A panel discussion from the Narrascope Conference, Boston, June 15+16 2019 - Celebrating Narrative Games “Dissecting the Bandernatch With a Vorpal Blade: What Netflix’s Choose Your Own Adventure Got Right and Got Wrong” was Narrascope’s panel discussion. Heather Albano, Mary Duffy, Jason Stevan Hill, Emily Short, and Ian Thomas discuss Netflix’s first venture into the world of interactive television with Bandersnatch, the Black Mirror episode that let viewers influence the story in a choose-your-path adventure kind of way. What was good, where did it fall flat, how would experienced game designers have tackled this kind of project? But beware, there will be spoilers!
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DISCUSSION SUMMARY
 
DIFFERENT AUDIENCE REACTIONS
Reactions different wildly from those familiar with the format, and the many audience members who had never previously been introduced to it.
 
FAMILIAR DESIGNS
Familiarity was again seen to be an important design tool.
 
CONTROVERSIAL CHOICE DESIGN
Not all choices made sense, or appeared to have purpose
 
THE IMPORTANCE OF ENDINGS
Viewing experiences were very different according to the endings reached
 
UNIVERSE SWITCHING
Too often the reality of a context was undermined, when a more interesting solution could have been found.
 
THE IMPORTANCE OF INTENTIONALITY
The writers could have done more to explore intentional participation through choices
 
GIVE PLAYERS TIME TO CONSIDER CHOICES
The decision to freeze action and give players time to make choices was generally received well.
 
FLASHBACKS
The option to step back in time was innovative, handled well
 
FAILING FORWARD
Whilst branching narratives are complicated, production load can be minimised by techniques to group potential responses thematically
 
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

1. Explain apparent continuity errors:
2. Intensify choices and limit replay:
3. Think about tone and context:
4. Focus
5. The power of authentic social messages
6. Respect consent
7. Complicate control

 
 
UNCOMFORTABLE SOCIAL MESSAGES
A number of panel members questioned social assumptions within the game
 

 
DETAILED DISCUSSION TRANSCRIPT
 
As a gamer, what did you learn? And what did you hate?
(spoiler alert)
 
 
DIFFERENT AUDIENCE REACTIONS
 
By the time `I watched it there were already a whole lot of game designers who had seen it and panned it. Where's the innovation they asked? … and yet at the same time there was a whole bunch of consumers saying, Wow, this is exciting. We've never seen anything like this before… is a really interesting disjunction, I think.  And so my first real reaction to it was that it introduced a lot of new people to interactivity, and that's a pretty major plus. 
 
FAMILIAR DESIGNS
 
They clearly built this to feel familiar for television viewers, the way it handles recaps, the way it handles changing audio and those kinds of elements. There was a lot of television craft that went into it. And that's part of what makes it accessible to those kinds of people. As a result I found myself a little bit more sort of forgiving of some of those elements.
 
CONTROVERSIAL CHOICE DESIGN
 
But also, I got very frustrated really early on with the first few choices that just didn't seem to do anything very much, with no immediate consequences that just railroaded you straight back in to the narrative.
 
I felt sympathetic to the possible design reasons for those choices because it felt like …We've got a TV audience, we need to get them used to the idea, they might even need to pick something. And if they miss and they fail to make a choice early on, we don't want their first experience with this style to be …oh, I missed out on doing something interesting because I didn't really understand the controls.
 
It’s interesting to think about it in terms of a product that has to teach its players how to play. It reminds me of something I encountered when I did customer support for Choice of Games. When I first started working for them, I would get emails from people basically saying “Please put a back button to your games, I picked the wrong choice, and I have to do the whole thing over again”. And I would diligently respond that there was no wrong options. But there are arguably many points during Bandersnatch where viewers can make the wrong choice. In fact audiences proceed directly into what seems to be the most important choice right off the bat in Bandersnatch, namely… Should I work in the Office of Tucker soft games? Or should I work on this at home? And everything about the way the scene is constructed, says, work at the office, you're going to have all this support that you don't have as an independent game designer, and that's the wrong choice. So I'm so frustrated by that particular moment.  It seems to be teaching audiences that their choices don't matter. Because what seems obvious to you is wrong. And so, you know, in a game that's trying to do all this layered metaphorical stuff about control…That's the first real choice. And it's tricking the audience. And that was such a turn off to me.
 
I agree 100% .  When I hit that first choice, and went into the office and died, it's like…really?  So I recognize the cultural impact that it has.  Introducing lay people to interactivity is cool, but in many ways they’re replicating what I consider to be bad habits that I want to move away from as a design culture. So, as a designer and as a player, I myself did not care for it.
 
Okay, that's fair, but I actually had a different reaction to that first choice and the shortness of the path. I thought it was an interesting design choice because if you have players who have never seen anything like this before it teaches them right up front that this genre involves replaying the same scenes and making different choices. In that context I thought the confronting delivery of the need to reply choices was forgivable.
 
THE IMPORTANCE OF ENDINGS
 
I also found that personally, I had a different reaction to the experience as a whole depending on what ending I got. And I feel like that's something that might be interesting to delve into.
 
Me too.  I enjoyed the piece more than a number of my friends because the ending that I got was the one in which he winds up being reunited with his mother and sharing in her death on the train. And that, to me was much more thematically resonant than many of the other options because I was much less interested in sort of gotcha endings where, you know, he fails to make a good game for some silly reason, or, you know, the whole thing devolves into this weird murder plot. I felt like the business about what has happened to him in the past and how he can revisit that trauma was a story that was less obvious to tell based on the form.
 
So what I mean by that is, I felt like a number of the paths through Bandersnatch were basically things where Rooker was asking questions about freewill or about you know, what does it mean if you have somebody, a player controlling the protagonist, which basically have been asked and re-asked by one interactive narrative designer after another.  It’s almost the first thing that people do when they realize that this form exists.  So, what I found most interesting was the case where the story it actually kind of gone beyond that set of probes into something different.
 
I agree. I got the same ending and I think it was an extremely poignant ending… choosing to go and die with your mom on the train. That was like a good Black Mirror episode to me. But when I was looking at the different endings that ending did not appear to be common.
 
UNIVERSE SWITCHING
 
Each ending almost catapults you into a different universe.  In some endings you are definitely controlled by a person. You’re making a movie. Actually, you step out of it, and you're the actor or the Stefan that you are controlling is an actor on set, which is a totally different universe from the other universes where you die, or you're the mother. So there's Something really strange about different roles stepping out beyond the original fictional frame and ending the story outside of itself. Great for the cognition of the player, because the player has built an idea of the world that they're in, and then suddenly you shift that from under them.
 
That kind of universe switching approach can be something where you're kind of asking the player, what kind of story do they even want out of this? What are they interested in? But the trick I feel in the case of Bandersnatch, is that it's, it's hard to actually articulate that agency As a player, although I had ideas about what I wanted to explore, there are only a few points where I really felt like I had the agency to articulate that to the system.
 
THE IMPORTANCE OF INTENTIONALITY
 
Not me, one of the things with choice games that we really tried to focus on is the idea of intentionality, that you have some idea of the possible consequences of your decisions. And you're in there with the therapist and you get into the fight and then it's like, jump on your dad or jump out the window. But if it turns out that you're just an actor that's forgotten the fact that you're an actor… that complete lack of intentionality was frustrating for me.
 
Also, if you have X number of options, and the player is failing a number of hidden tests, so that only one option appears instead of all 10, there's something wrong. And I question what that's supposed to do for you as a player in Bandersnatch.
 
Yeah, there were a couple of choices that seemed to duplicate each other. I mean, throw the jewels at the computer or destroy the computer. I don't want to do either of those.
 
And there are some that are explicitly the wrong choice where if you decide to throw the towel on the computer, it immediately brings you to try this again or go back or something like that, which I hated. I thought that was a cop out if you're going to give the player choice, it should be a choice that goes somewhere.
 
GIVE PLAYERS TIME TO CONSIDER CHOICES
 
That said, there are some interesting things in those choices just from an execution point of view.  We've all seen all the FMV games where you hit a choice and everything stops while you make a decision.  So it was quite nice that they had the kind of live feed happening in the background and that during that the character you were responding to would generally prompt you and put a bit more pressure on which is interesting. But there's also a flaw in that which is, it's like the choices out of walking dead where you have three choices actually left to right or fail to act.  Bandersnatch had that as well but didn't really seem to do anything with the fail to act option, other than auto-choose on your behalf, which was just a bit strange because it meant that you could just sit through it and sit back and watch the whole thing and it kind of loses the point a little to me because then you're not in control of anything.
 
I think there is a different emotional effect since you have as much time as you want to sit there and think about what you want. And so it's, you know, fail to act means something different than if you've been able to think about being inactive, and that's my choice, right? Whereas if, you know, you're sort of sitting there and and you're troubled by the question, and you're having a hard time making up your mind, or you somehow don't really want to commit and your time is running out that feels different. Yeah. So I'm a little bit more patient with it in a timed context, and I think it's more expressive actually.  So it wasn't so much that I wanted a third option to press. Yeah, it was more. I want there to be a consequence of failure, like an unexpected ending, or something….
 
FLASHBACKS
 
And I guess we should talk about flashbacks as well, because they were effective. Going back through the loop, and shortcutting all the sequences and seeing the results of some of your choices worked really well, brought it into a TV form really well.  But, but there was never any attempt to explain in the fiction how that happened. I mean, you can look at something I like that the strange reversal of going back through choices is very explicitly laid out in the world. How are we repeating this however?  Do the things I did last time apply to this loop? That's cool, but it lost me as a player. What is the friction? What's the infectious reason for this strangeness?
 
I'm struck by how differently I reacted to this emotionally depending on which of the endings I happened to strike. I didn't get death first, although it's my favourite because I agree with the emotionally resonant. I got, history repeats itself, where pearl ends up finishing the game, which I actually thought also worked as a black mirror episode in a very different way that it was very intellectually clever rather than emotionally resonant. I'm good with either ending, the one that annoyed me to death was the Netflix one that just struck me as the kind of thing you write at three o'clock in the morning when you're a bit blocked and it seems funny at the time.
 
I was listening to Charlie Brooker the other night talking about that, and that wasn't supposed to be a main choice, it was supposed to be a bit of an Easter egg. And they went through testing and decided to put it in.
 
And then I found the government control paths, which Stefan mentioned and the whole thing If that path felt to me, like they'd hacked it in that weekend, and that was when I started to wonder how deliberately the creators were commenting on different types of interactive fiction. I suspect that they haven't read that too deeply enough into the various types of interactive fiction to be that explicit about it. I think a lot of the impression I got was they wrote a huge tree in twine and then chopped lots of bits off when they realized it wouldn't fit into production.
 
When I was replaying it this week, I wanted to follow through all the leaves have an individual branch, if you will, and I was frustrated to that degree where it would take me farther back than I wanted to go and not let me explore all of those leaves. That said, I thought that the recap in particular was the best part. Like that was a really an innovation. It's not something that I'd seen before that I think will probably become a gold standard for this type of format in the future.
 
 
THINK ABOUT WHAT CHOICES MEAN
 
One choice context that I found particularly effective was the kind of locked, safe situation where the story presents you with the protagonist’s father's safe. And there are different storylines that could lead you to think that different things might be inside. You might think that it's about this government control program.  You might think that it contains something that's quite personal. And you're offered options about what combination to use to unlock the safe. And it presents the task as though it's a puzzle and as though you're supposed to solve it by knowing what the combination ought to be based on what's happened previously. But actually, all of the combinations are words that connect somehow to what's been going on in the story. So the choice that you're really making is what do I think is important enough to be the thing that might be in the safe at this moment? And so, although it disguises itself as a puzzle, it's actually asking what do you as a player care about, and that I thought was quite cool.
 
It actually works better than it would have done if there was a parser type answer, because it's making it really clear there are potentially multiple right answers. And if you revisit that choice point, having come through different avenues in the store, you're actually offered different combinations solutions, which lead then on to different discoveries in the safe.
I think that's what the fight sequence is about as well…what type of game are we playing?
 
Yeah. I managed to miss enter that code through clumsiness and get it wrong in playtesting. Just not enough people were getting the number. I also had to be much more explicit about it and retire that as the main puzzle from what I gathered from the script,
 
Okay. But the question I got about the whole thing, actually, in the podcast.  They interviewed Charlie Brooker about Black Mirror in general. And the impression I get from that was that Netflix said, Would you like to do this interactive fiction? They went, No, we don't want to. That's really nice. But we want to leave that. And then came up with an idea about a Black Mirror episode involving control and agency, and then did it the other way around, and went, Oh, no, this has to be interactive. Which at first involved trying to build this massive, massive branching tree narrative, and then production reality hit that massive tree. And so, what we've got left is really a very sparse impression of what the original structure was supposed to be. Because, as we all know, having again been through this loop over 30 years or whatever, the combinatorial explosion just doesn't work for filmed content really well.
 
FAILING FORWARD
 
And it made me wonder, like, why didn't they structurally do more with what we call failing forward (trial and error)? For example, you might have a choice with three options. Each option is testing a certain stat or maybe a certain Boolean for the past thing that you've already chosen, and it tests it, and then you have six different possible outcomes that involve either success, or failure. Why not just make two films for six different outcomes? Sure, it's expensive as hell to shoot a bunch of different outcomes. But if you can write something that either fails forward, or succeeds forward, and just elaborate on little moments here and there, then you could you could have something that feels a little more meaningful,
 
The production team were also saying that they tried to record a scene, and then a bunch of different lines to plug into that scene, and found that they just completely lost the emotion of the scene because they didn't know where it was going. So they actually had to record the scene six times, with six different line deliveries.  An experienced game actor, will know how to do that and to be able to authenticate themselves, but they're not using game actors for filming.
 
 
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

1. Explain apparent continuity errors: The first thing that I would do is continuity testing. On my last playthrough, I played Bandersnatch through intentionally leaving Collin alive, and then it forced me to kill Collin. And then he came back to life. And I was like, well, is that a continuity error? Or was that just jumping through multiplicities? If you don't know what the intention is it reads as a continuity error.  It was actually the intention of the author. So, if you're going to have a moment like that, you need to make sure to explain it so that it doesn't read as a continuity error.

 

1. Intensify choices and limit replay: For me, it would be about going off in all these different endings and potential universes, which are a great playground. It means that your content is wildly different on the different branches. If you're producing a whole lot of content, having one reality helps to limit that. I think you can put a lot more variance into the choices, as well as the continuity errors.  I’d also change the replay context.  The first time you play a game, it can seem to be really respecting your choices. And it's not until you play a game the second time that you notice that choosing that option, does the same thing whatever choice you make. So to a certain extent they shot themselves in the foot by having quite a sparse tree and forcing players to replay it at least once. It shattered the illusions a bit.

 

1. Think about tone and context: If they had made sure that the disparate paths that are re-joining contain something that cast a different emotional light or a different narrative context on what follows that would still feel meaningful so you can get away with it.

 

1. Focus: The main thing I would do differently is to drill down on the buffet of themes in this draft, to identify which ones people actually care about. Focus on that. Make sure that more of these choices are either structured in a way that lets the player feel some thematic agency, or else gain a better understanding what the stakes of the choice probably are. And I think if they narrowed the multiplicity down a bit so that it was easier to build kind of a mental model of what the possibility space is, where we're going here, then you'd get a lot more sense of intentionality at more of the choice points.

 

1. Deliver more authentic social messages: When choices seemed to be all about mental illness I was like, what? Like, for instance, you have an option at one point to take your meds or flush them. And then on a successive replay, you come back around to it, and you can flush them or you can throw them away. And I'm sitting there, trying to puzzle that out. And I'm thinking, Okay, well, if I throw them away, my dad might find them in the trash, and he'll know that I haven't taken my meds so then that will make something else happen. And then if I flush them, then the evidence is gone. You know, and you are smarter than the game. And then on top of that, they're doing something with mental illness that I didn't particularly appreciate. So, if you're going to give me binary choices, make sure that they clearly do something. But also, please don't give me choices that are like take your antidepressants or don't take your antidepressants.

 

1. Respect consent: But going back to those choices again, I think there were a whole bunch of occasions where you wanted a different possibility. The one I particularly hated was you can say yes or no, when Colin offers you the harder drugs. And if you say no, he spikes your drink. And I have, I think, never been quite so angry about a fake choice. That's bad writing and appalling social commentary, it just fails in every possible way.  It's a fictional violation of consent that goes with the mechanic. I didn't know that would happen because I've never turned down drugs.

 
I think they were banking on the fact that 90% of the players are not going to turn it down for a variety of reasons. It's the most interesting choice in the scene. Let's do it and see what happens right again, that's the problem with their intentionality. And their design strategy is to make one much more attractive than the other. And then they either reward you or punish you for picking the most attractive one and I'm not interested in being punished and I'm not even really that interested in being rewarded.
 
The first time I got the take your meds or don't take your meds I got to it from the path where Colin has ranted about people controlling you by putting stuff in your food in the context of the government control path, which is not well executed and is not believable. But in that context, deciding to throw your pills away makes a lot of sense. It's a story
 
The second time I got to it. I did not have the context of the common explanation. It was just I'd come from my psychiatrist office. And so I took the meds and then I failed to finish the game and the game that Stefan created was not well received. And so explicitly connecting antidepressants to creativity is incredibly irresponsible. So yeah, I was pretty disappointed by that.
 

1. Complicate control: I think it's quite interesting that we're talking about Stefan being us, actually, rather than that whole separation of control thing that they're trying to go for. So the separation of the control doesn't seem to be quite working. Because a lot of the intentionality in the choices and the reactions in that section where you're poking stuff out to do things and he is getting fed up with the voices in his head and he's starting to try and do something else. Which is an interesting idea, but wasn't very well executed, I think.

 
 
What are the social messages of this piece?
 
I found the mental illness aspects troubling. I also think there was a missed opportunity to go as far as they could have done with the friendship with Collin because it felt like he was a really interesting character and the possibility of comradeship in a difficult emotional space and different creative space is really important. And it is a possible resolution for a lot of the things that are afflicting the character. And the fact that they take you partway down that road and then they say, Oh, he drugs you, or you accept his drugs and then things go haywire. And there's this weird force jumping off a balcony scene. I felt like that was there was something false about that.  It felt like we got to this point because they thought it would be shocking or because they felt like they had to show you having a bad result for taking drugs. It feels like it's an opening to emotional intimacy and connection and you want to say yes to that, and it really bothered me that the story was like a hard no, and not for a good reason.
 
I was genuinely emotionally affected by the death ending. There's a bit at the very beginning where, where you're talking about your mother's death, and the psychiatrist says he didn't know. And so being back there and picking …No, I'm not getting on the train, knowing what's going to happen is also a very interesting emotional moment. I would have liked to have seen them do more of that.
 
Heather Albano, Mary Duffy, Jason Stevan Hill, Emily Short, and Ian Thomas. 2019. Narrascope 2019 - Panel Discussion - Dissecting the Bandernatch With a Vorpal Blade. In Narrascope 2019: YouTube.

Whilst cinematic games are increasingly popular, interactive movies remain niche and often struggle to combine narrative and interactivity.  Some theorists argue that this is because interaction obstructs the movie watching experience. 

"The problem is that too much interactivity will weaken the narrative and too little will weaken the gameplay" (p. 22 citing Crogan, 2002).

For this reason, even though internet TV platforms have the capacity to include interactivity, most don't, or if they do, they offer only very limited interactivity.  The few examples of successful integration of more extensive interaction such as Her Story (2015) and Roundabout (2015) are either regarded as niche, or classified as games.  Indeed, due to the historically poor reputation of "basic narrative with minimal branching and predictable endings... (Edmond, 2015; Edwards, 2003)" in interactive movies, the gaming classification has been a notable preference.  The researchers quote a print advertisement for the interactive movie Psychic Detective, which self-describes as a full motion video game, adding 'Yeah, we know full-motion video games in the past sucked' (Interactive Movie, n.d.).

The researcher defines interactive movies as those which include interactions that navigate the narrative and create alternate stories, albeit within the overall structure of the script, so that the audience is also in some sense the co-creator of the interactive movie (Kromhout & Forceville, 2013).

Using a combination of surveys, interviews and observations of 150 university students who were asked to play the interactive movie, The Outbreak, a branching tree narrative movie.  Branching tree narratives allow for pauses so the user can choose a path, and based on their choice the narrative continues with multiple possible endings. 

"Looking at our chosen interactive movie for this study, the interactivity only serves to branch the narrative and actually pauses the play until the user chooses a path. For that matter, most interactive movies seem to only use interactivity as an add on and not at all embedded as part of the narrative" (p. 27).

"While some of the participants enjoyed the novelty of trying a new concept, most found the interactivity distracting and even frustrating, with the most common key words used being – boring, distracting, frustrating, unique.." (p. 26).  

The researcher concludes that gamers are interested in complex interactivity and do not find interactive movies challenging enough, while non-gamers find the interactivity distracting. Thus, interactive movies as they are seem to be lost between two distinct genres, but the in between approach satisfies neither audience.

The researcher recommends non-obstructive interactive mechanisms that are complex enough to create an immersive gaming experience, while fully integrated in the narrative.

"For interactivity to be fully embedded, the gamer needs to let go of the role of story author and be a willing participant in the narrative, immersed in the story by the act of interacting with the narrative in a semiotic manner" (p. 23).

e.g.
A notable example of early interactive cinema in 1967, the interactive movie Kinoautomat (Weiberg, 2002) and its use of pre-determinism and making fun of democracy. In this movie the audience voted on each choice but that always lead to the same conclusion. The interactivity is very simple with a branching narrative structure that leads to the next section; the interactivity preserves the narrative and the narrative structure, but at the same time, the interactivity itself is actually part of the narrative in that it tells the story of democracy, no matter what you vote.

Work is under way to explore whether focusing upon character interaction, rather than narrative interaction might also enable more interactive movie engagement, but early efforts like the Façade Interactive Drama produced in 2005 (Mateas & Stern, 2005; Rettberg, 2015) are still experimental.

The market is not yet developed, and the researcher concludes that it will require considerable investment in talented writers and interactive designers to produce a few hit interactive movies before audiences are willing to consume such movies regularly. e.g. Netflix recently added interactivity to Black Mirror Bandersnatch interactive episode (discussed in another research summary) which was met with fanfare and positive audience engagement (Chua, 2019).  As yet these efforts are still experimental.

Dahdal, S., 2020. The Illusive Ludonarrativity and the Problem with Emergent Interactive Storytelling Models in Interactive Movies. Journal of Digital Media & Interaction, 3(6), pp.17-33

This article reviews findings from a survey of over 2, 000 Pokémon GO players regarding their motivations to play the game.  

Earlier experiences, especially with the same franchise, social influence, and popularity were the most common reasons to adopt the game, while progressing in the game was the most frequently reported reason to continue playing.  The player's personal situation outside the game and playability problems were the most significant reasons to quit the game.

The Pokémon GO brand is widely known, it has nostalgic value, and its characters are simple and attractive even if one is unfamiliar with them. The “gotta catch ‘em all” theme of Pokémon is well suited for a location-based game where the player can go to different places to find and catch different creatures.

Reasons to start playing Pokémon GO

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE
As many as 43.9% of the respondents reported experience with fandom for similar types of games or hobbies as a reason to pick up the game. Out of these, experience with Pokémon was by far the most frequent reason to start playing, mentioned by 39.6% of the respondents. The idea of the game brought up nostalgic feelings of childhood moments playing Pokémon. Some dreamt of being a Pokémon trainer as a child, and the game felt as the closest thing to fulfill that dream. In a smaller margin were previous experiences with geocaching, Ingress (Niantic, 2013) or other location-based games, or playing games in general.

SOCIAL INFLUENCE
Parents mentioned either wanting to be more informed about their children's activities or wanting something common to do together with them. Similarly, a friend's or a partner's recommendations or wanting to spend time with them while playing were reported.

POPULARITY 
The hype around the game and the visibility of the players had a major effect

POSITIVE CHARACTERISTICS
Physical exercise and spending time outdoors while playing were appealing. In addition, the respondents liked the idea of being encouraged to explore their surroundings and new areas.

NOVEL TECHNOLOGY
Location-based characteristics or AR, was a reason to try the game.

SITUATION and CONVENIENCE
Wanting something fun to do while doing other less interesting activities, or having a conveniently located PokéStop nearby. Some mentioned having a new phone, which made trying the game out convenient. The game being free and good weather were also mentioned.

GENERAL KNOWLEDGE 
People stated they picked up the game because they wanted to keep up with the times.

SOCIAL FEATURES
The general sociability of the game, liking to compete or wanting to help others were brought up. Some felt that playing would be a good opportunity to meet new people, even potential partners.

GAME MECHANICS 
Looking for, hunting, and collecting Pokémon was fun. The “treasure hunt” like gameplay was seen as exciting.

THE NATURE OF THE GAME
Being casual enough and having easy access, was appealing.

Reasons to continue playing Pokémon GO

PROGRESSION  
The most common individual reason to keep on playing was collecting Pokémon.  Achieving personal goals, the joy of discovery, and the general feel of advancement.

POSITIVE ASPECTS
Again, exercise and outdoor activities interested the players, and having a reason to go out and walk was motivating.

SOCIAL FEATURES 
Whether wanting to meet new people while playing or playing together with friends or family. The game functioned as an easy way to connect people together and create a feel of community.

SOCIAL INFLUENCE
This could mean parents wanting to be up to date and informed about their children's hobby or avoiding being left out of social circles when all friends were still playing the game.

INTEREST 
The game continued to feel interesting or fun.

FUTURE EXPECTATIONS 
Some players were curious about how the game was going to change or waiting for a specific update.

THE NATURE OF THE GAME 
The casual nature of the game, making it easy to play, while others felt that the challenging nature was positive. The game provided surprises and was rewarding.

While previous experiences, especially with the Pokémon brand, were brought up as the number one reason to start the game, they were rarely mentioned as the reason to continue playing.

Only a few respondents reported technology related reasons to continue playing, for instance liking the location-based properties or the AR features.

Reasons to stop playing Pokémon GO

SITUATION 
Getting bored, a lack of time or money, poor or cold weather, and health problems were mentioned, while some had quit due to their phone breaking or the game not working where they lived. Some had achieved their goal and had thus decided to quit, while others felt the hype was settling down.

PROGRESSION 
The leveling curve was seen to be too steep: the required experience points needed for a new level rose exponentially, while the earned experience points stayed the same, making it necessary to grind to advance. Similarly, when reaching a certain point in collecting the Pokémon, it became increasingly hard to find any new ones to advance towards the goal of catching them all.

FUNCTIONALITY PROBLEMS
Bugs, the game crashing or not registering the walked distances properly were mentioned. The respondents criticized the unequal gaming possibilities due to the Pokémon and PokéStops being concentrated to city centers. In addition, some disliked that you needed to keep the game active at all times even when playing passively. This caused the battery to drain.  

​SHALLOW
The shortcomings of the game, especially the lack of content, were seen to be problematic. Some players would have wanted more features or more Pokémon.

CHANGE
Sometimes players felt that the game was changing for the worse. For instance, the removal of the nearby feature, which had made locating Pokémon easier made some to stop playing.

BAD REPUTATION
Niantic was criticized for their lack of communication to the public, and even claims of not seeing them as trustworthy arose.

SOCIAL INFLUENCE
If friends no longer played the game, some respondents explained not feeling like continuing the game alone. Other people could have a negative influence, for instance by cheating.

Alha, K., Koskinen, E., Paavilainen, J. and Hamari, J., 2019. Why do people play location-based augmented reality games: A study on Pokémon GO. Computers in Human Behavior, 93, pp.114-122.

We don't normally summarise course content.  Yet, this particular course offers a clear and accessible introduction to augmented reality technologies, so it seems helpful to flag it here.  The main points covered within the course are listed below:

The basics of augmented reality

• Humankind’s first foray into immersive reality through a head-mounted display was the “Sword of Damocles,” created by Ivan Sutherland in 1968.
• HMD is the acronym for “head-mounted display.”
• The term “Augmented Reality” was coined by two Boeing researchers in 1992.
• A standalone headset is a VR or AR headset that does not require external processors, memory, or power.
• Through the combination of their hardware and software, many smartphones can view AR experiences that are less immersive than HMDs.
• Many of the components in smartphones—gyroscopes, cameras, accelerometers, miniaturized high-resolution displays—are also necessary for AR and VR headsets.
• The high demand for smartphones has driven the mass production of these components, resulting in greater hardware innovations and decreases in costs.
• Project Tango was an early AR experiment from Google, utilizing a combination of custom software and hardware innovations that lead to a phone with depth-sensing cameras and powerful processors to enable high fidelity AR.
• An evolution of Project Tango, ARCore is Google’s platform for building augmented reality experiences.

AR functionality

• In order to seem real, an AR object has to act like its equivalent in the real world. Immersion is the sense that digital objects belong in the real world.
• Breaking immersion means that the sense of realism has been broken; in AR this is usually by an object behaving in a way that does not match our expectations.
• Placing is when the tracking of a digital object is fixed, or anchored, to a certain point in the real world.
• Scaling is when a placed AR object changes size and/or dimension relative to the AR device's position. For example, when a user moves away or towards an AR object, it feels like the object is getting larger or smaller depending on the distance of the phone in relation to the object. AR objects further away from the phone look smaller and objects that are closer look larger. This should mimic the depth perception of human eyes.
• Occlusion occurs when one object blocks another object from view.
• AR software and hardware need to maintain “context awareness” by tracking the physical objects in any given space and understanding their relationships to each other -- i.e. which ones are taller, shorter, further away, etc.

Inside-out vs. outside-in tracking

• There are two basic ways to track the position and orientation of a device or user: outside-in tracking and inside-out tracking.
• Outside-in tracking uses external cameras or sensors to detect motion and track positioning. This method offers more precision tracking, but a drawback is the external sensors lower the portability.
• Inside-out tracking uses cameras or sensors located within the device itself to track its position in the real world space. This method requires more hardware in the AR device, but offers more portability.
• On the AR headset side, the Microsoft HoloLens is a device that uses inside-out tracking. On the VR headset side, the HTC Vive is a device that uses outside-in tracking.
• On the AR mobile side, the Google Pixel is a smartphone that uses inside-out tracking for AR.

Fundamentals of ARCore

• ARCore integrates virtual content with the real world as seen through your phone's camera and shown on your phone's display with technologies like motion tracking, environmental understanding, and light estimation.
• Motion tracking uses your phone's camera, internal gyroscope, and accelerometer to estimate its pose in 3D space in real time.
• Environmental understanding is the process by which ARCore “recognizes” objects in your environment and uses that information to properly place and orient digital objects. This allows the phone to detect the size and location of flat horizontal surfaces like the ground or a coffee table.
• Light estimation in ARCore is a process that uses the phone’s cameras to determine how to realistically match the lighting of digital objects to the real world’s lighting, making them more believable within the augmented scene.
• Feature points are visually distinct features in your environment, like the edge of a chair, a light switch on a wall, the corner of a rug, or anything else that is likely to stay visible and consistently placed in your environment.
• Concurrent odometry and mapping (COM) is a motion tracking process for ARCore, and tracks the smartphone’s location in relation to its surrounding world.
• Plane finding is the smartphone-specific process by which ARCore determines where surfaces are in your environment and uses those surfaces to place and orient digital objects. ARCore looks for clusters of feature points that appear to lie on common horizontal or vertical surfaces, like tables or walls, and makes these surfaces available to your app as planes. ARCore can also determine each plane's boundary and make that information available to your app. You can use this information to place virtual objects resting on flat surfaces.
• Anchors “hold” the objects in their specified location after a user has placed them.
• Motion tracking is not perfect. As you walk around, error, referred to as drift, may accumulate, and the device's pose may not reflect where you actually are. Anchors allow the underlying system to correct that error by indicating which points are important.

Constraints with current AR

• Currently AR has a lack of user interface metaphors, meaning that a commonly understood method or language of human interaction has not been established.
• The purpose of the interface metaphor is to give the user instantaneous knowledge about how to interact with the user interface. An example is a QWERTY keyboard or a computer mouse.
• The details of what makes AR challenging from a technical standpoint are complex, but three influential factors are power, heat, and size.
• AR requires high processing power, batteries generate heat, and a current challenge is fitting all the necessary components into a small enough form factor to wear on your face comfortably for extended periods of time.
• Not everything in AR has to be 3D, but the vast majority of assets, applications, and experiences will require at least a little 3D design.
• Currently, there is a limited base of people with 3D design and interaction skills, such as professional animators, graphic designers, mechanical engineers, or video game creators. For AR to grow, the adoption of 3D design theory, skills, and language needs to become much more widespread. Later on in this course, we’ll be discussing a few programs that are helping overcome this challenge, like Sceneform or Poly API.
• Computer vision is a blend of artificial intelligence and computer science that aims to enable computers (like smartphones) to visually understand the surrounding world like human vision does. This technology needs to improve in terms of object detection and segmentation to make AR processes more effective.

Use cases and current powers/limitations of AR

• ARCore can be used to create dynamic experiences for businesses, nonprofits, healthcare, schools, and more.
• ARCore’s strengths are its phone-based spatial mapping capabilities and addressable user base. Approximately 85% of phones around the world run on the Android operating system.
• At the beginning of 2018, ARCore is already available on 100 million Android-powered smartphones and that number continues growing. ARCore requires a lot of processing power, so not all older Android models have the necessary specifications yet. ARCore is also available in China.
• Limitations to consider with contemporary AR technology include: low-light environments, a lack of featured surfaces, and the availability of powerful mobile processors in new phones.

Basic AR interaction options

1.     Drag and Drop
2.     Voice
3.     Tap
4.     Pinch and Zoom
5.     Slide
6.     Tilt

Think like a user

• User flow is the journey of your app's users and how a person will engage, step by step, with your AR experience.
• Planning your user flow needs to take into account the scene, the user interactions, any audio cues, and the final user actions.
• A user flow can be created with simple sketches and panels all collected into one cohesive diagram.
• UX and UI are complementary fields of product design, and generally speaking UX is the more technical of the two.
• When considering UX/UI, one good rule of thumb to remember with AR is to avoid cluttering the screen with too many buttons or elements that might be confusing to users.
• Choosing to use cartoonish designs or lighting can actually make the experience feel more realistic to the user, as opposed to photorealistic assets that fail to meet our expectations when they don't blend in perfectly with the real world.
• Users might try to “break” your experience by deliberately disregarding your carefully planned user flow, but your resources are better spent on improving your app’s usability rather than trying to prevent bad actors

Next steps on the AR journey

• Advanced 3D design tools like Maya, Zbrush, Blender, and 3ds Max are powerful professional tools.
• Google’s Poly can be a good starting resource for building your first ARCore experience.
• Poly by Google is a repository of 3D assets that can be quickly downloaded and used in your ARCore experience.
• The recommended guide for your AR experience is a design document that contains all of the 3D assets, sounds, and other design ideas for your team to implement.
• You may need to hire advanced personnel to help you build your experience, such as: 3D artists, texture designers, level designers, sound designers, or other professionals.

A closer look at mechanics of ARCore

• Surface detection allows ARCore to place digital objects on various surface heights, to render different objects at different sizes and positions, and to create more realistic AR experiences in general.
• Pose is the position and orientation of any object in relation to the world around it. Everything has its own unique pose: from your mobile device to the augmented 3D asset that you see on your display.
• Hit-testing lets you establish a pose for virtual objects and is the next step in the ARCore user process after feature-tracking (finding stationary feature points that inform the environmental understanding of the device) and plane-finding (the smartphone-specific process by which ARCore determines where horizontal surfaces are in your environment).
• Light estimation is a process that allows the phone to estimate the environment's current lighting conditions. ARCore is able to detect objects in suboptimal light and map a room successfully, but it’s important to note that there is a limit to how low the light can be for the experience to function.
• Occlusion is when one 3D object blocks another 3D object. Currently this is only possible with digital objects, and AR objects cannot be occluded by a real world object. For example, in an AR game the digital object would not be able to behind a real couch in the real world.
• Assets in multi-plane detection are scaled appropriately in relationship to the established planes, though only need to be placed on them (via anchor points) when it causes them to function like their real-world counterparts.
• Immersion can be broken by users interacting with AR objects as if they were physically real. Framing can be used to combat these immersion-breaking interactions.
• Spatial mapping is the ability to create a 3D map of the environment and helps establish where assets can be placed.
• Feature points are stationary and are used to further environmental understanding and place planes in an experience. ARCore assumes planes are unmoving, so it is inadvisable to attempt to anchor a digital object to a real world object that is in motion. In general, it’s best not to place an object until the room has been sufficiently mapped and static surfaces have been recognized and designated as feature points.

Using Poly and Unity to create ARCore assets

• Unity is a cross-platform game engine and development environment for both 3D and 2D interactive applications. It has a variety of tools, from the simple to the professionally complex, to allow for the streamlined creation of 3D objects and environments.
• Poly toolkit for Unity is a plugin that allows you to import assets from Poly into Unity at edit time and at runtime.
• Edit-time means manually downloading assets from Poly and importing them into your app's project while you are creating your app or experience.
• Runtime means downloading assets from Poly when your app is running. This allows your app to leverage Poly's ever-expanding library of assets.

Even despite Google's undeniable motivation to promote its own products via this course, the course explanation of the above summary points is helpful and clear, enhanced by videos, diagrams and graphics.

Coursera course content is free for University students.  Certification is optional for an extra fee.  

VR, Google AR &. "Introduction to Augmented Reality & AR Core." Coursera, accessed 22.9.20. https://www.coursera.org/learn/ar.

Augmented reality (AR), creators can use the space around participants to visualize media, enable participants to organise those aspects with their own, and share it all with peers face-to-face. This is a Spatial Interface.

META an augmented reality glasses company researched  SPATIAL INTERFACE DESIGN GUIDES in collaboration with a diverse team of neuroscientists, led by Professor Stefano Baldassi (previously of Stanford University), UX designers and developers, advisers from industry and academia, and Meron Gribetz (founder and CEO of Meta), studying the way that the brain understands natural 3D interfaces. 

Guideline 1
Think Spatial: Place Tools and Content in Space
Replace flat layouts of windows, menus, and buttons, with a Spatial Interface that arranges tools and content in 3D space around the user. 
Do
Arrange volumetric tools and content in space.
Don’t
Cram traditional GUI elements (windows, icons, menus, etc.) into 2D panels.
UI Design Suggestions
1. Reconsider traditional windows and screen-based conventions
For example, don’t place a “start menu” in space, since it was designed for a small screen and presents a cluttered mess of buttons, abstract icons, and tools. 
2. Separate elements into two buckets: volume and content
Text and video are inherently flat, and should be contained within tangible 3D structures with their own sense of affordance. 3D models, on the other hand, may exist as free-standing objects of their own and their design should suggest their use. 
3. Distinguishing between tools and content
Content is an experience in and of itself; it conveys information or some kind of sensory experience. Tools, on the other hand, serve the purpose of creating, modifying or in some way interacting with content.  The "three-dimensional tool" needs to be based on the user's intuition, and the "content" may have an abstract and flat shape, or it may have a realistic and three-dimensional shape.  For example, text and video are flat, but need to be embedded in some three-dimensional structure. On the other hand, since the 3D model is originally three-dimensional, it can exist as an independent object.
4. Avoid expandable or hidden menus in AR
Instead of imitating the flat world of traditional traditional UIs into a three-dimensional world as they are, it is necessary to get inspiration from actual work sites such as art studios and workshops. Instead of thinking about menus and buttons, you should think of tools that the user can actually grasp.

Guideline 2
Minimize Abstractions: Design Tools with Volume and Affordances
Now that we understand how to arrange objects in space, how should we design the objects themselves? Replace abstract representations (like flat icons) with volumetric tools featuring physical characteristics that suggest their use without explicit instruction, leveraging the neuroscience of affordance.
Do
Use realistic volumetric designs for tools and content, creating intuitive affordances for the user.
Don’t
Represent objects with abstractions such as iconography

UI Design Suggestions
1. Design with affordances in mind
Design tools with affordances, which are physical characteristics that suggest how the tool should be grasped or used. For example, a holographic eraser might have grooves to invite grasping it on one side, and a flat surface for erasing on the other side.  Objects and tools designed with affordance in mind are better than abstract icons. Can be understood quickly and deeply.  
2. Build on the user’s prior knowledge of a tool instead of defining your own​
Design based on prior knowledge, to enhance usability.  For example, don’t reinvent the paintbrush in some radically new way.   
3.Use tools only if direct hand manipulation is insufficient or biomechanically challenging
Direct hand interaction is preferable for most simple tasks, such as moving, rotating, or scaling an object. 
4. Avoid use of buttons in AR as much as possible
For instance, rather than presenting a “send” button when the user writes an email, provide a mailbox that the user can drop the email into.
5. Compensate for lack of haptics with other sensory cues
For instance, consider synchronized audio cues when the user’s hand interacts with tools and content, or build hybrid tools that mix digital interfaces with real-world objects, or use physical markers that permit holographic drawing in space. 

Guideline 3
You are the OS: Organize Holographic Files and Tools in the User’s Environment
Replace the traditional abstract and complex hierachy of file systems with spatial organization of files that makes sense for people, it makes them easier to engage with.
Do
Use the physical environment to create organization and structure.
Don’t
Use the abstract, nested file systems of traditional UIs.

UI Design Suggestions
1 Use space as an organizational tool
For example, if the user places a holographic object in a specific area of a physical desk, their spatial memory of its placement makes it easy and faster to search later.
2 Use volumetric containers and holographic furniture
Also, the object should use a three-dimensional container rather than an abstract folder or file system. Unless these containers have a deep hierarchical structure, files can be easily retrieved ergonomically. 
3 Don’t overload the user’s working memory with nesting
These containers should not be nested. Nesting overloads the user's spatial memory and makes the file unintuitive.  If the application does need nesting, then do not exceed one level. Despite being commonplace in traditional UIs, a holographic drawer should not also feature hidden “sub-drawers” within it. 
4. Preserve the user’s spatial memory
When the user is selecting an object, other unselected objects should not be hidden Yes. This is because hiding impairs the integrity of the user's spatial memory. Highlight the selected object instead of hiding it.
5 Miniaturize content and tools to optimize space
On the other hand, miniaturizing content and tools (or vice versa) is effective in maximizing the user's workspace without disrupting spatial memory.

For example, family photos are routinely kept by the thousands in labeled albums, which can then be organized on shelves. This does not represent a violation of those principles because the photo albums are already exposed, and once opened, the user immediately arrives at the content they’re looking for—hence one level of hierarchy deep. This use of furniture, simple grouping, and shallow nesting provides AR developers and designers with an effective model for organizing huge amounts of holographic content without the cognitive overhead of abstract file systems. 

Guideline 4
Touch to See: Use the Hands to Interact Directly
The brain naturally tends to recognize objects near the hand. The tools and the content they operate on should not be physically or spatially separated.  That is, the user should not operate the content from a distance or mediate abstract objects such as gestures, buttons, and menus.
Do
Use direct hand manipulation to use tools and interact with content.
Don’t
Use remote gestures and abstract pointers.

UI Design Suggestions
1. Touch content to act on it
Tools, actions, and the content on which they operate should never be physically or spatially separated. 
2. When grabbing¨ pushing¨ or expanding
It is necessary for the object to reflect the user's physical movements and movements such as grasping and spreading. It should not be associated with gestures that the user must first learn the action and function of, such as opening a fist or waving to spread an object.  
3. Avoid gestures that require specialized knowledge or memorization
While power user shortcuts are enticing ways to speed up interaction with an interface, they leave behind most of humanity (the non-power users). Instead of discrete gestures, use affordances to encourage the user to interact with objects in more natural ways.
4. Persistence and the usage of tools
Tools intended for persistent use (such as a paint brush, a conductor’s wand, or a flashlight) should realistically respond to the user’s manipulation, instead of requiring a discreet hand gesture to activate or deactivate. For instance, the brush should draw when pressed against a surface, rather than in response to a separate trigger like a gesture or button press. 
5. Proximity feedback is your friend
Provide proximity feedback when the user uses or touches an object or content. By doing this, it is possible to compensate for the lack of tactile sensation and emphasize collisions and movements.  Glows and subtle audio cues are a good way to accent a collision or movement while compensating for the lack of haptics. 

Guideline 5
Do Not Disturb: Do not interrupt the User’s Workflow
Spatial computing demands spatial notifications. Rather than interrupting the user’s workflow with pop-ups, allow users to designate a separate container to passively collect incoming notifications. This allows the user to remain focused on their task, only stopping to check for updates when desired.
Do
Establish a passive notification receptacle: non-intrusive, segregated from the task at hand by default, and easy to move.
Don’t
Interrupt the user’s task flow with active notifications and pop-ups.

UI Design Suggestions
1Separate designated areas
Allow the user to designate a container or space to collect incoming notifications away from their workspace, instead of interrupting them directly with pop-ups or alerts. This preserves the user’s control over their experience by allowing them to focus on the task at hand, only breaking their concentration for updates when desired. Ideally, such a box would be located outside the user’s field of view and at some reasonable distance, ensuring disruptions are avoided. As a default, prioritise the user’s concentration, only allowing disruptive notifications when requested explicitly by the user.
2. Design tools for specific purposes
Certain tasks require bottom-up disruptions to break top-down flow (like when your timer beeps), and should be incorporated into tools designated for that specific purpose, but even these tools should mimic real world tools like alarm clocks and egg timers. Most importantly, the user should always understand how to turn off the sounds and visuals associated with alerts.
3 Allow for tailoring and flexibility
Create flexibility by allowing the user or developer to designate multiple boxes, and tailor them to receive certain kinds of notifications. For instance, one box might be associated with all social media apps from different services or people, while another might be for email only. A third box might handle all incoming phone calls, making it easy for the user to selectively allow calls to disrupt their work (by bringing this particular box closer to the workspace). Boxes can also be connected to specific people or groups, allowing for further organization of incoming notifications. Furthermore, the design of the box itself should use affordances to suggest its use, such as a lid that can be closed to mute notifications, or opened to enable them.
4 Consider gradual notifications over abrupt ones
Even if users choose to place notifications within their workspace, they should consider using gradual visual and audio cues instead of explosive alerts.

Guideline 6
Avoid Surprises and Magic Tricks: Pair Actions with Intuitive Outcomes
Avoid “magical” events that appear unrelated to user behavior or earlier causes, or events that ignore the laws of physics as these only confound the user.
Do
Create predictable connections between a user’s actions and the result.
Don’t
Use nonsensical, disorienting quirks and surprises.

UI Design Suggestions
1Avoid “magic” by tailoring outcomes to match the user’s actions
Here, “Magic ” refers to anything that confuses the intuitive sense of cause and effect. A magic wand, for example, is confusing because it looks more like a stick and there is no affordance associated with a particular task. Also, people can't predict the consequences of using it. On the other hand, most users will immediately know how to use an eraser; its use can be understood and its effects predicted with no additional explanation.
2. Use realistic physics to create intuitive object interactions and behavior
It also confuses the user when the object does not respond in a reasonable way.
For example, even if you gently push a holographic ice cube and slide it on a desk, do not fly across the room at 900 m / h. It is necessary to have a clear relationship between actions and effects.
3 Enforce causality with clear associations between action and effect
A sound triggered by a user’s action should occur immediately in real-time and emanate from the appropriate location. Likewise, visual feedback such as glowing highlights, shadows, or physical deformations should be proportionate and spatially close to the event that triggered them.

Guideline 7
The Holographic Campfire: Don’t Obscure Hands and Faces with the UI
Our ancestors have evolved to face each other, both in pairs and in tribes. Therefore, we are very sensitive to the gaze of the eyes and the facial expressions of others, and the dedicated areas of the brain continuously perceive those sensations.
Our perception of the line of sight extends to its surroundings and is immediately noticed when someone else is looking at something of interest.
Avoid blocking eye contact, create shared spaces that encourage a mutual gaze, and ensure hands are visible while collaborating. 
Do
Replace UIs that disrupt eye contact with a shared space. Also, collaborate by directly manipulating shared content.
Don’t
Obscure or occlude the face of others with interface elements, or use single modality collaboration, such as face-to-face collaboration without the hands or voice chat without video.

​UI Design Suggestions
1. Promote unobstructed views
Avoid interfaces that occupy the entire field of view and obscure facial expressions—two significant components of personal communication. Within a shared physical space, interfaces should be arranged around users, not between them. 
2. Support collaborative experiences when working in the same location
For example, a collaborative design tool should encourage all participants to manipulate the same object in the same place, as opposed to private instances visible to each individual separately.  
3. Show hands when collaborating
The interface must clearly indicate the position of the user's hands.  When a user's hands are within the sight of other users, the ability to learn from collaboration and demonstration increases.
4.When collaborating remotely¨ use 3D video of participants instead of avatars or virtual characters
Artificial expressions such as still images, icons, and virtual characters only reduce the accuracy of communication and improve cognitive burden and social anxiety.

Guideline 8
Public by Default: Shared Understanding Reduces Anxiety Among Users
We have evolved to constantly observe the attitudes, movements, and behaviors of those around us in order to attempt the intentions of others, and to guess the minds of others.  By default, other people's content should be viewable. All users should be able to see the same holographic environment, just as they see the same physical environment in the real world.
Do
Make tools and content public by default. Maintain the ability to make
things private if needed.
Don’t
Offer private, asymmetric UIs (like the ones seen in Google Glass).

UI Design Suggestions
1. By default¨ ensure content can be viewed by anyone else wearing a headset
All users should be exposed to the same holographic surroundings, just like we all see the same physical surroundings in the real world. When a user's content is hidden from other users in AR, the action appears to be in an empty space . To confuse. Furthermore, devices like Google Glass have demonstrated our distrust of private interfaces because they allow aggressive or invasive actions that can be performed secretly, even when face-to-face. Such practices may divide users, rather than encourage cooperation, and may contribute to social anxiety.
2. When privacy is necessary¨ use a blocking object like curtains or dividers
Do not simply make sensitive content invisible from the perspective of unauthorized users, as this creates a disparity between users that can lead to confusion and distrust. Instead, just as in real life, establish privacy with holographic curtains or dividers. This approach ensures a consistent experience across all users without confusion or mixed signals, and eliminates the disorienting sight of gestures performed on empty space.
3. Privacy is a function of etiquette¨ not a feature of the interface
Augmented reality is most powerful when treated as a single, shared space. Don’t relegate privacy to an on/off switch that segregates user experiences. Confusion arises when this otherwise collaborative experience is unknowingly changed from one user to another for the sake of privacy or discretion. For example, a user who wishes to view financially sensitive information should do so within an interface that has privacy features, such as a curtain, divider, or display that can be tilted away from unwanted viewers. Users should design their own privacy within the rules of the shared space, as opposed to breaking the rules.

Guideline 9
Augmented, Not Mixed, Reality: Enhance the User’s Perception with Relevant Information
Rather than block out users’ reality (as in virtual reality) or distort the user’s reality (as in mixed reality), provide access to metadata about the world placed near by, without masking it—add something useful to people's understanding of their environment. Create an informative, powerful, and unobtrusive layer of digital information on top of the real
world.
Do
Present information and tools that reflect the user’s reality and deepen their understanding of it.
Don’t
Block or distort reality, whether fully or partially.

UI Design Suggestions
1. Complement the real world
When images and sentences added in the user's field of view by the AR (Augmented Reality) interface are added to the real world without discomfort, the user can understand them intuitively and effectively.  Design interfaces to complement real-world objects, instead of masking or transforming them. For instance, a panel with a Wikipedia page about a flower placed near, but not occluding, the flower would be considered augmented reality. Consider a user that is able to touch a flower and learn about the amount of DNA s/he shares with it. This simplistic example demonstrates how one can enhance their connection with their surrounding environment.
2. The experience of turning the gym floor back to the surface of the pool, in contrast, causes unnecessary confusion and misleads the user about how it works.
This is because it changes or distorts the physical properties of the actual object.
3. Add value and insight for the user
Rich content should be displayed to provide information with as much clarity and depth as possible. Text, video, volumetric content, and the Web can all play a role in empowering the user with deeper understanding and connection to their world.
4 A note about use cases in gaming, In games, we recommend allowing virtual characters to pass through the actual user's environment, rather than "breaking walls" or covering them with overly distorted visuals. On the other hand, for certain uses, such as interior decoration, momentary changes in the environment are tolerated. This use case leads to changes and improvements in the physical properties of the real world.

The report is further summarised in these two blog posts: 

• https://realityrookie.com/2017/03/16/use-neuroscience-to-design-the-ar-interfaces-of-the-future/
• https://qiita.com/A_kkie/items/37f5496838012791ae77

For the full report, together with example images and related neuroscience references, see:
https://pages.metavision.com/meta-augmented-reality-design-guidelines/

ATA 2018 Audience of the Future Presentation.  
 

• Prof Andrew Chitty (Director, Audience of the Future Programme) spoke with Ruth Sessions (Director of Production, Factory 42), Emily Smith (Director of Marketing and BD, Atlantic Productions), Paul Moore (Head of School Communication & Media, Ulster University), Greg Furber (Creative Director, Rewind).Alchemy VR (moved from documentary into museum interpretation.

​
Alchemy VR: Our first experimental virtual reality was back in 2015, where we partnered with the Natural History Museum.  We worked on an experience where we walked people through the Cambrian ocean, a 500 million year old environment based on fossil data held at the museum. David Attenborough took you through that amazing world which we delivered on location in the Natural History Museum.  Visitors would come in, wear a headset, and they'd get the VR experience then they'd see the actual specimens. And it was a great example of a use case of VR, because how else could visitors go back in time to that period and understand what it's like to be in that environment.
Visitor feedback:
86% of visitors learnt something new about the natural world
68% of visitors also learnt something new about the museum’s scientific research, which is a really important outcome.
 
On the basis of that success, we again worked with David on a VR experience that takes you down into the Great Barrier Reef and visitors could explore the barrier reef with him, again, a use case for VR that other museum interpretive tools could not deliver.  How can you go down into the barrier reef unless you're extremely rich, and dive that environment and understand about the fragility of it.  Both of those experiences have run commercially in museums right across the world.
 
In other words, VR is an interpretive tool that offers things that other museum interpretation tools cannot do.  It puts visitors in the position of somebody actually experiencing something, or undertaking an otherwise impossible journey.
 
The VR lounge was delivered on site in the Science Museum, and also toured around the UK to a number of venues across two years.
Also, the VR bus takes a cut down version of the experience into hard to reach communities and schools to engage people across the nation.
 
And another experience that we've worked on involves more of a 4k experience and supported efforts to defend the Amazon for Greenpeace who wanted to create a piece that engaged people with the plight of the Maduro tribe who are about to be wiped out by the building of a dam.  We partnered with another company to create an experience whereby, as virtual reality visitors had fully visceral physical experience and sensory experience delivered in really beautiful pods. And we took a perfume out to the Amazon to capture the smells of the Amazon. Those were delivered in the pod. So as you were walking through the Amazon with Munduruku people, you'd smell what they would smell as point in experience where you have a cup of coffee with the people and you suddenly smelt coffee and felt the heat of the coffee cup in your hand. So really beautiful, visceral experience and it ran across a number of museums across South America. And best of all, the dam was not built.
 
The entertainment sector I wanted to talk about is Disney's Pandora. This experience was built around the Avatar film. As Jake played by Sam Worthington in the movie, you fly on a banshee. And this whole experience, the VR ride essentially is one part of a massive, immersive experience. The environment consists of built mountains and beautiful streams that visitors walk through.  Visitors engage in the physical experience, long before they come face to face with an avatar in a jar. They're given their own avatar through which they then enter the virtual reality.  So, there's elements of personalization and there are also elements of extremely theatrical environments. You're got wind, you've got mist you really feel like you're on the back of a banshee.
 
We're also doing big warehouse scale gaming VR, which have included lots of zombie experiences.  Participants engage with each other in a game environment in the physical space. Noma ran an experiment called virtually dead, which essentially emerged as a kind of theatrical experience with a virtual reality experience. Participants first had to train with actors before they came face to face with the zombies, both as actors and then in the real world in an East London warehouse. This is a small kind of startup essentially tickets sold out immediately. And they started going for five times their market price on the internet.
 
 
AR examples.
The Science Museum did the first AR museum experience, I think.  They used AR to essentially invigorate a gallery, which was very tired from the 1970s to add vision of skin on bones in order to enable visitors to understand more about the creatures in a more exciting way. AR is now also being used to gamify a kind of commercial visitor attraction. Cedar Point used AR, to essentially build a game for visitors around the characters in the theme park with a lot of social interaction and storytelling. So virtual creatures appeared in the real world and visitors formed groups to play games against each other in the theme park. Greg from rewind has also got a wonderful example from his own work, a NASA experiment with their Jet Propulsion Lab and the pre commercial HoloLens in which shows Buzz Aldrin playing that at the Kennedy Space Center. They created a Mars environment where multi visitors at the same time could engage in a virtual Mars environment. 
 
 
Factory 42: Hold the world involves David Attenborough, and gives visitors access to treasures of the Natural History Museum.  In VR visitors can pick up and turn the objects around to examine them much closer…and watch the objects come to life.
The key to Hold The World is that it gives the user the chance to do something that they simply can't do in real life, which is crucial.  Also, once visitors put on the headset it’s worth it because they have a one on one audience with David Attenborough. The experience also takes visitors behind the scenes in the Natural History Museum to three extraordinary rooms that the public is not able to enter.
 
We sort of think of it it's hard to explain, really, but it's, it's somewhere between a TV documentary and a computer game.
 
Eight organizations worked together to make this possible:

• So the first technology we used was a holographic capture. We capture David as a hologram. So the technologies volumetric capture So 106 cameras surrounded him in the green screen studio, which captured every angle of his performance. So the output of that is a hyper realistic 3d hologram, that even your close up really feels like you're sitting across the desk from him.
• We also use photogrammetry. We use photogrammetry to scan the three the three behind the scene environments in the Natural History Museum.

We also used game engine technology, high end visual effects, and several other technologies as well, which combined with a script from a BAFTA winning director.
 
We advise three broad principles to success in this space.
1) A balance between storytelling and consumer insight and technology. So a lot of what we see out there right now doesn't really have that balance. Too much is led by the technology, and not what the consumer might want to experience. … the key thing is, and this is really obvious, but it's sometimes easy to forget, is for the technology to enable, rather than to lead people and actually what's the story you want to tell? And then how can the technologies help you tell the story?
2) I think the second thing you need to succeed is resilience and an appetite for a tough challenge. I mean, this stuff is hard to do, particularly at scale. The technology doesn't always work. It's changing quickly, and finding the right people and good people who know how to work with it is also challenging.  It took us probably about a year to work out how we'd make Hold the world actually before we started in production.
3) Collaborate effectively, because no one's got all the answers. So bringing the cultural world and the tech world together. Both have to adapt the way they work. And that's a key learning from my own personal experience on making Old World was we spoke different languages. I mean, we really did it as if we should have had a sort of simultaneous translator with us at all times. But sides of the team. It wasn't two sides. But both people from both backgrounds in it, we've moved. We grew in understanding how each other works and things. And I think we all emerged wiser from that.  These are complicated relationships with multiple stakeholders

Change is happening quickly.
 
Hololens (and now Unity MARS) - The reality of what the technology can do is absolutely mind blowing. It can scan a room like this can map every surface it can place objects and things on those surfaces and explore an entire world. The building blocks from that are things like unity AI technologies that are in the hands of any talented development team working within this space. And those things are transferable across the entire pipeline.
 
So something that HoloLens today could soon enable us to see smoke come out of trains as we walk around them.   We can bring up the data that people are squinting at.  We can bring in objects you could not otherwise have that space.  
 
If you think of Red Bull Races.  Actually, what we're doing is bringing in real time race to the telemetry data, we're bringing in multiple video feeds, we're using the HoloLens as a control unit that controls multiple screens in the space, so you can switch between different pilots racing. Red Bull air race is the fastest motor sport on the planet, because even though a plane might be doing 200 miles an hour, they're getting pulled up on a slight technicality because their wings weren't perfectly aligned at a certain point or they lost by nought point nought one of a second. Also, when you can't see two planes on a racetrack at the same time, the danger, the excitement and the power that's going out in the field out there doesn't translate. So with technologies like this, we're able to show the truth of what's going on. We can use the data to help us tell the full, dramatic story what's happening out in the racetrack.
 
 
How do you please more than one visitor in the same experience? Is that visitor coming along to get a visual experience? Are they going to have a kind of public experience of some kind? Are they going to have a visceral experience? Is it going to be emotive? Who are you actually appealing to? Now it seems to me it has to be a global audience, given the scale. So how do you square that circle of having somebody down the street walk in, and somebody's logging in remotely from China, applying a very different cultural understanding to whatever experience you're giving them. The technology has to deliver a culturally variable message. Also, a great experience is not really about single experiences.  Coming to a museum isa community experience. Putting on a headset optimizes that experience, but it also takes you out of that community, plus it makes you look like a dick (e.g. you might want to consider using mobiles, or glasses instead). But you see what I'm getting at, the experience is being dictated by the Technology, not necessarily the other way around. The curiosity should not be driven by whatever the technology happens to be.
 
Imagine we’ve got the Giant's Causeway. It's very boring. But actually, if you were trying to make a visitor experience out of that, you can ask a lot of questions about whether it is a geological site. Yes. Is it a contested site? Absolutely. Because the other folkloric story is that a giant called Finn McCool made this place. And if you think it was Finn McCool, that means that you're coming from a Catholic background, and that makes you a Republican. And if you're a unionist, the Giant's Causeway is where you realized that you are connected and not separated by water to your ancestors in Scotland. Contested space! So you've made a visitor experience, and three people have just come through the door. And they've all got different understandings of what that is. How do you represent those narratives? Because it's those narratives that are important. And more crucially, how do you represent those narratives to a Chinese person who has their own narratives? So if I was putting the visitor experience together, I would be thinking about a template of applied understandings and ideas which can move to anywhere in the globe. So you've created a template which you can then sell to South America or you sell to us Africa where they can tell their stories with their cultural resonances. But you've created a vehicle through which they can do that using the technology.
 
Constructing a mixed reality, sensation, experience, which allows people to bring their reality and construct their own narrative coming out of that experience space is quite a challenge. You've got your narratives, where do you set that into?  You may create a landscape, a soundscape, a cityscape, but there has to be a context in which those experiences happen. And those narratives can communicated regardless of the technology, so don't fixate on the technology.
 
You want everyone to know the same piece of information and to be able to share an experience. To help people have their own private experience and also find out the shared base-line, does there need to be a group activity, or a walking tour together, or simply a way to share with families and friends? The answer depends upon who you're trying to reach and what you're trying to help them understand.

I teach museum personnel on a master's program, and it's my job to encourage museum workers to take on digital tools and they are absolutely resistant to that space because they believe passionately in the authenticity of the object. And that's the kind of problem you're up against How do you convince people that those technologies enhance the authenticity of the object?
 

Interactive stories are a technologically daunting challenge.  They require several support technologies that are still underdeveloped - e.g. a lot less money has gone into interactive story technologies than AI voice tech, and even that is still developing.  

As a result "interactive story as a narrative form can be said to be in an infant stage of development akin to the first cinematic films of the early 20th century" (p. 2)

"Putting aside superficial features such as high fidelity graphics and animation, the most successful games offer players true agency - the ability for players to have persisitent, meaningful effects on the events of the experience.  Today's games have only achieved agency in the domain of action - or puzzle oriented game-play" (p.2)

EMBRACING THE COMBINATORIAL EXPLOSION:
The quintessential requirements of an interactive story - and a research agenda.
1. Agency is primary - implicit in this is the promise to directly affect the plot of the story.
2. Generation - in order to achieve this requires vast amounts of content, so to overcome branching fatigue and costs we need systems that can content generate on the fly.  Pioneer projects include Talespin, Universe and Minstrel.
3. Interface - Once players are directing the plots of stories about people, expressive natural language and gesture interfaces will be required.
4. Connection - If generation is akin to speaking, and interface is akin to listening, then the two phases need to be connected with the ability to manage the drama and reason about the player's input.
5. Terminology problem - If players have true agency the interaction is not being told, but generated.  "Interactive storymaking" is more accurate, if awkward.  For now, the researchers drop the verb and refer instead to "interactive stories", noting the need for a new term.

Future recommendations including building new systems to enable new types of interactive stories and making them available for public feedback

Stern, A., 2008, November. Embracing the combinatorial explosion: A brief prescription for interactive story R&D. In Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (pp. 1-5). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Independent producers are not always comfortable using analytics and might link these sorts of metrics to AAA or free-to-play games. But this sort of data can provide valuable feedback about how players experience your interactive media. In this Narrascope 2020 talk Em Lazer-Walker, a Toronto-based artist, engineer, and game designer discusses the benefits, techniques, what to measure, and what not to measure.

My name is Em, I use she her pronouns and I work for Microsoft as a cloud advocate.
I also do a lot of experimental indie game work on my own.
 
This is a talk about analytics.
 
It’s in three parts:

1. How free to play games measure things?
2. What is applicable to smaller games and more experimental games?
3. Is there value in adding analytics to your game? How would you actually go about doing that? What are some practical tools you can use?

 
 
 

1. HOW DO COMMERCIAL GAMES USE DATA?

 
I do not generally endorse the way that commercial metrics analytics works but learning how analytics functions is going to be really useful before we talk about how we can co-opt these techniques for other things.  This is an abstracted overview based on my own experience working in free to play games many years ago, as well as talking to some folks I know who have done it more recently.
 
So if you are a product manager (pm) on a free to play game, you're looking at your game as a product that converts essentially user eyeballs into money. And in order to do that you have the sort of funnel that you narrow in on. You're going to get some new users to download your game, they're going to play it in 2020. This is largely through paying money to acquire these users through channels like video ads. Of all the people who download and install and play your game, some number of them are going to come back the next day, or the next week. Not all of them, but hopefully a lot of them. Of the people who keep coming back and are excited enough about your game and the stories you're telling to keep playing it. Some of them are eventually going to give you some money. And then, of all those players who are giving you money, hopefully some of them will keep giving you more money. A lot of times the vast majority of revenue come from a tiny fraction of players. Again, I am not endorsing the system, but this is the way things are. And so if this is what you're looking at, you can see how a numbers map become important.  Say you're losing people at each step of the funnel, if you can stop the bleeding and slightly increase retention, perhaps you can slightly increase the average amount of money that a paying player gives you.  That’s gonna make you a lot more money.
 
So we need some metrics to test that. For the most part, there are really three high level guiding metrics or classes of metrics that you look at for this funnel.
 

• RETENTION

 
The first is retention, so are people coming back and playing your game? This is typically measured according to what percentage of players are coming back a certain number of days after installing the game.
 
So, day one retention is for everyone who downloaded and installed your game, what percentage of them came back the next day to play it again? Day seven is how many players then logged on seven days later to play the game, etc. You don't usually see this measure beyond day 30 which is also really interesting.
 
So, if long term or short term retention immediately drops after you introduced a new feature that can be a clear sign that you did something wrong.
 
Retention ends up being used as a proxy for fun, because analysts assume if players are coming back day after day, they probably like the game and are having fun. Although I would argue that's a really tricky assumption.  Are they coming back because they're addicted, or they actually enjoy it? To figure out that distinction, analysts typically employ what's often called cohort analysis where instead of just looking at overall retention, they will look at retention among a group of people who start playing on the same day, which makes it easy to look at how things change over time.
 

• REVENUE

 
Next is revenue. There are a million different ways to slice and dice this based on are you talking about revenue per user across your entire user base or just for the people who are paying you? Are you looking across the lifetime of a player or just during a single day, etc. So you end up with these really fun acronyms like ARPU versus ARPA, but money is money.
 

• REACH

 
And the last one is reach.  Reach retention and revenue is what we used to use when I worked at Zynga about a decade ago, in the era of Facebook games.  The reach metric measures how new people are coming into your game at the top of the funnel. And the way that new people come into your game is through virality. So you design things into your game that entice players to bring their friends.
 
That is not how things work in 2020 however. These days, like mobile free to play, which is where most things are, is all about paid user acquisition, primarily through video ads and people spend time crunching these numbers to a flaw. But this is not a thing that game designers worry about anymore. This is like a user acquisition team somewhere else dealing with ads. 
 
HOW DO YOU TRACK THESE THINGS:?
 
So if we have these sort of three guiding metrics, the question then is what do you actually add into your game to track things? And so typically, a product owner on one of these free to play games will add tracking to the games with an eye towards answering specific questions. Like are people playing your story the way you expected them to? Are people playing it at all? Are they getting all the way to the end?
 
You also might have a number that represents the overall health of your game in a sense. The number that we really cared about was the total number of turns played per day by all players across the entire game. So, when you have 25 million daily players across all platforms, that's a very large number. But it was still useful to look at how that number fluctuated either over an entire day, or even by noon. That's a really good sign that, you know, maybe we've shipped out some bad code that's breaking the game or some new feature is actively hurting things. Or perhaps there is a real world event that's affecting things that we need to look into and think about. Like, if you look at stats right now, people are playing way more mobile games than they were a couple months ago, because it turns out, when you're sitting at home with nothing to do, you're going to download a lot of free mobile games.
 
If you know, you really need to get your attention numbers, your revenue numbers up, that is going to influence storytelling and monetization decisions, based on what you know about your audience. 
 
2. HOW MUCH OF THIS IS RELEVANT TO EXPERIMENTAL OR NARRATIVE GAMES? 

If you are working as a narrative designer, or a writer or a game designer or a programmer, you are likely isolated from a lot of this. But it's possible to use some of these same things divorced from the larger context, to get a better sense of how players are interacting with your game and engaging with the stories you're trying to tell in ways that are qualitatively different from what you'd get from doing something like in person play-testing or user feedback sessions or reading whether your community hangs out on discord or their steam reviews, or whatever.
 
We're not looking at individual players. We are really interested in numbers as a way of looking at large groups of people to look at player behaviour in aggregate.
 
A project that I worked on at my day job, for example, which was a little twine game that's essentially a short escape room. So you're in the spooky old house. And he has all a bunch of puzzles and so I built out this integration between twine in a tool called playfab, so that anytime a player clicked on a link, or loaded a new twine passage, it took all of that information about the event and what the player is doing and where they are in the game world. I had access to this data via a sort of Visual Dashboard where I could write complex queries around that data set to see what players were doing.
 
We broadly found gathering these analytics to be incredibly useful for answering a pretty wide set of questions and informing different design problems.
 
Many of you may have used interactive fiction tools that have some sort of automated mechanism for validating that you don't have any impossible states in your game or you don't have any sort of pieces of content that are technically impossible for anyone to get to usually sort of brute forcing their way through the game as an AI.
 
For us, once we had some number of play testers, analytics, were able to serve a similar goal. So we can go through our web interface and run some queries and figure out if there were any twine passages that had zero visits, given the number of users we had, it was pretty likely that this was not actually accessible in the game itself, which was really useful.
 
We ran into a situation where all of our play testers that we watched in person play the game had no trouble with the first of two big puzzle bottlenecks in our game. But then once we had way more users many of the players were not people who traditionally played games and were unfamiliar with the puzzle conventions.  When we ran the numbers we found that many of them were not getting through that bottleneck. So, it was very easy for us to look at the data and say great cool, we need to more aggressively hit that puzzle, which fixed that problem and we had the tools to know that that problem was fixed by looking at the relative visits of the passage before that puzzle in the passage after it.
 
This also then lets us look at nonlinear spaces to find the paths that people are playing.  W
We could see what people had seen versus not seen of a game during a play session. We also could track the order in which rooms were being visited, which led us to make a few changes about the way different puzzles were previously hinted at in different spaces based on incorrect assumptions about which older players would visit rooms.
 
The awareness of that discrepancy between your expectation to player behavior, and actual player behavior is going to make you stronger as a designer.
 
A thing that we did not do, but we really wanted to if you'd had time, was implementing the tell-tale style, actually showing players their choices and context of what other players chose as well. And for me as someone who has some reservations about whether it is ethical to gather this playthrough data from players at all, it helps to be able to concretely, take all this stuff you're gathering and not just use it to inform your own decision making, but to actively give players a gift back that enriches their experience.
 
At the same time the numbers are not the goal. A good pm is going to know when to ignore the numbers and go on intuition.
 
3. WHICH ANALYTICS TOOLS TO USE? 

If you've ever tried to use analytics tools, it can be overwhelming because there's so many options. I think in broad strokes, though, they fit into a couple of buckets. So, if you are working at a large game studio, you will have in house tools, you might have a team of statisticians writing raw SQL queries, that's not really relevant to us. So you'll probably end up grabbing a tool built for web developers just because that's where the audiences for these sorts of tools is. These can be great, but you have to take these tools that were not meant for games and adapt them to games.
 
But, I worry about the ethical considerations of what is happening to your data. If you're using something like Google Analytics, Google is a large tech company that essentially runs by selling user data and ads. You may not even be a paying customer of Google Analytics, so what are they doing with all of this data that they’re collecting from your users.
 
Playfab
Personally, these days I mostly use a tool called play fab, which Microsoft acquired a year or two ago, which I think is great. Because however you might feel about Microsoft as a company, they are not in the business of advertising or user eyeballs or anything like that.
 
Playfab is this gigantic overwhelming game live ops tool.  They basically want to be everything you need in order to run an online game. So large MMOs are using them for everything from matchmaking and party management to voice chat to economy management to cloud saves, and leaderboards and achievements. There's a whole lot in there. But also, crucially, they have a really nice analytics module that works really well because it is a games tool. It understands how to provide analytics for games really well. And because it is this tool that is meant for these super huge games.
 
If you make narrative games, you're probably going to fit well within the free tier instead of having to pay them. At our peak, we had about 180,000 daily active users and we're using playfab for much more stuff like cloud saves on leaderboards, etc. And we're not paying them a penny, which is awesome.
 
There are basically five or six lines of JavaScript you need to copy into your twine game, you will need to paste in a magic playfab ID that you'll get when you sign up. And even though I'm doing automatic tracking of passages, I track twine variables but that's more manual. So if you want to track variables, you need to type in the names of those variables so I know what to look for. And then if you do this with your twine game, again, this is free on GitHub, you can grab it yourself. This is going to give you two different things. The first is it's going to send you this daily email, giving you these high level metrics about who's playing your game. Are they new? Are they coming back? What's the retention? If your small team working on a game and wondering if people even playing it, this can feel really, really good.
 
The other thing that play fab really gives you is an analytics dashboard where all of this data is available. So for that example I gave of a puzzle that not enough people were solving, the way that I was able to tell that was I was able to write this custom query…show me all of the number of passage visits for, you know, the passage before the puzzle in the passage after the puzzle. And we can get really clear visualizations of how many players are reaching each of those relative passages over time.
 
So if you integrate playfab into your game separately you can get all of that, like the API's for just sending data to play fab are really, really simple.
 
I can recommend the general approach of just tracking every unit of content as if it were on its own if you don't have much more specific focused ideas of questions you want to answer, but really, anything works.

Lazer-Walker, Em. 2020. Analytics? In MY Interactive Fiction?! edited by Narrascope 2020. U.S.: YouTube.