Posts Tagged ‘hinterland’
The expectations of festivals
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
This is a very belated thought from the front line of Hinterland, which was Hide&Seek’s contribution to this year’s Forest Fringe in Edinburgh. It’s about the expectations that a city full of festivals can generate in people, and what it’s like to share work that runs counter to them.
Hinterland – a game that turns into a poem, or a game about cities and language, or possibly a poem that you play - was a modest success, I think. We had 227 players in total, of whom 72 made it past Canto 1, and nine hardy, wonderful players made it all the way to the top of Calton Hill and the conclusion of Canto 4.
The relationship between game, poetry and technology, the way it invites the player to just be in a city, look at the people around them and reflect on what a narrow slice of any environment we occupy, bounded by our language and our class and our network, is something I’m very proud of. The players who made it to the end had a really amazing experience. It generated a great look on their faces – shining with achievement, but also having being shown something very beautiful that was right on their doorstep. There’s a wonderful account of the whole experience from a player’s perspective here (warning: minor spoilers!)
So what do I mean by the expectations of festivals? Some snapshots:
- The look of nervousness on a critic’s face upon being told that in order to play our game they had to seek out and speak with strangers in other languages.
- Hearing Ruth Little talk about how cognitive scientists have been saying for a while now that ideas reside in processes, not people – that talent is a product of environment, not individuals. It doesn’t matter whose synapses fire first.
- Being told by a player who reached the end of the game that playing had become like a religious experience for him.
- Mucking in with fellow artists in the last days of the Forest Café, running the queue with Gary, manning the box office with Ira.
- Rohan Gunatillake, at the Festivals as Digital Playgrounds panel, saying that ‘artists need to consider making experiences that are consonant with the lives of the people they are making it for’.
- Hearing a festival-goer describe the experience of seeing five shows in one day as ‘like eating too much food too fast, so you didn’t taste any of it’.
Being in Edinburgh means that you are showing your work amongst an extraordinary plurality of other stuff – the Fringe, the Art Festival, the Book Festival, and the International Festival all happening at the same time.
The thing about almost everything happening in all these festivals is that it confirms to a pretty tight definition of how a cultural experience operates. The word is ‘show‘. You go to a place at a particular time, see something. And given the hectic, carnivalesque super-abundance of shows to see, you probably do this several times every day that you are there.
Sharing a piece of work like Hinterland in this context felt challenging… I sympathise with the difficulties potential players faced in fitting it into their intensely busy schedules, but there was more to it than that – changing your mode of operation from consuming to participating is I think a really difficult thing to do. A frequent note of feedback was the ‘stressful’ nature of the asks the game made of players. Aren’t fighting for hot tickets, rushing to make it to the theatre in time for curtain up, and cramming in extra shows that you feel you really ought to see all forms of festival-induced stress? Just ones that we are inured to, or possibly even ones that we crave?
Having said that, Hinterland worked as well as it did because it was nestled within Forest Fringe. Forest Fringe is the work of Andy Field and Deborah Pearson, who wanted to create a free space for artists to show work that wouldn’t necessarily fit in the confines of the other festivals. It’s run by the artists that they programme, along with a bevy of volunteers. And it all takes place at the Forest Café, which was a ramshackle old place itself run by volunteers, which offered the people of Edinburgh an independent space for art and culture (and falafel and herb teas). This co-operative model set a context in which participation of many kinds could flourish, where a balanced diet of seeing, making and talking was on offer.
And yet… our audiences didn’t leave the other Edinburghs behind when they crossed the threshold of the Forest Café. And it’s too much to ask one venue, one small community, to hold back the tide of passive consumption.
It made me dream of an Edinburgh where Forest Fringe’s vision was the dominant one, and free-to-play open-ended experience in the city was the norm rather than the troubling extension. My instinct is that there would be a wealth of political and social benefits that would follow in the wake of such a shift, as the visions put forth by Kars Alfrink in his recent dConstruct talk elaborate.
That vision is, sadly, further from reality as a result of the Forest Café’s eviction from their home.
Designing Games for Telephones
Monday, October 24th, 2011
Hinterland – a poem that you play – ran for two weeks at the Edinburgh festival. Over four cantos, players would seek out strangers meeting particular criteria (which varied per canto), and get them to help answer a questionnaire. Then, players would phone the Operator, and hand over their answers. The Operator wasn’t a human being, though: it was a piece of software.
I wanted to write a little about the technical design behind the game: how we wrote a game for telephones, and the design considerations that went into it.
Hinterland began in a “scratch” week of prototyping at Battersea Arts Centre in early summer. As well as exploring the concept of the game, the nature of its poetry, and the experience we wanted players to have, we also took a first run at the technology behind it, to see what was possible. This was where I got to understand the material we were working with – in this case, telephony: what was possible, what felt natural, and how we could convey the experience we wanted through it. I wrote code while the rest of the team wrote poetry and design the game.
We quickly came to a simple technical brief for the game: it had to be playable on a simple mobile phone, with nothing more than voice calls and SMS. “Designing for a Nokia 3210” became a mantra. By the end of the week, we had a working prototype: a single Canto, playable beginning to end, with a working Operator and working telephone lines.
Basic Telephony
We’re lucky to exist in a climate where writing smart answerphones for telephone-based games is remarkably easy. Hinterland is made possible by Twilio: an API for “building Voice and SMS applications”. Twilio connects a phoneline to an endpoint on a webserver. When you sign up, you get a number in the US or Canada; you specify a URL on your webserver for Twilio to post data to. And then, every time you receive a call, Twilio POSTs data to that endpoint. If you return an XML file that accords to the TwiML spec, Twilio will follow the instructions contained in that file: speaking text, playing an MP3, asking for voice or numeric input.
That’s enough to make our Operator with.
When a player calls the Operator, the software works out which Canto that player is on, and what question to ask them next. It asks them that question, waits for the answer, and repeats this process until they’ve answered all the questions in the canto.
Hinterland identifies players by their mobile phone numbers, which Twilio passes to us (making maintaining state easy). Initially, we created a new player the moment they dialed our number, but this led to people starting missions when they perhaps hadn’t planned to – if, for instance, they rang the number they saw on the website.
As with so much of the project, we fixed this with human intervention. Because starting the game required visiting Forest Fringe, we’d ask players for their mobile numbers at the venue. When they called the phone number, we’d already determined that they were playing the game. Similarly, they couldn’t proceed to the next canto until they returned to Forest Fringe, where they’d receive a new canto booklet, advance their avatar to the next part of the Hinterland, and finally, be moved onto the next canto in our system by a volunteer. This ensured that the phoneline always behaved in the manner players expected.
Twilio’s phone numbers are all based in the US or Canada – not much good for a primarily British audience. The first version of the game we tried used an 0800 Freephone number forwarding to Twilio. That sounds good on paper, but turns out to very expensive when you’re on a mobile – most mobile contracts don’t include Freephone numbers. For the Edinburgh run, we acquired an Edinburgh phone number from Soho66, which cost next-to-nothing. We had to pay a small VOIP fee for the forwarding to the US, but it meant that players would call a British landline, which made the cost of the call to most of them minimal.
Dealing with responses.
Once we’d got a player’s answers, we had to make a custom canto from them. A few of the answers were multiple choice – specified via pushing a button on the keypad. Most, however, were spoken responses.
When Twilio records speech, it includes the URL for an audio file in the data it POSTs to your server. In the Hinterland admin interface, it was possible to listen to the audio of the player’s answer, and enter a transcription of it. That text transcription appears in a version of the poem that’d appear on the website for the player (and whoever they chose to share the private URL of their page with) to see.
The text transcription enabled us to produce an audio version of the poem. The cantos are designed as performances to be listened to, first and foremost. We’d experimented with various forms of delivery at BAC, and settled on the use of a speech synthesiser for most of the cantos. It wasn’t enough to just put the whole canto into a speech synthesiser, though; that tended to sound disappointing. So Ross provided audio templates of the poem: large multitrack Garageband files, cleverly designed to allow new words to be dropped in, and branching segments to be appropriately muted. We’d synthesise the player’s dialogue, assemble their poem as an MP3, and upload it to our server.
This was a little intensive, and involved a behind-the-scenes team in London working on the audio whilst Edinburgh worked on transcription. The trade-off for using people was nuance: the poems sounded good, and there’s nothing like the good old human ear for tweaking audio until it sounds good. Still, I’m going to keep looking for ways to streamline the audio production process in future runs: the balance of “sounding good” and “returning a file to a player in a good time” was often hard to strike.
Early feedback before Edinburgh from the production team was that a clearer “inbox” of what needed doing would help them a lot, so I created a view of incoming responses grouped by player, indicating exactly how many players were waiting for transcription or upload. It meant the production team only had to watch one page to stay on top of things.
This became the heart of our workflow. Indeed, most of the fine-tuning in the weeks running up to Edinburgh came from understanding the workflow of a distributed production team – split between Edinburgh and London – and what processes would help players understand the game best, whilst ensuring everyone on the production team was clear about what had to happen next for each player, and who was doing what.
Delivering the poem
Finally, we returned the canto to the player via SMS and email. The latter told them their poem was online, and gave them a URL where they could see it as text and listen to it. However, email was a luxury, for players with smartphones: the main purpose of the email was so that players could revisit the experience when they returned home to a computer.
SMS became our primary messaging system: a short text to tell players that their canto was ready, and that they could return to Forest Fringe for the next one. The text gave them a number to call, which would play them their latest canto (again using Twilio). It meant they could get their latest poem as soon as it was ready – ideally, not too long after they’d submitted their answers – and listen to it wherever they were. We used Clickatell for our SMS gateway, which cost about a penny to send a single SMS. There are many SMS gateways, all offering similar services, and my choice came down the simplest one to integrate. Luke Redpath’s Clickatell gem made integrating text messaging into the Ruby application trivial.
SMS also proved useful for getting in touch with players in the field. Audio transcription is hard – especially given some of the questions we were getting players to answer! One afternoon in the run up to launch, I quickly added a way for the Hinterland team to send any player a custom text message, which proved handy on several occasions.
We never really had many problems with the design of the game itself, but we used the feedback and experiences of the early players in Edinburgh to constantly improve it for others. As the Edinburgh run progressed, we added clarity to some dialogue that had proved confusing, and added many more pauses to the dialogue: there were certain points where, as a phone was passed back and forth, players and their interviewees would miss crucial words. With hindsight, I’d have spent longer on the canto editing tools earlier: there was still a bit too much that only I could alter, and spreading the load of the production work would have left me more time to solve more specific problems with code.
The Hinterland web application – powering both the simple public website and the telephony back-end – didn’t gain much major functionality in the weeks between the scratch at BAC and the Edinburgh run. What it did gain was polish: a better understanding of the game’s requirements, of the workflows that made production run smoothly, of the nature of telephony, and the elements of the poem that needed clarifying to players. The project benefited hugely from how quickly we got to an end-to-end working prototype, and it was great to be able to scratch code at the same time as scratching the game design.
Picture by Maria Hägglöf
Denizens of the Hinterland
Monday, August 22nd, 2011
Arriving at the Hinterland
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
This is a blog about the genesis of our poem you can play, Hinterland. For information on the project and how to play, please visit hinterland.hideandseek.net)
With just a week to go before the Hinterland opens up at Forest Fringe in Edinburgh, I wanted to look back briefly on the genesis of the project. The story begins at Hide&Seek’s very first event and my very first game, in 2007 at the BFI delegate’s centre, when it was called the London Poetry Game.
Some principles have run through all three versions of the game: 1. The game requires you to talk to strangers via a specially-created telephone hotline 2. Your reward for taking part is a poem. 3. The game is about cities and the languages spoken within them and 4. The game is not really that much of a game at all.
Looking back, it’s clear that my own insight into this particular form has developed over the four years I’ve been working with it. The way I work with technology (and the people who work with technology), the assumptions I make about people’s willingness to take action as part of the games I design, and my understanding of how (or if) a game can have a political perspective, have all progressed some distance in that time.
Back in 2007, it ran like this: I took some verses of September 1, 1939 by W.H.Auden and translated each line into a different language, and printed the new poem out with the rules on the back. Players had to go out and find bilingual speakers of those languages, and get them to phone in both a reading and an English translation of the line. Those lines were then compiled into a presentation of the poem at the end of the festival, which consisted of three parts: 1. a reading of the poem in the many languages; 2. a reading of the poem in the multiple translations and 3; a reading of the original poem, by me.
Except it didn’t work out that way, of course. Not really knowing what playtesting was, I encountered all my problems in the field. Players weren’t so interested in the task, describing it as ‘a bit stressful’ and ‘difficult to do’, and so we didn’t get anywhere near a complete poem. Also, I was (while running the festival at the same time) my own audio edit guy. We set up a phoneline with that automatically generated .wav files, which I then cut together using an open-source sound editor.
The performance at the end, therefore, consisted of me playing the short audio file I had managed to put together, and then manfully reading a rather long poem to a patient but disengaged audience.
The way I understood the problems with the game were primarily practical and functional – deriving from my assumption that if I could fix the way we communicated the game to players, and fix the way we created the audio file, then the project would work fine. I documented those problems in more detail in a post last year.
In 2010, we were able to fix all those things. We worked with technologist Chris Thorpe to create a dedicated website for the game, poet Ross Sutherland to create a more accessible poem for translation, and producer Sarah Ellis to create robust translations and a community engagement programme. Nick Ryan devised a sound editing process and created an audio realisation of the poem. We were embedded within the 2010 Weekender with a much greater pool of players to draw on. And Ross created a video document of the project which summed it up wonderfully.
Symphony (The London Poetry Game) from Ross Sutherland on Vimeo.
And yet… This smoother, more efficient, more effective execution of the game now yielded a different set of problems. Players still participated in the game more out of enthusiasm for the concept than out of any real sense of fun. And our attentions were turned more closely to the second set of participants in the game – the people who the players seek out in search of translations. What was in it for them?
I have always hoped that the London Poetry Game would ‘say something’ about our multicultural urban lives. That a game which brings speakers of different languages into proximity with one another was by definition a good thing, that it ‘created dialogue’ and ‘opened our ears to the different languages spoken in a single street’ (those two culled from various application texts for the project over the years). But maybe the noble aims were muddied by the framework in which the game operated. An English-speaking creative team, making a game and a poem in English, which gets English -speaking players to act on its behalf, by requiring (forcing) bilingual (‘native’) speakers of other languages to perform limited actions. Maybe there was something a bit colonial about all that…
(I think it’s worth noting how it was only possible to address these higher concerns once the basic problems with execution were fixed. I’d like to revisit this in a future post – maybe collaborative projects have a hierarchy of needs?)
In answering that challenge, I have been fortunate enough to continue the collaboration with Ross and Sarah, and draw the essential understanding and input of Tom Armitage, newly-minted game designer and technologist at Hide&Seek. Through a longer period of development, we’ve had a chance to reflect on the affordances of the hybrid form we have created, to work through (with a residency at BAC) the dramaturgy of the player-stranger dialogues that the game generates, and to examine how a poem could be generated from the actions of players in a more discursive and gamelike way. We’ve thought a lot about how a game for two players where one player speaks more languages than the other creates a very interesting power dynamic. We’ve prototyped, playtested and discussed, and in doing so come up with something that has travelled a very long way from its last iteration.
I don’t want to spoil the game for potential players by telling you what’s in the Hinterland. But I think it’s definitely true to say that there’s more game, more poem and more dialogue in there than there was before. I hope you’ll join us if you’re able…
Hinterland Scratch at BAC
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
Following on from our collaboration on last year’s London Poetry Game, we’re joining forces with Ross Sutherland on a new poetry / game hybrid. Close followers of last year’s project will be pleased to note that we’re bringing even more poetry and even more game. Hinterland is about the space that appears when we speak languages that aren’t our mother tongue. And maybe also a bit about how rubbish so many of us tend to be at speaking languages other than English.
The full shebang is going to debut at this year’s Forest Fringe in Edinburgh, and in preparation for that BAC have generously offered us a week’s residency to try some things out. So, two things to look out for! We’ll be posting up some poetic games for you all to play that week, and at BAC on Friday 17th at 8.30pm there will be an informal sharing of the work we’ve done so far, with an emphasis on the word ‘informal’.
More info and pay-what-you-can tickets available here.