyou!" Installing a Pervasive Game Played with Nokia NFC Phones

That's the installation kit for Five Trees Forest - posters, magic chocolate bars (NFC enabled!), comments book, landmark posters (with an NFC chip stuck on them), and they all fit in the big green magic box.

On Friday afternoon I spent fifteen minutes going round the building with posters and blu-tack putting up posters, and hey presto, a building is turned into an enchanted space.

That's the Museum of Lost Things on the door (the Museum is always closed otherwise you'd go in and find all the things you'd lost, and there would be no exhibits left).

Because we are using NFC enabled mobile phones, I'm hoping that players will need hardly any introduction in how to play - just a demo of how to use the phone to read the NFC chip and that's it - the game itself should tell them everything else they need to know.

To test that out I've tried to give the players as little technical instruction as possible, and I'm not even going to hand the phones out to them myself - I'll show the receptionists in the building how to use the NFC function, and they'll show the players, who will pick up their phones and begin when they come to reception to collect their post in the morning.

Anyone who has ever installed and run any sort of pervasive game event using technology, which can get to theatrical levels of complexity and faff, even down to pains-in-the-arse like the wifi not working in the venue, will be standing up and applauding me right now.

And creating a mixed reality infrastructure using posters takes me right back to City Poems.

Five Trees Forest Pervasive Game Using Nokia NFC Phones

Five Trees Forest is a pervasive game played with Nokia NFC enabled mobile phones.

The Five Trees Forest is an invisible world that is in exactly the same place as our world.

It has landmarks, like the Down the Back of the Settee Mines

characters like the Wise Sheep

and baddies, wicked witches like the Big Flip Flops witch.

The only creatures that can jump between our world and the Five Trees Forest are sprites, and when they are in our world, sprites like to live in mobile phones because the batteries keep them warm, and the radio waves make them giggle.

To pick up and drop off sprites from the Forest, humans just need to hold their phone up to the secret signs that mark places in the Five Trees Forest landscape, and their sprite will hop into or out of the phone.

Sprites talk to humans by sending messages that appear out of thin air (humans sometimes call them text messages), and ask magic questions like "If you were a ghost, who would you haunt and why?" in order to win treasure, and fight the wicked witches.

The answers to the magic questions from all the players appear on the map of the Forest, so that humans become part of the story and history of the Five Trees Forest wherever it appears.

The Five Trees Forest will be found first in a trial at the Media Centre in Huddersfield, then at Norton Sixth Form College in Sheffield as part of the Off the Shelf literature festival, then at a secret location in London (it's a very large media organisation, but that is TBC).

fivetreesforest.org

Magic food in the Five Trees Forest

Installing the Five Trees Forest

Nokia NFC Phones Kissing

A write up of the new Nokia 6212 NFC phone on the Touch site includes a photo of two phones side by side, exchanging information via NFC.

This reminded me of how convincing and right it looks to put two phones side by side to do something together.

When we were commissioning short films to be played on mobile phones, a couple of the films needed to be played out on two or more phone screens simultaniously.

These films were slightly more succesful in the concept than the execution, but what was clear straight away, as soon as you put two phones side by side on a table top, was that it fitted in exactly with how mobile phones were and could be used.

Advanced Technical Research and Development with Nokia NFC Phones

Ready for a run through of Five Trees Forest, with a Nokia 6131 NFC phone, and NFC tags that allow sprites to jump between our world and the Five Trees Forest.

You can see the Down the Back of the Settee Mines (lots of treasure to be found there of course!), Wise Sheep, Graveyard of Milk Bottles and Ancient Slide of Sprites (kept shiny by the bums of countless generations of sprites!)

Of course, those places really look like this:

We've found with Nokia 6131 you can't use NFC phone-to-phone, and one of the events I wanted to happen in the game was for pairs of players to have to find each other and swap sprites, so we've had to improvise and stick an NFC tag on the back of the phone to enable that interaction.

Though the new Nokia 6212 does do phone to phone according to Touch.