How to Prepare for Location-Sensitive Mobile Training Sessions
(This section includes all of the Web sites we recommended using in this game)
1. Shoot photos and video to be used to in the game
Dave decided that since we were going to be tracking an escaped moose in the hotel, naturally the hotel would call in someone to deal with such a pest. He had recently watched the sequence in “Ghostbusters” where the trio destroy a ballroom, and thus the “Mooseinator” was born – a more than slightly deranged guy who is prone to quoting Ahab in his pursuit of ungainly quadrupeds. (Hey, when you create a game like this, you get to make up the story.)
Using the free online tools listed here, Dave was able use his iPhone 3Gs to shoot video of the 'moose' (okay, it was only 6 inches tall) racing down the hallway of the hotel and attacking a member of the hotel staff. (Don't worry: she was happy to play along and the moose was not harmed during filming.)
2. Set up a Fictitious Facebook Account (www.Facebook.com)
Establishing a fake Facebook page is pretty easy. Just open up a new Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail account, and then sign up for a Facebook page using that account as your new user. One caution: when Dave tried to open up a Facebook page from the Yahoo mail account of moose.killa@yahoo.com, he was stopped by some kind of a bot (probably guarding against violent teen sociopaths cyber-bullying each other) that apparently objected to the “killa” part of the new identity.
The Moosinator identity was going to serve as that most valuable of tools -- an NPC (non-player character) -- for the Dungeon Master (in D&D speak). It's always helps your narrative if you include a surly tavern keeper or wounded ogre to serve as a bottomless well of information about the quest. We planned to use the Moosinator profile to issue cryptic updates from time to time, if the journos seemed to be going off on a tangent, or losing sight of the next stage they needed to hit.
We had originally planned to have a couple dozen characters in the game, either adding information, or – just as valuable from a training standpoint – throwing out red herrings and disinformation, the way that crowdsourcing happens in real-world situations. Part of our training session makes it clear that simply repeating Tweets or Facebook updates without fact-checking has proven to be a dangerous policy. But again – bandwidth and connectivity problems convinced us that this would make the game too complex to be completed in only 30 minutes. If you have more time, a better Internet connection, and a couple more people to manage the game, you could make this fun for a much larger group and drag it out for hours or even days.
3. Establish a Twitter account (www.Twitter.com)
This was done to flesh out the characters, and give them a more realistic “voice” in the game. It also served to help people get used to monitoring Twitter, which proved a great way to communicate during the game, too.
We used the same moose.killa@yahoo.com email address to open the Twitter account, and Dave wrote a couple of Tweets to send out once the game got going. It's good to prepare as much of this stuff in advance as possible. Some things, like the Facebook account, we set up with clues in advance (but we didn't send out the Facebook info until the middle of the game) But Janine had to send the Tweets out after the game started, to add the feeling that events were transpiring in real time, so the players could feel like they were on the scene of a actual news event.
Again because of our time constraints, we didn't do as much with Twitter as we could have; but recent history shows how this is one of the most significant advances in how the face of news is changing. Not only are the reporters on the scene communicating directly with their readers, but the readers are able to ask questions that either the reporters or the others in the virtual “room” (as defined by hashtags or other technologies) can respond to. We were hoping to lead the players into what seemed like a blind alley, only to allow the conversations taking place among the players and characters lead them back to the trail.
4. Establish YouTube and Flickr accounts (YouTube.com and Flickr.com)
We wanted to include video as well as photos in the game because multimedia provides some of the greatest opportunities (and challenges) on the mobile deck. The most recent stat – that 25% of Americans watched a video in the last month on their phones – means that mobile video is arriving. And you can do a lot these days with low-cost multimedia tools.
Dave used the aforementioned iPhone 3Gs to shoot video and the Flickr Uploadr utility to upload, tag and caption it. You can also easily upload videos to YouTube and then link to them or embed them in a Web page or blog post. Most smartphones will play YouTube videos; the generation of phones arriving in stores in 2010 will have even more video capabilities included. There is just too much demand for this functionality on the part of users (particularly teens) for hardware manufacturers to ignore this.
In your own version of this game, think about how to include a short video clip to enrich the user experience – if your theme allows you to come up with a subject like a drunken moose on a rampage, it's an easy way to add a couple of cheap laughs.
5. Shoot video on location to be used in the game.
Due to the aforementioned bandwidth considerations, we drastically shortened and simplified my use of video in this scavenger hunt. We had also used new geo-tagging functionalities while shooting the video (check out Corey Haik’s excellent ONA session for more on tools) in the hopes of leveraging GPS-enabled phones. Sadly, we again had to jettison this concept, because cellphone reception in the hotel proved spotty, and the spaces we were working in were vertical as well as horizontal. A game set over an entire day in a spread-out space like a music festival or a county fair or an event like SxSW would be a perfect venue to use this kind of technology.
Adding video that’s shot in the locations that you’re leading the characters through makes the game more immersive, more of an Alternative-Reality Game. The more you can make the players feel that they’re just on the heels of the main characters in this kind of a hunt, the more engaged and inspired they will be. We’re firm believers in impact over slickness – in fact, we’ve observed that a certain amount of crudity in viral marketing campaigns gives them the ring of authenticity. As noted above, too much post-production sheen on a campaign makes the players feel “like they’re on rails” and being manipulated.
If time allows, you should definitely ask participants to shoot and upload video from their phones. If you are dealing with a late-adopter player base, who haven’t sprung for the latest video-enabled phones, this may be best offered as a 'bonus' step for advanced players.
6. Establish a place for the players to publish their responses (Posterous.com makes it easy to post anything from a mobile phone)
This step really saved my arse.
If you ask players to post to a site like Posterous.com during the game, your team can get real-time snapshots of the progress of your players. If we were to do this in a larger setting, we would have had “editors” monitoring the submissions of the teams of “reporters” in the field, to train managers what it’s like to be trying to separate the wheat from the UGC chaff during a meltdown-level news event, while still maintaining the presence of mind to coordinate the newsgathering efforts of your field team.
But if you have limited time and you don't have your own mobile-friendly web site, Posterous.com is an easy place to 'publish' all of your reporters’ work.
Another advantage of using services like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Posterous: one of the points that we tried to make during the PowerPoint and Q&A sections of our training session was that there are an almost infinite variety of combinations of screen resolution, color depth, video compression, etc., on the various mobile decks. You can either try to sort all that out by yourself – and here Dave asked if anyone in the audience had ever tried to edit video that had been submitted on DVD, and then re-compress it to appear on the web (audible moans of agony) – or you can use one of these great, free, social media sites and offload these tasks on someone who’s already baked their brains trying to come up with the best compression settings. For us, the choice is clear.
Why these work so well: Throughout a MobileQuest, your team can send photos and videos to players through free, commonly used sites like these and you can ask players to post their own photos, answer to questions, etc.
7. Shower the winners with gifts (or something)
When you play a game, you expect to win something. We didn’t want to get too crass with a giveaway, but we did want there to be some pot of … well, maybe not gold, but something … at the end of the rainbow for those persistent enough to follow our breadcrumbs to the very end.
Serving as both a prop and a prize, we 'regifted' a “Canned Alaska Moose.” That's really what it says on the side of the can. We teased the players with promises to show them the gruesome results when the “Mooseinator” bounty hunter caught up with mytho-Palin’s escaped drunken pet. And then when the winner opened the can, everyone could see the antlers of the stuffed moose that Dave used to shoot the video in the hotel hallway only hours before we started the session.
How to create your own mobile training game
1. Back to first page and keys to success
2. Step-by-step Instructions for creating our Mobile Training Game