This week was a long one for the team, we went back and forth on flushing out the concepts further to include key features, going back to the drawing board as well as trying to move forward with the technical prototype of one of the concepts. We also met with the clients a couple of times this week and picked up an idea that we will be working on for the rest of the project. All that in due time.
Networking Concept
This concept came forth from our meeting with Emily and Ariel in New York and was kind of a modified version of the Friends game concept that the team had pitched. At the core of any conference, there is networking and often a lot of people face issues starting conversations with strangers. This was the core problem that this concept was trying to solve. The way that the game would work is by tapping into some interesting trivia about individuals and show their information on the big screen in the hallway. Technology around the concept was using RFID tags to identify each individual and track their location during the conference. This way when they connect with someone they gain more space on the large screen and more people can see them. They would remain visible on the screen only when they are interacting with others in hallways in between sessions and conferences. The time they leave the hallway their information would disappear as well. But to reward the players that interact the most, a part of the screen would be dedicated to showing a leader board as well which would show persistent information about people who networked and played the game the most. The idea was the with some snippets of information available about people in the space, this would give others some conversation starters and help in forming better relationships. The presentation on this concept can be found here.
Boundaries Concept
Based on our past discussion with our clients and as Emily recently suggested as well, this concept can be a really powerful tool. Only thing lacking from this concept was a strong direct social change that associated with this concept. The team internally brainstormed on a lot of social causes and Emily guided us with finding potential social issues as well. Few of these included gun violence, excessive use of technology disrupting real relationships, use of violence in games, child abuse, labor movement and many more. Few of these did not feel a best fit with the game mechanic where as others were a bit hard to communicate. The team decided on using gun violence as a social cause where the expansion in the game by singing low pitch people expand their territory and with high pitch singing they acquire more guns and weapon power which in turn would be used to capture other territories. The ending was something that was still open to question as this would mean having to negate the impact of buying weapons in the first place.
Final Call
Today we had another call with our client, Emily and after a lot of discussions and back and forth among the team final decision was to go with the Boundaries concept. Yay! This concept has been something that the team is really excited about since the game mechanic of singing in the phone and making each individuals voice heard is really powerful concept. The game mechanic as far as we know as not been used in the past for such a scale of a project and will be really interesting to tackle the challenges that come along the way.
Starting next week the team goes full on board with implementation of a prototype and getting a playable version up and running as soon as possible.
That’s it from Week 6, see you all next week. Have a nice weekend.
Mayank Grover