Gaming

America's Army (also known as AA or Army Game Project) is a series of video games and other media developed by the United States Army and released as a global public relations initiative to help with recruitment. America's Army was conceived by Colonel Casey Wardynski and is managed by the U.S. Army's Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at the United States Military Academy.

Wardynski envisioned "using computer game technology to provide the public a virtual Soldier experience that was engaging, informative and entertaining."The PC version 1.0, subtitled Recon, was first released on July 4, 2002. Since then, there have been over 26 versions released, the most recent being America's Army 3. All versions have been developed on the Unreal Engine and use PunkBuster to try to prevent cheating. The game is financed by the U.S. government and distributed by free download.

America's Army has "grown in ways its originators couldn't have imagined". Dozens of government training and simulation applications using the America's Army platform have been developed to train and educate U.S. Army Soldiers. America's Army has also been used to deliver virtual Soldiering experiences to participants at events, such as air shows, amusement parks, and sporting events around the country. The America's Army series has also been expanded to include versions for Xbox and Xbox 360, arcade, and mobile applications published through licensing arrangements.

The game was developed by Col. Wardynski who recognized that a video game might be helpful to the U.S. Army in the strategic communication efforts by providing more information to prospective Soldiers and to help reduce the number of recruits who wash out during the nine weeks of basic training. The effort proved successful as more than 9 million copies have been downloaded. One teenager was quoted saying the game "provides great information. This would probably spark an interest. I don't know how I would have found out so much some other way."



The critical and hazardous nature
of the work for which soldiers are trained requires a “virtually real” environment where mistakes
are not catastrophic. The highly coordinated and cooperative nature of their work requires
a learning environment that builds teams and prepares personnel for highly specific and highly
coordinated missions. The U.S. Army is so convinced of the power and effect of serious games
that it uses its massively multiplayer online game as a recruitment tool.



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Research Poster

Poster should contain:
1. Title
2. Introduction presenting your research question or central proposition
3. A short description of its significance, context and relevance
4. Overview of methodologies used in the design research investigation
5. Description of key design activities, original investigations,
experiments, technical achievements and reflections
6. Overview of the intended design solution
7. References
> Link address to PDF version on Stream
> Poster should be understandable in 10min.
> Only A1 format
> Portrait



Just two posters to get me thinking about composition and aesthetics

For my teams poster we are going to explain the participatory culture with a heavy emphasis on the entertainment industry e.g Music, Games and Movies. We decided to get active participation with the design aesthetic by getting facebook users to submit to us an image that they think best describes the entertainment industry. These images will be collected and transformed into a collage. This information was sent to facebook users online via a group invite, here is the description they received:

Major Project Assignment Thingy

Category:Entertainment & Arts - Online Media

Description:
Hey guys, for my design research paper i have been looking onto the participatory culture and user driven content online. One part of my assignment requires me to create a poster explaining this user interactivity and i would like to create a collage with your collaborative input.

I basically need an image(s) of your favorite aspect of the entertainment industry e.g movies, bands, music, technology, gaming etc. From there ill take your image and hopefully turn it into an amazing piece of informative design. So jump on google or your favorite image search engine, grab an image that you think represents your definition of entertainment and chuck the link onto this page.

Thanks for your time, you guys are the shizz!!!



So far there has been a positive response with many people joining the group but fewer to actively participate by posting a link or image. This maybe because they do not have an incentive to participate, in saying that some facebook users found the group by chance and found it interesting so they joined and began adding images themselves.

Object

The class was asked to bring in there favorite/most desirable object to class, iv decide to take a photo of mine rather than bringing it all the way in. My object is my guitar which is a black G-310 Epiphone SG guitar that i purchased when i was 17 years old from a music shop in Rotorua, a fairly cheap guitar but sounds good on clean.

Human Computation

Folksonomy to ESP Games (games with a purpose)

The ESP game is an idea in computer science for addressing the problem of creating difficult metadata,
the idea behind the game is to use computational power of humans to preform a task that computers can not do
(image recognition) by packing the task into a game.










http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=google+tech+talks#

Social Tags

Folksonomy

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy is a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy.
Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation.

Social Bookmarking is a method for internet users to share, organize, search and manage bookmarks online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves are not shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.
Attempts have been made to characterize folksonomy in social tagging system as emergent externalization of knowledge structures contributed by multiple users. Models of collaborative tagging have been developed to characterize how knowledge structures could arise and be useful to other users, even when there is a lack of top-down mediation (which is believed to be an important feature because they do not need laborious explicit representations as in semantic web). In particular, cognitive models of collaborative tagging can highlight how differences in internal knowledge structures of multiple users can lead to different emergent properties in the folksonomy of a social tagging system.

- Advantages

All of the classifications of internet resources are done by human beings, who understand the content of the resouce as opposes to software, which use algorithmic attempts to determine the meaning of the resource. Also people can find pages that have not yet been found or indexed by a web spider.

Exploiting Social Tags

For Music Information Retrieval
- Expanding the tag/ labeling coverage
- using tags for discovery
- improving the quality of tags



http://www.slideshare.net/plamere/social-tags-and-music-information-retrieval-part-i-presentation

"Music is created by humans for other humans, and humans
can bring a tremendous amount of contextual knowledge to
bear on anything they do; in fact, they can’t avoid it, and
they’re rarely conscious of it.
But computers can never bring much contextual knowledge to
bear, often none at all, and never without being specifically
programmed to do so. Therefore doing almost anything with
music by computers is very difficult; many problems are
essentially intractable "(Byrd, 2008).

Byrd, D. (2008). Organization and search of musical
information. Syllabus for a course at http://informatics.
indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/I545Site-Spring08/Syllabus
I545.html

Lecture Notes

Design Context

"Design is a goal-oriented process to solve problems, meet needs, improve situations, or create something new or useful..."
(Friedman 2005)

-Create awareness of a problem, issue or an opinion

- For users needs, problem solving, Developing own vision, independent thinking and to explore own signature


The focus of design research is qualitative

-Critical thinking
-Meanings, feelings and dreams
-Contextual research/design


Research Summary + Abstract

What/Why = Contextual Research = Background Argument

How = Studio Research + Design Studio

* What is the Communication issue and Context?

* Why is it important?

* Who is your audience?

* How will you accomplish this and what is your design direction

* What visual strategies will you use?
e.g Semiotics, Rhetoric , Aesthetic, Techniques and Phenomenology


Design as an agent in a system of meaning making communications
that are all ( Investigated, Discussed, Synthesized and Articulated) = Research Summary

Abstract

Initially advertising began purely as an informative communication for the public in which products were differentiated by their specific features. Over time companies started to use more influential methods of persuasion to sell their products, such as celebrity endorsements and stretching the truth to not only sell goods, but to inform the consumer of how this product could benefit their lifestyle.

In later years, advertising developed into more than a product focused communication tool and began to exploit the psychological thoughts of consumers by creating an experience that they can become a part of. Thus altering the consumer’s perceived nature of the product and through association, how they are viewed by others.

Currently consumers are responding to these tactics with the emergence of the movement known as the participatory culture. Many brands and corporations have responded back by embracing consumer input to come across as more trustworthy.

The participatory culture is the active communication, co-operation and circulation of ideas between the masses, this allowing the public to act not only as consumers but also as producers and contributors. This culture has emerged from the recent advances of technologies mainly personal computers and the Internet, the absorption of this technology has created opportunities for the average consumer to create, archive, appropriate and publish media content usually through the Internet.

This leads us to our research question, with participatory culture emerging into mainstream media, how can the users input; interact, influence and contribute towards the design process?

This will be investigated by finding examples of ways that the participatory culture is impacting on different areas of design. We will explore how participatory culture can be used, adapted and applied to various platforms.

Brainstorming, Random Thoughts and Links

Entertainment Industry
Music / Movie / Gaming

- How authentic can a product be if its advertised?
- Manipulation by audience user
- Live process and development becoming interesting for viewer and promotes the product
- Authenticity Vs Stealth advertising
- Adaptive Design (Consumer have become cynical of the products advertised to them and with adaptive designs the consumer has a creative role making the process personalized)


Process---Product---Advert(all become linked together)

* Advertising for traveling to a exact location ( Not a typical tourist location, with landmarks)
* The creation of thoughts and the self conscious
* Advertising movie trailers / Movies advertising products (gaining feedback for the audience before the movies are made with the trailers and redeveloping the movie concept according to the received feedback

- Metadata

Metadata is loosely defined as data about data. Though this definition is easy to remember, it is not very precise. The strength of this definition is in recognizing that metadata is data. As such, metadata can be stored and managed in a database, often called a registry or repository. However, it is impossible to identify metadata just by looking at it. We don't know when data is metadata or just data.

Metadata is a concept that applies mainly to electronically archived data and is used to describe the
definition, structure, administration of data files with all contents in context to ease the use of the captured and archived data for further use. Web pages often include metadata in the form of meta tags. Description and keywords meta tags are commonly used to describe the Web page's content. Most search engines use this data when adding pages to their search index.

- User Inclusive Design (Chris Anderson, 2009)
- Ubiquitous Design



- Authenticity of the entertainment industry?
- Brands Manipulation Techniques, concerns about how they are perceived and construct their own identities
- there is a disconnect between user, company and product (lack of interaction and intimacy)

Transmedia storytelling

Transmedia storytelling

In Transmedia storytelling, content becomes invasive and permeates fully the audience's lifestyle. A transmedia project develops storytelling across multiple forms of media in order to have different "entry points" in the story; entry-points with a unique and independent lifespan but with a definite role in the big narrative scheme. One of the first documented uses of the term was by Marsha Kinder in her 1993 book "Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". She called them “commercial transmedia superstructures”, and goes on to say “transmedia intertextuality works to position consumers as powerful players while disavowing commercial manipulation."

These two videos explain the ideologies behind Transmedia quite well

The Power Of Transmedia from Starlight Runner Entertainment on
Vimeo.

Transmedia Examples

Journey of Jin
"Journey of Jin" is a transmedial play experience centered on mobile media, location-based entertainment, a comic book, and other web-based media. A creation of Stephen Dinehart, this simple transmedia system is intended to invite users into a virtual world with multiple points of entry. Journey of Jin offers a grand adventure in bite size consumables. Unlike properties like Star Wars, He-Man, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which lend themselves to transmedia, JOJ was created with the intention of being transmedia universe, and not proliferated into other media formats for simply for merchandising purposes but for enriching the storytelling.

The Matrix
In Convergence Culture Jenkins cites the Matrix as an example of transmedia storytelling. Jenkins explains that, "key bits of information are conveyed through three live action films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories, and several video games. There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the Matrix universe."

Batman Begins and the Dark Knight
Another example that Jenkins cites is from the 2005 movie Batman Begins. DC Comics published comic books before the release of the movie to give further background information for the movie; most of the background information was to give further details about Bruce Wayne's past. This example shows how Warner Brothers, owner of DC Comics, used multimedia sources to convey information about a single story.

Get Serious:Transmedia Branding from experience freak on Vimeo.

Sorority Forever
In 2008, Warner Brothers partnered with Big Fantastic to create Sorority Forever, the first original web series for The WB. In addition to the episodes, a fully interactive metaverse was created and produced to provide an immersive, transmedia experience, with almost limitless entry points into the story. Viewers could interact with characters in real time using MySpace, Twitter, Stickam, and other internet platforms, as well as discover additional story and character elements.

Other Examples include: Heroes, Pokemon, Cloverfield and Marvel Comics Spiderman

Heroes Transmedia Storytelling Extensions from Branded Evolution on Vimeo.

Participatory Culture

So i have decide to research the Participatory Culture and the sub topics that surround this movement as this is a current trend that is happening all around us as consumers, but also as designers we must understand and be aware of this as a potential projective technique to further develop our concepts and ideas.

Participatory culture is a neologism in reference of, but opposite to a Consumer culture — in other words a culture in which private persons (the public) do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media. Recent advances in technologies (mostly personal computers and the Internet) have enabled private persons to create and publish such media, usually through the Internet. This new culture as it relates to the internet has been described as Web 2.0.

The relationship between Web 2.0 tools and participatory culture is more than just material, however. As the mindsets and skillsets of participatory practices have been increasingly taken up, people are increasingly likely to exploit new tools and technology in 2.0 ways. One example is the use of cellphone technology to engage "smart mobs" for political change worldwide. In countries where cellphone usage exceeds use of any other form of digital technology, passing information via mobile phone has helped bring about significant political and social change. Notable examples include the so-called "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, the overthrow of Philippine President Joseph Estrada, and regular political protests worldwide




User Participation & Projective Techniques

what?

interpretation of target group audience
- Uncover: hidden feelings, emotions, associations
- Tap into: fantasies, [day]dreams, emotions
- Articulate: thinking, visualising, impressions
- Enable: associative thinking and processes
Projective techniques is often used in ‘Motivation Research’

why?

qualitative: helps to define peoples tastes, opninions, dislikes, preferences etc.
it supports interviews and focus-groups

1. use the set up of an interview/focusgroup
2. chose technique:
Associations
Construction
Projective Questioning
Role Playing
Completion
Expressive Techniques(drawing when communicating with children)
Moodboards/collage
Metaphors
3. describe why you chose a certain technique
4. describe usage of technique
5. analyse and conclude
6. adjust design

Alternative Narrative

Initial Thoughts

-Social Communication Trends

-Web 3.0/Intelligent Web
Web 2.0 is about social networking and mass collaboration with the lines blurring between content, creator and user.
whereas web 3.0 is based on intelligent web applications using:
- Natural language processing
- Machine Based learning and reasoning
- Intelligent applications
The goal is to tailor online searching and request specifically to users preference and needs. Although the intelligent web sounds similar to artificial intelligence its not quite the same.


-New Marketing Techniues
-Dominant / Residual / Emergent
-Proximity or Target Audience

- Adaptive Design/ Open Source
- Unserviced/ Self Service
- Two way communication (Consumer - Producer)
- Avatar's / Second Life
- Tangible Personalization
- Organic Branding
- Emotionology
- Relationship of user and object
- Non Conventional Advertising

Introduction

VCD Research and Development is a pivotal paper in the Bachelor of Design with Honours (BDes Hons)
study. This paper focuses on establishing the skills and processes to move forward to a design
completion in the paper 222.454 VCD Research Project in semester 2. Completion of this paper will position
to produce your final and probably most significant work of your degree.
Design practice is always underpinned by research. This paper requires development of a topic which can be
addressed through design activity. The written components in this paper guide the use of appropriate
methods to investigate a topic through analysis, synthesis and reflection resulting in a design direction or
response. The written components and creative work are conducted at the same time as each informs the
other.

Aim

The aim of this paper is to equip you with the necessary skills to conduct research and to present this study
in a scholarly format. Individual aims include:
‣ To develop ability to investigate a topic in both written and visual form
‣ To develop ability to collate, analyse, and evaluate material associated with a topic
‣ To present research in a coherent and concise manner
‣ To form a design proposal or brief that will enable further execution as a design production project.