fisharepeopletoo

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.

The 8453

Our creative technology clan can beat your creative technology clan at any game you care to mention, from table tennis to World of Warcraft.

Academic Enquiry*

i/ We want to understand what might be effective tools and techniques
for creating satisfying location aware play/narratives** [and assuming our version of it to be
technologically enabled in some way]

ii/ From the run of Five Trees Forest events (in two office buildings and a sixth form college), start to isolate [in a repeatable and demonstrable way] what those tools and techniques might be.

iii/ Measure how effectively Five Trees Forest deploys those tools and
techniques.

iv/ use that measurement to inform new location aware play.

My guess as to what the effective tools and techniques might be (not
all deployed in Five Trees Forest), is some combination of:

location sensing technology (which technologies might be better or
worse? - is NFC better than GPS, is an SMS keyword better than NFC?)
shared public space
narrative
game play
rules
individual creativity and self expression
communal activity
real world identity/anonymity
presence
peer pressure
face-to-face interactions
web sites
printed paper
mobile phones
archives and databases
screens
sense of place
sense of belonging

which is the sort of list that includes just about everything, ever.

*We've been enquiring into this since 2002 if not before, but not academically.
** My half-arsed (though based on a great deal of practical experience) observations on "What is location aware play?" coming shortly. Whether it's a meaningful or valuable thing to try and create, I might skip for the time being.