My name is Matthew. I'm a UX writer at Google Daydream and this presentation is about how to tell stories as a developer, as a designer, as someone with a pretty cool tool using the techniques at your disposal.
 
My interview with google was literally the day that Google Assistant was announced. I was hired to make video games without video and at the time, we had no idea what that meant.

These days, I am working in almost the exact opposite media, immersive computing. It's virtual reality, augmented reality, anything you can see that isn't really there. Ideally, the written word will intrude as little as possible.
 
But our goal is the same: To take the user through an action experience as naturally as we can, and to have our users spend the minimum time thinking about the medium that the experience takes place in, and the most time being in that experience and participating in it and interacting with it.
 
When you play a game, you experience the story by telling it to yourself.

Any game gives you tools, a weapon a spell book, the ability to make monsters vanish by jumping on their heads. And by picking up these things, or casting them or jumping on their heads, you're telling your own story within the boundaries imposed on you by the master storyteller, the game designer.
 
AR gives you a whole collection of game mechanics, constructing, crafting, discovery and more. AR core is Google's engine for running AR, which appears on most of the latest generations of Android phones. Apple has a similar engine called AR kit. And there are a few others too. They have different features and annoyances. But basically, what they do is they look at what your camera is seeing at any given moment (plus the moments just before the moments after), and they extrapolate all this information to put together a picture of the world around you in 3D. Augmented reality is a way to see virtual content in the real world. The way I explain it to my mom is VR is real if you are in an imaginary world, ar is imaginary objects in the real world. AR core is a platform for building AR apps on Android phones. It keeps track of three variables to construct these AR worlds. There's motion tracking, environmental understanding, and latest dimension.
 
Although these design principles relate to AR Core, they still apply to all sorts of tools.
 
GET TO KNOW THE TECHNOLOGY
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I am always looking for ways to like dig into the technology because if I can make myself understand it, then I can really do anything with it. I start to figure out how the developers are seeing this world. And therefore instead of just being like, make this happen, or can you make this happen, I'm like, hey, can you use these tools to make this happen this way?

MAKE ON-BOARDING PART OF THE NARRATIVE

Once you've established your place, you need to convince the user to detect the real world surroundings, in order for the phone to calibrate its whereabouts. That creates an intrinsic delay that's built in to mobile AR, so we need to give the user a mission. We need to give the user an excuse to discover the world and physically move the phone around. So we give them a fetch quest, which are normally done badly. Because fetch quests so often fill in the dead space between fighting, it's like you're saying to the player, the thing you usually do is run around and fight people. Now let's get rid of the fighting people part and just like run around for no good reason we've effectively freemium qualified them.
 
In the user journey that running around and the technical functionality of scanning for surfaces are exactly the same. So the idea of discovery is at the core of the experience, so we want to embrace that moment and make the narrative wedded to that, not just have it be a do this so that you can play the game, but have that be the beginning of the game.
 
So we want to make it awesome.

These AR techniques that I'm talking about, like plane finding and setting up boundaries. They don't necessarily feel like storytelling techniques, but they are.
 
ADD DEVELOPMENT, NOT REPETITION

I'm going to tell you all about one of my favourite game designers, Aristotle. Aristotle created a storytelling structure that a lot of us still use today.  First, there's an inciting incident, an explosion of birth and death, like getting lifted up by a tornado and landing on a witch. Something happens that the main character is not necessarily in control of. Then the character reacts to it. They strap on the witch's slippers and follow the yellow brick road. That's the Act One climax. That's the hero's call to action. And then act two which is most of the experience. This is the middle hour and a half of a two hour movie.  In involves a series of events where the character faces challenges, each one gets harder than the last, and each one reveals a new part of the character, a part that the audience has never seen before. That's also why if battles are too repetitive, a game gets grindy. Since it's no longer revealing something new and unseen. You're not getting character development or character building or character amping up new swords.
 
Ideally each episode or interaction gets more challenging until the end of that when a character faces complete despair. It's the lowest moment, the dark night of the soul, you must fall completely before you get up again.
 
Blake Snyder, who wrote save the cat, which is this book that all these Hollywood writers use, has this thesis.  I don't know if I agree with it, but I've seen it used in such great ways.  The thesis is that, um, you always show an interaction with the main character at the very beginning of a movie or a game or whatever you're doing, where the character saves a cat, because even if they're an evil person, they've saved the cat so you identify with them. I don't know. Let's talk about that later.
 
But then we get to the moment where we need a complete reversal from the darkest night into the final blades of glory. So that's the story of every story. It's also the story of each moment of a video. The first moments of Pac Man are filled with Tension the frantic thoughts of escape of limited motion of being eaten I can only move left or right.
 
DESIGN FOR AWE AND RESPONSE
You want to design a world that's both amazing to look at, and one that reacts to your presence. Make your world real. On the screen, you're combining virtual and real world objects. So let them interact, the more they play together and roll off each other, either metaphorically or literally, the more your world will feel like an actual living inhabited place. And let players mess with it. The virtual and real world, the virtual world and the actual world are only two dimensions of the experience. In order to make it feel real, we need to add the third dimension, the user. Let people touch, manipulate and change as many virtual objects as you can add, as many as makes sense to be changed and manipulated.
 
Here's the biggest obstacle … Users can be in one of four positions, 1) either seated with your hands fixed, 2) seated with your hands moving around, 3) standing still with your hands fixed or 4) walking around and moving around in a real world space.
 
PHYSICALITY IS EMOTION
By designing the mechanics for your experience, you can change their physical position as well as their mental experience. In other words, you can blow their minds by blowing their bodies out of their seats.
 
One of the greatest advantages we have in AR is the size of our space, it's theoretically infinite. The problem is most users don't remember that they're stuck here, right? So you want to give them something to cheat, so they actually have to move the phone around. And that little nudging icon will help them do that.
 
Now I'm going to talk about what players can actually do in AR game mechanics.
 
Like every story, you can break it down every moment into a first, second and third act, a call to action, a hero's quest and a combination. You want to take it advantage of the real world environment, put things just out of reach to users and offer them rewards for moving around exploring.
 
Hidden bonus levels are at time honored tradition, finding them in your living room gives you an extra measure of delight.
 
When you place objects in your AR scene, users will want to play with them and the more non necessary stuff they can pick up and play with the more than one a hunt for the objects that they do need to use.

But you want to give breadcrumbs too.  You can break reality selectively. 
 
SETTING IS A STORYTELLING TOOL
But as a world builder, you're empowered to decide when you want it to be realistic, and when you want to withhold that realism. If you need to draw the user’s attention to an object or an area or an evil robot, the entire world is at your command. You have lighting, shading, texture and physics at your disposal. You can highlight things you can play things down and move them into the shadows. 
 
MOTION IS EMOTION
We can use a single effect like jump scares to achieve a bunch of different emotional goals. The best jump scares, all the best moments of connection happen when you forget there's a screen separating you from the movie from the game.
 
Having the action right in front of you makes that separation even easier to forget. It's in my room. It's on my bed. It's right in front of me and it's happening with me. In one morning, you just don't want to make the user move backward without looking behind them. Because that can have real world disastrous effects. At some point in the history of games, sneaking past enemies was just a way not to get killed. At some point the game designer started recording your visibility percentage lines of sight and sneaking became an actual measurable mechanic. Just think of how recording everything in the real world can let us change enemy AI.
 
USE SURPRISING INPUTS
If your games input is the camera, then let anything you see be the input trigger, we can record degrees of light. And light is especially useful because it's so easy to manipulate when you are indoors anyway. And because it's so unexpected to the user, you can see that when the light is switched off here, cars turned on their lights and buildings laid out, like at night.
 
But it's also something that the user just didn't expect, but we have it completely at our disposal. Here’s a game that’s really cool. It's really simple. The first player chooses a spot to bury the treasure. You tap anywhere and the game buries it. Then you hand your phone to the next player and they dig around until they find it.
 
When you create or play in the world, you always have the potential to interact with other users. Cloud anchors make this uniquely possible by matching virtual content with real world locations, then serving the same content to different users. All you need is another person and a path to the shared world. This game is played on two phones and both phones are sensing in the same environment. There are techniques to do that I will show you how to find them.
 
 
CREATE MANY DIFFERENT PATHS TO ENGAGEMENT
In some way, AR is a great way to create an all access role for differently abled users to see things in their own scale. However, it comes with a whole set of new challenges. If you tell users to reach up and grab something or take two steps forward, what happens when your user can't reach the device or take steps?

Here, we've added in an alternate way for users to reach faraway objects. There's a reticle that stretches and extends based on the angle of your phone. This is a very Googley concept. This is something that we keep talking about having many paths to success. People who like keyboard shortcuts, vs people who like mouse interactions, they're people who want to do things the slow way. We create different paths to success. 

Roth, Matthew. 2020. VISUAL STORYTELLING IN IMMERSIVE REALITY edited by Narrascope 2020. U.S.: YouTube.


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In this presentation Aki Jarvinen, Senior Experience Researcher, Ph.D, Digital Catapult, author of the report The Immersive Audience Journey summarises the report’s main findings and explains why he encourages creators to think about the immersive experiences beyond the story, "Framing immersive experiences under the banner of 'storytelling' in the age of ‘peak TV’ and omnipresent story content is not necessarily a working strategy. Emphasising the experiences seems to differentiate immersive. Immersive producers need to think how to blend production activities into marketing, and adopt holistic thinking around audience engagement. Community building and pre event launch activities can significantly increase awareness and facilitating post event activities contribute to loyalty".
 
Download the full report here
 
The original need for this research emerged from the question of audience. There was a recognition that we lacked insight regarding what is immersive audience, or what are immersive audiences.
 
What is immersive?
 
Whereas producers tend to associate the term with particular technologies, audiences tend to associate it with stepping into a responsive and alternative reality that has been artificially created for them.
 
Immersive technologies are typically good at creating these kind of experiences. So immersive is many things, and can be created using a variety of technologies. 
 
Our analysis highlights a common, high level customer journey map approach which has traditionally been employed in marketing, service and design thinking contexts, but we want to encourage more thinking about this throughout the production process. 

If immersive producers are able to leverage this more holistic approach, we think that it contributes to a more structured planning of the project which puts it in a better place to succeed. There's so many things grabbing our attention, so alternative distribution approaches are important. One definition from service design literature says that a human centered tool, like the journey map not only includes steps where a customer is interacting with the company, but also reveals all the key steps of the experience. So journey maps help us define gaps in customer experiences, and explore potential solutions.
 
The Unfolding Immersive Audience Journey in Phases:

Phase 0: Segmenting Immersive Audiences
 
What we are finding is that the immersive audience is a collection of subsets of audiences, ranging from festival goers who happen across an immersive production exhibited in that festival, whether it's online or location based. Immersive audiences include gamers who are into VR. They include casual AR mobile AR audiences, but also more niche cohorts that might be more profitable and engaged like secret cinema enthusiasts. immersive theater enthusiasts, even VR documentary enthusiasts. The key thing to understand is that the context defines the audience for any given production. So for instance, if it's a location based experience where is it delivered, exhibited, but also on which digital platforms, as the device might dictate and shape your audience, but also social dynamics. So is it something that enables friends and families to go together?
 
Already we are seeing some clever solutions for post Covid-19 engagement that facilitate for instance, a family or a household come in at the same time to a location based solution.
 
Phase 1: Reaching Audience Awareness

This is the phase where a potential audience member becomes aware that an immersive production exists, which requires promotion, marketing, and community building. And the key takeaway, I think, from this phase is that immersive productions are challenging to market by traditional means.
 
In the age of peak TV, where there is an overwhelming amount of streaming television storytelling format content, framing your experience, as the peak in immersive storytelling is not necessarily the most strategically sound choice.
 
Instead you need to emphasize the unique component of your immersive experience. And that tends to be immersion, whether it's the sense of presence that you feel through, let's say, VR, or the physical set, with projections and props. However, the paradox here is that creating awareness around this isn't very easy to do with traditional marketing means. It’s  hard to communicate what is special about an immersive experience via print, or video marketing.  You need to be creative.

My one takeaway would be that you should show audiences engaging with the experience in a unique way in the promotion video.  Don’t just show the visuals of the experience because that also factors to the next phase which is consideration.
 
Phase 2: Audience considerations
 
After becoming aware, your potential audience starts to weigh up whether to attend, or participate, engage, and pay for your experience.  Managing their expectations and almost literally telling them the degree of expected interaction is very important. There is also a duty of care, to show that you will be on-boarding them through this and taking care of them during it as well. This may require that you lower the threshold of attendance explicitly in certain cohorts, and this relates to technology acceptance, so how comfortable people are putting on a headset or engaging with a technology that they're not familiar with in their everyday sort of media, and technology repertoire.  Multiple things go into those considerations, including the genre and type of content and experience.  For example, to engage a broader audience in the thrill seeking aspect of that experience, you might engage your comic lead in your communication and that just might work for you that they can connect with that certain niche.
 
Putting your production out there takes time, money and resourcing.  You need to have people on hand to help participants go through that experience. This is one thing that I feel requires further development on the digital side of things, because people are just not comfortable trying to engage with new equipment like headsets on their own. So how could you facilitate that process? How do you make it as easy as possible to get on board. Also, can you draw attention away from the technology towards the experience itself?  That's another element that you want, might want to do.
 
Phase 3: Evaluating Audience Experience
 
The decision for an audience member to attend or not to attend might contribute directly to your bottom line and your opportunity to continue the work. Therefore, you need to be aware of the different dynamics that go into these decisions. For instance, the size of a market that you are targeting is one important factor. At Digital Catapult we're trying to get more actual data about Immersive Audiences size, demographics and limits to help guide startups.
 
Important factors include price and location. A location can be a platform too. So if an AR mobile experience is only available to Android or iOS, then that shapes your audience. A certain kind of headset shapes your audience and price factors into that too, as well as more qualitative characteristics such as technology acceptance in a certain demographic for instance, or the fear of missing out regarding this experience, which might be something that you want to deliberately build. But there are other considerations, like the expected level of interaction.  The whole point of an immersive theatre piece might be to take it out from the theatre to the streets and make it a bit more chaotic if you will. But then some of the audience members complained that they didn't always see all the actors and therefore didn't always know where to direct their attention. So if your target participants are more used to traditional theatre where you have a good view to the stage and all the techniques that have to do with lighting and drawing audience's attention to this on the stage, immersive disruption can violate those expectations. If it does that audiences will leave unsatisfied and won’t recommend the experience to others.

We have a tool available to help you test your interfaces.
 
If the intention is create an experience which gives participants the option to make choices, ideally they will then come out of the experience feeling that it was unique and personalised. But people bring their own personal context, habits and expectation to every experience that will shape how fully they interact with the piece.  So if there's a lot of self-interaction, there might be people who just are not familiar with those conventions of interaction, and they might come out of the experience by feeling that they didn't get as much as somebody else. That might feel like a design failure.
 
User testing is a skill set and a set of know how that small studios don’t necessarily possess, so it tends to get de prioritised in production. In the interviews that we conducted, nobody discounted the need and potential usefulness of user research and testing, but because they weren't well versed in the methodologies, production itself tends to take over, with ad hoc user tests conducted very close to the end. And that also means that their methodology might not be entirely sound, which then might lead to skewed results. For example, the testing cohort might not be representative of the target audience. So it's just another example where time and resource needs to be allocated early on to this and there needs to be somebody leading on it as well.
 
In larger organisations like museums, there might already be a culture of user research. So, they have experts in house who gather user insights from past projects, to inform a new project and then advocate those insights along the journey.
 
And they have a very good sort of set structure of where at which phases is production tested, and how that feeds into the process. So we hope to assist people find these relatively accessible methodologies and tools.
 
But it is very challenging to be able to assess if there's any longer term impact of an experience, particularly in terms of behaviour change over time.
 
Phase 4: Satisfaction and Loyalty

This is another moment of truth, satisfaction and loyalty. It’s very important especially if you hope people will re-engage or recommend the experience to others. So, if you want to create so called organic growth word of mouth around your production, then you should think about how to facilitate that.
 
This is where community management comes into the picture. To create a community around your product, where people share stories about using the product and experiencing it. And they've tried to leverage this by engaging the community and listening to them, and so on so forth. But again, somebody has to do, perhaps even a small team, and allocating that responsibility can be challenging, but down the line, it does pay off in most cases.
 
Another thing to consider is merchandising. This approach has been tried and tested in the amusement park industry. Merchandise can reinforce a participatory experience.  By buying a T shirt, an object, a piece of memorabilia that they can take home, audience members might also contribute to that word of mouth.
 
And the other benefit from thinking about and planning for merchandising is that it creates another complimentary revenue stream for your ticket or download revenues. Again, this is something that needs to be planned in order to be effectively executed.
 
TEMPLATES

This audience journey is an approach that can be applied in practice, and can inform your thinking about your production in a holistic manner. So therefore, we have included two templates to the report, and also they will be available to download separately as printouts.
 
Template 1:
The audience journey template which illustrates the various touch points to consider from the point of view of the responsibilities and stakeholders involved in different phases of the journey.
 
Template 2:
In a 2nd template the user journey is also mapped from an emotional perspective, to help you think in a more deliberate way about how to take your audience from being indifferent, or casually interested, let's say, to being excited and waiting to see your production and then also possibly eager to re-engage or hear about what you're going to do next.

Download the full report here

Jarvinen, Aki. 2020. The Immersive Audience Journey: Insights and perspectives on immersive art, culture, & entertainment. edited by Digital Catapult. U.K.: Digital Catapult/YouTube.

Melissa Kagan is a game studies academic and incoming Assistant Professor of Communication at Curry College. She's published in Game studies, Convergence and Game environments, and she serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. Her book project Wandering Games is forthcoming. 

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When I started analysing wandering games I started thinking about, particularly walking sims and gender, and how walking sims get gendered female. Some work was starting to get done on walking sims as queer spaces and I started to get really fascinated at how walking sims are usually defined by their lack. The definition that I cobbled together is that they’re exploratory non0-violent games without points, goals or tasks in which the undying first person player character wanders around a narrative leverage space.

The term walking simulator originated as this derogatory smear intended to denigrate games that were less violent, less task oriented, or less difficult to complete, which immediately implies this sense of lack. They're not violent, they don't have guns, they don't have tasks, they might not have wind loss conditions, there's something missing, which in part comes from their history of being modded. 
 
But, the more I thought about this, the more I wanted to rethink Walking Sims and reclaim them as wandering games.  Wandering games don’t lack something, rather they draw from a vast intellectual history.  So over the last decade, "walking simulator" has become a catch all term for games that are interested in alternative modes of expression, and alternative considerations of embodiment, environment, orientation and community. The genre now serves as a catalyst for debates about anti game ascetics, changing gamer demographics and the radical potential of poetic spatial storytelling in video games. In process, the term walking simulator also accidentally tapped into something brilliant: The vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking and wandering in performance, philosophy, pilgrimage, protest and literature.
 
Originally my book was going to be about walking simulators, but I shifted it towards wandering games in order to bring this intellectual heritage explicitly into the discussion of walking. I'm interested in showing how this genre has inflected and continues to inflect some of the most interesting hybrid games of the last couple years.
 
These games are connected to the concept of wandering as a theme, a formal mode and aesthetic metaphor, a player action. And through troubling the concept of wandering, They tap into what I would consider some of the most crucial conversations going on in game studies today, wandering in games exposes the multiplicity as possibilities of a simple human act of moving through space, and complicates what such movement might mean within different game worlds.
 
Labor and capitalism: 
How does wandering games attempt to reinstate a radical boundary between work and play? How can we understand the reaction against wandering games within gamer culture as something like a resistance to any game that criticizes the unthinking replication of capitalists success paragraphs, if most games are premised on this same paradigm?  Are wandering games binge designed to provoke unproductive contemplative, anti-capitalist play? How does the construction of empty landscape in walking Sims replicated colonizers understanding of space and place? How does the heroic monomyth of the wanderer and the ubiquity of exploration with narrative gaming, invite colonialist game design? How does the negative space violence of an empty landscape connect to broader conversations of violence in gaming?
 
Gender and sexuality:
How and why are wandering games often gendered female? And how does this gendering map onto long standing discussions of female agency and presence in the public sphere? How do wandering modes queer traditional video gameplay, and finally death and violence? How does the central tension of simulating a traditionally an undying Player Character traversing a dead haunted world help us to understand ludic conventions, metaphors and obsessions surrounding death, and play?
 
A lot of the wonderful work that's already been done in this space has been done on walking simulators.
 
Right? Okay? So, very ambitiously, I'm now about to take you through one slide per chapter.
 
Introduction
An incomplete background about wandering as a concept for games before digital game, and then how those discussions and discourses get kind of imported wholesale oftentimes implicitly into contemporary video games.
 
I include a survey of the digital game genres that developed conventions surrounding ludic exploration, and the embodied performative game genres that enable players designers and landscapes to co create narratively rich spaces through which to wander.
 
Then I zoom out a little bit more and look across the 20th century In general, the array of artistic and activist practices related to wandering, which are relevant to the development of walking, including 20th century performance art. So interactive insights, theatre, situationist international Capra's happenings. I also look a little bit at digressive landmarks of literature, particularly modernist ones that demand respect for meandering, purposeless anti-capitalist, leisure. And then third, an activist understanding of the connections between wandering and marching when does wandering in a group turn into marching occupation resistance protests I draw from Rebecca Solnit Sarah Jean Servin ack, Carla Wallace and Lauren Elkin in particular.
 
Late capitalism

This is a pun, I'm interested in thinking about the corpse as media ties and archival object. Wandering games are archival adventures. You're working through big fields of different kinds of text and you're piecing all that text together like a researcher in an archive.

So from there, I go towards some thoughts about death and walking since in general, wandering games have a reputation as these peaceful ludic environments. Oftentimes, that's a major complaint about them. But I argue that these games fully participate in the tradition of death and violence that characterizes the history of video games. The difference is time. In so many games, you walk into a peaceful environment and you kill everything in it.  (Overdone – where you discover and try to solve the mystery of a ship full of dead bodies) assumes the opposite, you walk into a peaceful environment in which everything has mysteriously already died. IN other words, you’re not divorced from death, you are instead exploring the aftermath of death rather than causing it directly.
 
The archival poetics of the game hinge on the mythical existence of that impossible moment when the living person transforms into an archival and archival object.
And finally, I conclude by discussing what that process of objectification means, in the harsh capitalist world in which every death no matter how bloody must eventually be reduced to a number in a ledger.  In this chapter I draw a lot from Margaret Schwartz’s Dead Matter. Jennifer Murkowski’s Dying in Full Detail. And Amanda Phillips work on macro politics, which is an article rather than a book.
 
I also discuss Each Shade, an early 2019 beautiful game where you wander around being a traveling artist in a beautiful place, painting it. You take commissions for your paintings as you explore the whole island get to know everybody. It's so lovely. It's perfect fantasy, if unrealistic. The maker shade rebels in this gap, offering the player a fantasy tailor-made to soothe the particular fears of precarity in 2019 2020, and doing so with such charm that the player hardly realizes that it's happening.
 
So this chapter looks at how this game is delivering a fantasy of late capitalist precarity. I start by jumping back to the 19th century, and tracing the aesthetic socio-cultural mythmaking surrounding the wandering artist, a character who became increasingly important during the 19th century. I show how the players response to East Shade landscapes relates to the aesthetics that developed during European romanticism, that particular art movement. And then in addition to the romantic ideal of the wanderer, I discuss how the player is also put into the role of that character’s much more realistic cousin, the mid 19th century artisanal journeymen who migrated in search of work.
 
The experience of playing East Shade is this constant back and forth between the dream of being a wandering artist and the reality of finding commissions and managing all of these different economies, but you have to keep track have largely in a traditional RPG sort of way. But when juxtaposed with the promise of the fantasy of just being a wandering artist and painting, whatever you like, it's really interesting how much of your time is spent, you know, building up your relationship with pivotal NPCs and making sure you have enough inspiration to paint the paintings that are on commission even though that's not what you really wanted to paint and so on and so forth.
 
So I analyse the key economic considerations that drive the player (and designer, and game studio). And I read their actions within the context of millennial anxieties. Here I'm drawing a lot from Ergin Bulut’s A Precarious Game: The Illusion Of Dream Jobs In The Video Game Industry, a super fascinating work on favour, parity, and the neoliberal instrumentalization of love and passion, the dangerous promise that of the do what you love ethos, and how it's perfectly designed to produce and reproduce a creative precariat.
 
Gender

I then turn to consider feminist considerations, first in the context of moon visuals as a queer feminist take on wandering. In the game Under Constraints, a player character is a powerful witch, who has been banished from the entire earth and relegated to a tiny circle of movement, which she walks and re-walks daily. Each day she conducts an identical ritual and decides whether or not to protect the Earth today against this apocalyptic comet, which we see about to crash into the earth. Every day, the player must remember to play, but it's constrained to play for only five minutes at a time, you have to play every single day for 28 days, but only for five minutes each day.
 
So when such constraints are placed around movement, and then mirrored by the game, they force the player to have constraints around time.  The player is denied the chance to exert agency over space, or to wander freely in this game. What is left? To discuss this I construct wandering as a metaphorical concept, not a physical one, the practice of which emancipates those to whom society gives no spatial outlet. Internal wandering enables a rebellion against an external order dedicated to the immobilization of black and female bodies.
 
Connotations of freedom are defined in relation to the unfreedom of others, freeing certain people in other words, only through the subjugation of others into non wandering immobility. Explicating the ritual of the moon through this lens shows how feminist game studies, queer game studies and disability studies can help us to conceptualize repetitive steps in circles as a powerful and alternative mode of wandering – and create places also where multiple temporalities intersect.
 
Decentering

After this I think through three different ways of traveling through space as the explorer in 80 days, connecting each one to the heroic monomyths of the wonder and ubiquity of exploration within narratives. Obviously, exploration is not something new. What I'm interested in, in this chapter is thinking through different types of exploration and how all are not equal when it comes to age, or colonialist outlook.
 
So first I show how narratives of progress and colonialism are woven inextricably into walking simulators. In this context, the player travels through the colonizer with a predatory gaze seeking exploitable land. The perception of landscape got imported from numerous first person shooters and a lot of Walking Sims are still proceeding through landscape in a similar predatory, exploitative way that often goes under the radar.
Imagine, you’re entering a space where you're not the one doing the killing, the exploiting the colonizing, taking over. But your perspective on the space is still one of taking and looting.
 
So, right. The second way of traveling through this game doesn’t do this. The protagonist offers an experience of peaceably traveling through a complex world, a world that is much more complicated than the protagonist. I love the idea of deconstructing 80Days (discussed in another panel) or trying to make all the wrong choices. I find that so hard to do as a player, so I appreciate you doing that work, that worked for me.
 
Many Giants has spoken and written quite a bit about the intention to invite post-colonial play by intentionally disrupting 19th century in our activities, dissolving the players expectations of class colonialism, heterosexuality, and creating expectation that the player is not the center of the world. They're traveling through a complex world rather than centered within it. I analyze the subversive choice of a queer, lower class cleric character, while keeping sight of the fact that he's still a white European man. And I try to speculate on critical play of colonialist and post colonialist works.
 
Finally, in the third section, I turned to a hyper colonialist board game, based on the same narrative, the first Ravensburger board game published in 1884.

This is a board game that's based on the genre goose games, basically, it's the Spyro game. Nothing to do with geese, very sorry to report. But it has a spiraling board. And I argue that it is hyper colonialist not just in its text and content, but it transforms spatial travel into time travel. The player is traveling through time rather than space.  The board represents one day rather than one place through which one can travel. And in this way, colonial progress is made logically inevitable. Believe it or not, in this era, dice and the whims of the dice were regarded as unacceptably subversive or could be with enough bad luck and enough bad dice rolls. Maybe the player would not land on the space that they wanted to invade or takeover whatever it was in the diegetic parlance of the game. So by taking that option away and saying no, no, each square is just a day rather than a place, conquest is inevitable because time will pass and the player will continue on the board.
 
So these three different ways of wandering through game worlds as exploitative colonizers or prospective colonizers, as curious travelers, and as inevitable conquerors illustrates how different kinds of lunar exploration effects can reflect different relationships towards space.
 
After this I analyse Heavens Vault and show how language can create spaces for confronting death and colonialism through play. Basically, I'm trying to think of language as a space to explore as well.  In Heaven’s Vault so many different kinds of language are available and even required from the player. So, it happens to be an archaeologist Aliya who roams around the nebula following the traces of a missing person. The more she learns of sneaky Brenda's disappearance, the deeper she gets into the mythology of the nebula, a universe of looping time, of use robots, fallen and forgotten empires, and a language called ancient which is inscribed on short phrases on many of the artifacts that Aliya encounters during her travels with each human visited, and each inscription decoded. The player gains a little more knowledge about the language and is able to understand the past and it's eraser a little more completely.  The knowledge of encroaching death in the Forgotten past, and maybe the near future because of the time loop mythology or religion of this game gives weight and meaning to the players understanding of the game’s language.  The threat of all-encompassing imperial power, which is made manifest in the way language works, which I'll get into a little bit more in a second.  So by conceptualizing language as a space co created by player and game, I draw from theories of digressive literature to posit the player as an anti colonialist wanderer in a world made of a dozen different types of language and through the way that they navigate that linguistic space and mix them together through their digressive passage through it, they're doing anti colonialist work
 
The main mechanic of the game is translating the glyphs of ancient into English. So one is attuned to thinking about language from the beginning and the player is making charts and inferences about what the grammatical systems are. And then in the process of playing the game, there's all of this cultural code switching that Aliya does. They're switching between the speech on the colonized worlds for the player care where Leo was born, the player character, and then there's the speech of Empire, which she uses professionally, in the university where she works. In some cases, her specific cultural knowledge is what cracks the code and makes semantically legible, something that would have been incomprehensible otherwise. So she's going back and forth between different kinds of literacy and legibility, all of which are necessary to her solving these translation puzzles. How is it different for a machine versus a human to read a piece of text? And this then becomes a question of identity as well. Since one of the main characters in the game is a robot with sentience, personality, emotions, quite an intense personality actually. So the ways in which a machine can read something are different than the ways that Aaliyah can read and can be read. In navigating these identities, and these various kinds of text, the characters make manifest the many kinds of linguistic fluency, legibility and communication that the game offers, in which the player too has to learn how to navigate and read.
 
Digression

I also want to make a note about digression. The notion that if one keeps talking, keeps writing, death can't take you. And so the result is digressive literature because you've just continuously written and talked until, well, you can't stop, you can't stop.
 
One of the texts I'm drawing from here is Astrid Ensslin’s Literary Gaming, particularly the work on Primo and situationists.
 
I also discuss Death Stranding, a game where the player wanders around a post human, post apocalyptic, post death world. The player is made hyper aware of the particularities and limitations of body as they re-attune themselves to their new physicality throughout the game. In Death Stranding you need to manipulate objects on to the main player character Sam and be aware of how the weight of them changes his ability to move through the world. So he roams the devastated landscape of what was once the US delivering packages to a bunkered down populace and connecting each city to a network that is basically the internet. The world is also infested with ghostly creatures. We’re either in some sort of post death moment or death doesn't really exist, Sam cannot die. Sam goes into any sort of afterlife mode and then comes back and because of this ability his entire body is capitalized on shall we say, his blood and his urine and all of his exertion is sort of monetized in the fight against these ghost like creatures. So Sam is between life and death. The world is between life and death. So many of the characters are crossing back and forth across that boundary and the experience of playing the game is gives us an almost offensive sense of connecting with each bunker and going between one task and another task. And to me that is a smokescreen to try to make the game commercially legible. I think it's really about the horror of his perpetual motion in-between. He's always in the process of wandering from one place to the other.
 
Because of all of this monetization of every instant of every characters or fans in particular life, and physicality. I'm drawing most explicitly here from Alenda Chang's book Playing Nature: The Ecology of Video Games, especially the last chapter on the ecologies of games.
 
Wandering Games is due to be published towards the end of 2021.
 
Further recommended reading:

- Consalvo, M. and Paul, C.A., 2019. Real Games: What's Legitimate and What's Not in Contemporary Videogames. MIT Press.
- Reed, J.E., 2020. Feminism in play: edited by Kishonna L. Gray, Gerald Voorhees and Emma Vossen, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 271 pp.,(ebook), ISBN 978-3-319-90539-6. Feminist Media Studies, 20(3), pp.458-459.
- Shaw, A., 2015. Gaming at the edge: Sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture. U of Minnesota Press.

Kagan, Melissa. 2020. Narrascope 2020: Wandering Games. edited by Narrascope 2020. U.S.: YouTube.

These heuristics were then mapped thematically, and those groupings were evaluated in the 1st instance by 3 design experts.  Following further adjustments in response to this 1st round of feedback the heuristic themes were re-evaluated, this time by 5 experts, to identify any doubling up, or lack of relevance.  The heuristics (14 at this point) were then tested in practice during the design of two AR applications.  The experiential insight gained through application revealed a few more inconsistencies and overlap, which inspired the researchers to streamline them further into the 9 heuristics presented above, which also underwent a 3rd round of evaluation by 5 expert reviewers to assess inter-item consistency and inter-rater reliability before being finalised.  

Endsley, T.C., Sprehn, K.A., Brill, R.M., Ryan, K.J., Vincent, E.C. and Martin, J.M., 2017, September. Augmented reality design heuristics: Designing for dynamic interactions. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 61, No. 1, pp. 2100-2104). Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.