Mihesuah points out the complications of our roles: “Native women academic activist focused on tribal issues? Native woman academic who writes about topics unrelated to tribal reality? Native woman academic who writes about Natives but uses theory and methodologies approved by white scholars? Native woman scholar facing stress and frustration for speaking out and not being accepted by those who subscribe to the status quo?” (2003, p. 22).

I find myself in the category of being a Native woman academic struggling to adapt theory and methodologies from non-Native scholars. While qualitative methods and methodologies have some room for cultural sensitivity, there’s no denying the uniqueness to certain factors of my research. For example, the research is intended primarily for an indigenous audience, not an academic audience. Even further, I know there will be a time when I receive knowledge that cannot and will not be included in my dissertation out of respect for tradition. That’s definitely not easy to explain to a non-Native committee. “Trust me, the data is there, I just can’t share it!”

I feel fortunate that SFU’s Interactive Arts & Technology program is flexible enough to allow me space in regards to how the data is used, since “tribes need us to utilize data we amass in political, economic, social, and educational spheres, but many universities do not support these activist interests,” (Mihesuah, 2003, p. 21).

My research poses “What is the process of indigenous traditional oral storytelling?” in the hopes of coming up with design parameters for creating interactive technology that provides an authentic traditional experience as close to the “real thing” as possible. I’m motivated by preserving and revitalizing our culture, which is something that can hardly be quantified over a few months or years, so the main emphasis remains on what can be interpreted as data to the larger academic system. Even so, this motivation is an important factor in my research, since it provides context for why I’m doing what I’m doing and who agrees to essentially become data.

It’s a strange concept for me–becoming data–and one I’m still not comfortable with. I’m still coming to terms with what it means to be mixed blood engaging in research with (hopefully seen as “with” instead of “of”) other Natives. But whenever I begin to question myself, I have Mihesuah to remember: “Scholar-activists need to write about our concerns, and the most powerful way to express ourselves is through our writings. Writing is a way to empower us, to state that we are not victims and that we are attempting to find answers and to solve problems,” (2003, p. 23).

Mihesuah, D. A. (2003). In the trenches of academia. In Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, empowerment, activism (pp. 21-38). Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press.

Types of Tests
Self-testing: play through and start a notebook to record feedback
Playtesting with confidants: Write down observations, ask open-ended non-leading questions
Playtesting with strangers: (Better because they have nothing to gain or lose)
Ideal playtesters (target audience): What are your hobbies? Why did you respond to the bulletin? How often do you play and/or buy this type of game?

Playtesting Session
Introduction (2-3 minutes)
Warm-up discussion (5 minutes)
Play Session (15-20 minutes)
Discussion of game experience (15-20 minutes)

• Overall, what were your thoughts about the game?
• What were your thoughts about the game play?
• Were you able to learn how to play quickly?
• What is the objective of the game?
• How would you describe this game to someone who has never played it before? What would you tell them?
• Now that you have had a chance to play the game, is there any information that would have been useful to you before starting?
• Is there anything that you did not like about the game? If so, what?
• Was anything confusing? Please take me through what you found to be confusing.

Playtesting Methods
One-on-one testing
Group testing
Feedback forms
Interview
Open discussion
Data hooks (player movement and actions)

Overall, it’s better to use several methods for the purpose of data triangulation, which is what I intend to do. I’ll likely combine open interview and observation. Feedback forms and written responses really aren’t useful in the context of indigenous oral communication.

Since my work is culturally based, I see myself following the track of activist game design within serious games based on my motivations of self-representation as mixed blood (Irish, Anishinaabe, Metis). However, as far as the bullet point categories of serious games go (health, education, training), my work doesn’t fall inside those areas. I can see opportunities in First Nations communities for health games, particularly related to big topics like diabetes or the importance of mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional health. Training games lean too much towards simulation for me but people like Garry Oker (Doig First Nation) could make use of that field for training on-reserve resource management. Educational games as a whole for me are distinguished by their main audience–youth. In a way, it’s not useful for me to term a project as an “educational game” since I feel that all games are educational.

Having said that, what I’ve found is that serious games is the current hot spot (casual games are soooo old, gawd) for the money-making buzz. What government units can we attach ourselves to?! Where can we get funding for a non-profit world-saving game?! Certainly, it’s easy at the forefront to say, “I’m making a health game to help this community,” but at the end of it all, we need to look back at the iterative game design process and ensure we’re making good, fun games with strong game mechanics and hopefully even new innovations in mechanics.

Although the design phase of Techno Medicine Wheel is over and I’ve had to move on to focus on my dissertation research, I’d like to continue work in ARGs for social change with a First Nations take in the future. I feel that ARGs are a fascinating form of viral marketing mixed with play that can be used for non-profit purposes.

The “wtf was that?”: Think Blair Witch Project. Something is audio taped, video taped, or photographed, which is claimed to be real. The “alternate reality” is in manipulating imagery/audio to make us question what we “know.”

401 (http://401wtf.wikispaces.com/) – Ashton Kutcher appeared in the MTV show with signs with messages that led to a website with a very bizarre video hidden in the text.

The “message from the future”: A message is found which unravels a story jumping from one media to another.

The Beast (http://www.seanstewart.org/interactive/args/) – Made as an extension of the AI movie, a web site from the future leads to another leads to another leads to another, revealing a sorted tale of robots accused of murder and robot rights.

ilovebees (http://www.ilovebees.com/) – Made as an advertisement of the video game Halo, a message popped up on a website which led to audio recordings, puzzles that revealed GPS locations of phone booths where more messages could be received, all sent from a future/different reality.

The “imagined future”: There’s a different future imagined and coped with.

World Without Oil (http://worldwithoutoil.org/) – What if we ran out of oil? This one is put together by Jane McGonigal, who also worked on ilovebees. She’s looking at using ARGs for social change.

Year 0 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_%28alternate_reality_game%29) – Follows up from the NIN CD and may be turned into a movie, storage devices with music files are left in bathrooms at concert locations and other destinations, revealing a story about a dystopian future.

The “mystery in the present”: Something different is happening around people, and although fictional, made to be “real,” thus making it an alternate reality within our timespace.

Last Call Poker – Made to advertise the video game GUN, the site was a free poker site which people gave personal phone numbers to. Automatic calls with odd messages (like someone in a fire accidentally patching in to your phone and calling for help) about mysterious deaths led to the story of a gun, from the game GUN, wild west era, which was bad luck in our present time. They met at graveyards late at night (illegally, ooo) to play live poker games.

(Can’t remember) – There was another one I can’t remember the name of now that was actually meant to promote a new car. There was a website with a mistaken login that led to messages about a party, which was really held. People could join up and go to future real live events held by other groups but they had people in the audience passing out secret booklets to those that wore certain symbols I believe.

Katherine Isbister’s Believable Characters is an extremely helpful and in-depth text on how to design characters that elicit immersive play. But here’s Isbister’s stance: you don’t necessarily need human-level AI for human-level interaction. Instead of focusing on advancing technologies, she emphasizes learning how to leverage human nature for interactive experiences. Ultimately, character responses should serve as feedback to the player about their status in the play. With this in mind, every interaction has a clear purpose.

The Game Empathy blog features a break down of empathy-related research in games (and game characters) that’s being built on by Isbister and other researchers. The hope is to eventually have a taxonomy of helpful techniques for eliciting empathy in games, with special attention paid to cultural interpretations. This is most relevant to my work, since I’m often working with cultural content that may be received and interacted with in a different way depending on the players. I haven’t had a chance to test this, but I do wonder–how would a Native character be perceived by Native players compared to non-Native players? How does the band/tribe/nation affiliation of the character influence the reception in terms of empathy (and interest)?

If only I had a finished prototype to be able to explore this as a related issue in Indigenous game design! I have decided to initiate my own project, which should start paper prototyping in April. I wouldn’t want to overlook making believable characters in the name of only focusing on identifying an Indigenous game design methodology, so looking at interdisciplinary work in character design is essential. So far, I’m leaning mostly towards Isbister’s work rather than trying to develop a new system of interaction.

This structure won’t work for Indigenous games, since it calls out a structure of interaction and story that’s inherently different than Indigenous storytelling. Although I am in no way able to wrap my mind around AI and its possibilities, I do feel that we aren’t even close to truly emergent AI, and thus every system has a structure it follows and calls on pre-created content. I feel my place as a writer is in making the content of a game as rich and involving as possible given the medium. Indigenous storytelling doesn’t follow a branching method either though.

I hope to find a unique way of structuring a game based on purely Indigenous models of storytelling. Here, the concept of drama is dropped. Rather, stories are fragmented, self-growing and continuing, learned by repeated tellings, and experienced as collective knowledge to enrich history and life skills intrinsically connected to belief. Stories are healing and guiding. They have taste and sound and color, and to many peoples, they cross from landscapes into dreamscapes. Because of this, I feel that Indigenous thought on story patterns most closely resonates with the natural properties of the 3D virtual medium. Games add a layer of rules and guidelines, goals and destinations, over the experience of fragmented stories.

Ultimately, the key is to remember that interactive narrative/drama/storytelling is not itself a game, and that games have unique properties. While aspects of this interaction can be used in a game to create more depth in character believability and driving the game goals forward, I am interested in embedding story and culture in a way that doesn’t struggle with the medium, but rather grows from it. There shouldn’t be one ideal of how much code, art, music, or content go into a game, but rather acknowledge a continuum, much like the Indigenous continuum of time and space with no clear rules.

• Magy Seif El-Nasr. Interaction, Narrative, and Drama Creating an Adaptive Interactive Narrative using Performance Arts Theories. Interaction Studies, Vol 8, No. 2, 2007.

• Mateas, M. and A. Stern (2002). Architecture, Authorial Idioms and early Observations of the Interactive Drama Facade. CMU-CS-02-198. Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Mellon University.

• Szilas, N.: IDTension: A Narrative Engine for Interactive Drama. Proceedings of the Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE) Conference (2003) 187-203

• Cavazza, Aylett, Dautenhahn, et. Al. Interactive Storytelling in Virtual Environments: Building the Holodeck, Proceedings of VSMM, 2000

Brenda Laurel’s compilation in Design Methods gives several perspectives on possible design methods, which I’m starting to see as tools and frameworks of research.

Christopher Ireland, in “Qualitative Methods: From Boring to Brilliant,” breaks down numerous possibilities:

Focus groups: traditional, mini focus group, 1-on-1 interviews, dyads, super groups, triads, party groups, online discussion groups

Ethnography: field, digital, photo, ethnofuturism, “real world” enactments, personas

Participatory: development panel, in-home placement

To his Participatory section, I’d add workshops, where community members (or in an industry situation, the target audience) are brought together for participating in the design process during interactive hands-on workshops with prototyping materials relevant to the concept of the project.

Since my research is encapsulated in case studies to derive a holistic viewpoint on the projects, I believe I will employ almost all of these methods, except for ethnography in great depth. I am hesitant to fall into traps of “researcher” and “researched subject.” Ethnographies of our players may be helpful, done in field, digital, and photo form, but otherwise these strategies are too prone to creating a hierarchy. Tim Plowman references Geertz in “Ethnography and Critical Design Practice,” and although Geertz was a colorful and engaging writer, that was really the trick of his research. He also creates a story of “emerging” research although of course went there with an intent of analyzing a culture through its play practices with cockfighting. Further, he entirely ignores gender issues although his wife was mentioned in the start of his story. Where’s her paper?

Researchers all have bias, regardless of how they present the situation. I am very much in support of Action Research, and realize then that I do have a bias that needs to be recognized throughout the case studies.

Overall, the case studies will each follow the story of the process of Inception of Idea, Prototyping, Production, and Validation/Playtesting. This is heavily rooted in iterative design, as described in Eric Zimmerman’ “Play as Research.” Design, test, analyze, repeat. As much as I am researcher and participant, I am also designer and player. It creates an interesting parallel to track during research and design.

Ultimately, one possible outcome of this research is exploring a uniquely Indigenous design method that becomes visible during the process of designing and developing games with Indigenous peoples. I plan to combine methods such as these with methodologies in Decolonizing Methodologies.

So here’s what I remember about playing it when it first came out. “OMG I CAN RUN UP THE WALL!” It’s obvious where games like Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted get their dynamic focus on new moves from, since Sands of Time really serves as a legacy to introducing more interaction with the space around you. It helps to think of the game as a platformer, even though the pretty graphics can be deceiving. I used to ride an exercise bike while playing games (yeah, I would still do that if I had the room in my tiny attic suite for it), and Prince of Persia was one of those games I absolutely couldn’t play while biking. It was way too disorienting to try to wall climb while moving myself. FPS, sure, casual handheld games, sure. Prince of Persia takes concentration.

Taking another look at this game years later, it really stands out for me how classic it is. The “controlling of time” mechanic was implemented to give new gameplay and something new from the typical die/restart/save/restart/save/restart rotation. Very clever, and improved on now. Refer to a past post on the Sand of Time‘s creative director’s perspectives on this mechanic!

It would have been particularly important for Deus Ex to use this systemic global setting method, given all of the different kinds of gameplay they attempt to tackle. Warren Spector put it well in an E3 interview before Thief: Deadly Shadows’ launch by calling Deus Ex a Swiss army knife and Thief a scalpel. How diplomatic! The only issue I really have here is that Thief‘s claim to fame is its stealthing mechanics, sometimes optional, and too much gloating on being “the stealth game” makes me go–hey, hey, now, don’t forget Metal Gear Solid. Deadly Shadows, built on the same technology used for Deus Ex: Invisible War, doesn’t cut it for me in terms of smoothness for a stealth game, but this is not to say the game is not enjoyable. Maybe it’s just hard for me to switch from current games like Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed back to Deadly Shadows because I keep thinking, “Woah, squarey.”

Thankfully, the game does redeem itself in its use of lighting in the form of shadows (I’d hope so!) and time put into A.I. But there’s just something missing in the overall look and feel of the game. So what happened? A rather pointed interview with Deadly Shadows designer Randy Smith asked just that. Here’s where we go back to his good friend Harvey Smith, who advocates for global object properties and enabling emergent gameplay. Unfortunately, the Deadly Shadows team just wasn’t organized enough to really meet the deadlines they needed to. This is also alluded to in Warren Spector’s interview where he points out that the optional third person view was added quite last minute after the team convinced him to drop more money into it. For me, this was an added bonus and saved a lot of the gameplay for me, since I always prefer third person to first person. I often feel too trapped in a certain viewpoint in first person modes. Side-scrollers and god view games like Diablo were really what made me a gamer, so I always feel more comfortable there.

To end on another positive note, the sound depth in Deadly Shadows is a prelude to games like Halo 3 now. Bungie uses a test level covered in different swatches of terrain tiles to test out anything from walking to bullets hitting the ground to rocks that break off a surface also hitting the ground to explosions and so on. Directional audio is even further improved on in Next Gen games. It really matters where you face and how far you are from the origination of the sound. All of these “invisible” elements really enrich games, and I only see them vastly improving the further technology comes.

Ah yes, I am sorry to have deserted you WoW. But you got to be too abusive, and I feel myself now coming back to you anticipating more abuse but feeling like I deserve it for leaving you.