Before I dive into my blog post, I wanted to first mention how much I appreciate the series of individual presentations that we’ve been doing across the span of the semester. It’s been quite special getting to know everyone in our class through the games that are meaningful to them. There’s something personal about sharing the kind of “play” experiences that we are drawn to and the ways that these games shape us. 

For this blog post, as we explore gamified online environments, I am going to be looking closely at the Apple Watch, extending some of the thinking and discourse around the gamification of fitness and health as explored with the FitBit and Nike+ in our past readings.

I was given an Apple Watch a few years ago and have been a bit on-and-off with the device. And by on-and-off, I really mean: my relationship with fitness and exercise constantly ebbs and flows from intensely regimented to nonexistent and on top of that, I’m typically only wearing the device when I’m working out — so I’ve never really immersed myself in the full-on days- or weeks-long Apple Watch experience of bio-metric health tracking. That being said, what I am most keen to explore is the ways in which Apple asserts (or doesn’t assert) the “good life” and the consequences that result from that strategy.

The Apple Watch (and the supporting advertising/marketing campaigns) introduced the phrase, “close your rings” into the popular vernacular. The phrase is a result of the Apple Watch’s main interface, which displays the wearer’s stats prominently with circle-shaped progress bars. One feature is directly comparing your own progress to friends that you can add and “compete against.” Competitive health is quite the metaphor for surveillance capitalism.

The wearable device prominently displays a user’s progress across three key metrics: move (how “active you’d like to be” in calories), exercise (how many minutes of activity “above a brisk walk” per day), and stand (how many hours per day that you’d like to be standing for “at least a minute”). In looking purely at the three metric areas and the language used to describe them — I’m initially fascinated by the measurements that are being used, particularly the calories. For a general audience (which I believe the Apple Watch is targeted to, especially after being so many generations along in the device’s evolution), it’s fascinating how comfortable people have become with calorie-tracking even compared to just years ago.

Apple Watch users are disciplined for how many calories they have or have not “burnt” in the span of a day, and it’s not unlikely that this recurring, daily tracking of calories may shape eating behaviors — or even on a larger scale, an understanding of food, movement, and play! What becomes of a stroll when it is measured in minutes and miles? What does it mean to live when consistency and calories act as our compass for routine? I think also about the ways that these health indicators, or more specifically the prioritization of these three metrics, are pointing to a very specific kind of lifestyle — a “good life” that is offered to the desk-familiar, frequently-seated people who just needs to leave their seated position of low-physical intensity work to get enough movement and exercise required of a healthy participant of a capitalistic society.

But to reel it back in for a second — away from my cynicism of the Apple Watch— I have to also temper and contextualize my assessment of health gamification as a modern invention, or even a digital one. I find that I gravitate towards looking at gamification as a novel aspect of digital life, but the feedback loops and measurement of progress have always been quite embedded within the fitness and health world. The written logging of weights and repetitions. The distance of runs.

Are all well-tracked goals an act of gamification? The Apple Watch allows the user to set their own goals. With that, success can be made easy or difficult. The game is always played with rules set by the player. And maybe that’s where it’s unable to be a game, where it becomes too “productive” to be a form of play.

Location sharing is a frequent topic of conversation among my friend group. Generally when I share my location with someone it is because we are coordinating meeting up or we’re in a crowded place and want to find each other if we’re separated. In these situations I select Apple’s temporary options that allow me to share my location for 1 hour or until the end of the day. My wife, Google Map stan, is also a fan of location sharing. She has the location of a gaggle of people – my sister, some close friends, an old acquaintance or two, and her cousin. It’s been a point of contention between us up until very recently when I finally relented and shared my location with her… indefinitely. She convinced me to become one of her Sims when I started school last month, but if I’m totally honest I was more willing to give in to the request because my sister had become a Sim a few weeks earlier. If your friend jumps off a bridge…

Foucault’s Fitbit: Governance and Gamification by Jennifer R. Whitson analyzes the Foucaultian concept of the panopticon through self-tracking and gamification. In this framing the governance comes from the self, rather than the state. I find the more predatory side of location sharing capitalizes on fear. Whitson says “this data-driven heterotopia provides a contrast with the messiness and fallibility of physical human body” (349). A type of heterotopia is created by the “data”, in this case friend and family Sims, where we feel like our loved ones are safe because we think we can see where they are. Our Sims aren’t their messy, fleshy selves, they’re a neat little contact photo bubble that is hopefully located on the map where it should be. But, what if it isn’t? I guess this is the knifes edge that Whitson refers to, where a heterotopia can turn into a dystopia (349). You can almost feel the world start spinning and an anxiety attack set in at just the thought of the neat little bubble not being at the proper coordinates. Does real time location data actually make us safer? Is some cases, absolutely. But, in my personal life I am not sold that the safety element of location sharing, especially when if it involves a 3rd party app. I was unable to find anything specific about what Apple does with the data of location shares between users, but in general there was plenty of legalese on what location data Apple keeps. It feels silly to be preoccupied about consensual location sharing when the phone itself is capturing more data than I would care to imagine and doing who knows what with it.

Sharing your location with friends or family is pretty low stakes. As long as your not conducting an affair or wildly lying to your nearest and dearest then there probably isn’t anything all that incriminating to be found if your friends and family know your coordinates. That said, it does influence our behavior. According to my wife, the knowledge that she could be caught in a lie keeps her honest. She believes it builds trust with her friends because they’re not going to lie to her. Does this kind of self surveillance make us better friends? Better people? More honest? Maybe. There does seem to be something fun or playful about the simulation element in this, but I can’t quite articulate it. Nightly my wife will open her phone and check on her Sims, the name we’ve given the avatars of our friends in her phone. She list off “so and so is home”, “I wonder what X is doing there”, “looks like Y got tickets to the Liberty game”. There aren’t seemingly any consequences to become one of my wife’s Sims, unless you are skittish and don’t want her rolling up to the exact isle your perusing in DSW, like she did to our sister in law once. Despite the low stakes I remain suspicious even though I’ve given in to being Simified.

I’ve run regularly for about 15 years now, but never in a competitive or team setting (like cross-country or track). I prefer to run solo. And I prefer to be unencumbered by devices: no arm band, running watch, or belt equipped with small bottles of water and energy goos. 

The most I’m really willing to do is sign into the Strava app and press “start” when I start my run, and “stop” when I stop it. For the uninitiated, Strava is a platform for tracking exercise and connecting with others through exercise in a social network-style community (instead of “liking” someone’s post, you give “kudos” to their run/walk/cycle route/etc.). I first tried it when training for a half-marathon, with the hope that it would help me stay accountable to my loose training plan. 

After using it for a few years now, I can’t say I’ve ever been encouraged by the app to really stick to anything. It doesn’t send me push notifications telling me to get outside or play high-tempo music to push me to run faster. It doesn’t read out my mile times as I’m running, like Nike+ did the one time I tried it. In my opinion, all of this works to Strava’s benefit. I like that it doesn’t try to “nudge” me too much toward certain behaviors. 

However, what I appreciate most is that it affords space for me to share context about my run after the fact, and I get to share this with friends. These elements (the contextual, the social) are ancillary to the run itself, and to the app’s supposed reason for existing, but they allow me to experience more joy in and around the run. This quality hints at what Miguel Sicart describes in “Playing The Good Life” as the “expressive” nature of play, which allows players to “play freely with and within [the] boundaries” (235). 

The app doesn’t necessarily invite this kind of play, but it doesn’t foreclose it, either — the way Nike+ (another running app, and therefore a helpful point of comparison) does. As Sicart writes, “Users of Nike+ can only make sense of their experience of running through the data manipulation tools that the system affords, such as the limited description field for the run where users can describe the quality of the run. Nike+ in this way limits its users’ agency over the practice of running” (233). 

Strava, on the other hand, allows you to write whatever you want about the run. It doesn’t limit the description field to a limited range of possible answers (e.g., via a drop-down menu) or even to a short text description. It prompts you with “How’d it go?” and then you can write as short or long of a response as you’d like (or leave no response at all). 

Here is where I like to get playful in my responses. I’ve described a 2-mile run as “Slobbery” (I was running with my dog, and I attached a photo of him with his tongue out). I’ve chalked my fast pace up to the fact that I was trying to finish in time to take advantage of “happy hour” at a bar. These addendums help attach the activity of running to the context in which it occurs — thereby undermining the kind of detachment that most gamification architectures achieve.

This helps me feel less like a “user” and more like a “player.” A game’s players, according to Jennifer Whitson, “bring their modes of play along with them. This play includes joyful explorations and tangential detours/détournement. It also includes counterplay, both of which complicate the surveillance projects that constitute corporate gamification endeavors” (“Foucault’s Fitbit,” 355). 

While being welcoming to a certain kind of playfulness, Strava is, at the end of the day, a business — and a booming one. It made nearly $300M in revenue last year, primarily off subscriptions for premium features. But its users aren’t the only audience it’s going after. Strava has a separate business line called Strava Metro, through which urban planning organizations and city governments can use Strava’s rich data on athletes’ movements to inform city development and safety. While this data is currently offered free of charge, it reflects the obvious value inherent in its proprietary data on the over 100M athletes that use its app. 

As a private company, Strava isn’t held to the same reporting standards or scrutiny as a public company — its founder has even stated that the company is in no rush to go public given “a lot of disclosure” requirements. It’s not hard to imagine the company diverting user data toward more commercial ends if and when it needs to access new revenue streams. This happens all the time in corporate settings — as Whitson notes in the case of RescueTime, which defended the release of an employee monitoring service for employers by saying: “Revenue and profit are king and we can’t expect to focus on free/consumer audiences forever” (352).  

Look no further than Strava’s current job openings: a job description for a Senior Director of Data, for instance, says that anyone hired into this role should plan to “Uncover measurable insights about our global community of athletes, both for internal and external consumption; turn volumes of data into product features, partnership opportunities, and other strategic interests.” The phrase “other strategic interests” leaves the door open to all kinds of possibilities. 

But for now, users seem content to play within the borders of the Strava app — including seeing where and when they can bend the rules to their favor.

While reading from Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, my interest piqued when Google Earth was mentioned in the context of Pokémon Go. As much as I find Google Earth (and its accompanying tool, Google Street View), a fascinating (and oftentimes beautiful) means to explore the world, I’m deeply concerned about the implications of this seemingly omniscient location technology on private life. One of my primary anxieties about Google Earth rests in its ability to dictate our ways of viewing the world: not only does Google Earth collect data about its users’ movements, but it also shapes how those movements are plotted. Although violations of privacy through Google Earth have been widely documented, and should not be minimized, I’m interested in how the “shadow text” of location softwares contributes to a grammar of seeing that suppresses our agency. Zuboff writes that, “even when knowledge derived from your behavior is fed back to you in the first text as a quid pro quo for participation, the parallel secret operations of the shadow text capture surplus for crafting into predication products destined for other marketplaces that are about you rather than for you” (33). With Google Earth, the product we inherit is not simply tips about traffic slow-downs or road closures, which we enable through participation with the platform; rather, we are taught to “read” the world through the pathways and conventions presenting by Google Earth. 

When using Google Earth as a navigation aid, the “choice architecture” of this mapping software determines where you might “channel your attention” or “shape your action” as you traverse the world. Google Maps has the ability to modify its users’ behaviors for profit by pre-determining how users experience space, as evidenced by the use of “sponsored locations” in Pokémon Go. The maps interface can disrupt our ability to exercise our own autonomy and self-determination as we plan out travel routes, or even as we toggle through distant cities on Street View, inhibiting us from looking down certain alleyways or learning about a foreign country beyond a 2-dimensional representation of its streets and thus limiting the self-regulatory processes that grant us power (6). While we might mistake the open-world nature of Street View and Google Earth for freedom, we sacrifice our awareness of these platforms’ political overreach when we fail to interrogate what they might gain by welcoming us into the digital map. 

Central to my unease about Google Earth is the question of politics. As Zuboff succinctly recounts, Google Earth initially came into being as a CIA-funded satellite mapping startup (17). As incursions into citizens’ privacy have catastrophic social and financial consequences, like predictive algorithms that jack up healthcare premiums or surveillance technology that disproportionately targets Black and brown people, we must also consider how the state’s deployment of surveillance capitalism implicates us in the project of oppression. How are we, as everyday users of this innocuous navigation software, used to justify support for military technologies? Zuboff’s asserts that, “key to our interest is the growth and elaboration of behavioral modification as an extension of political power” (27). Indeed, when corporate and political power increasingly collapse into one another, I share this interest keenly. In response to the overwhelming reach of Google Earth, I think of Zuboff’s words of caution that “every threat to human autonomy begins with an assault on awareness” (15). In using Google Maps — which, unfortunately, can be inevitable — I try to remain aware of my role in the physical world represented by the map. One way I like to do this is by insisting that I sidestep the prescribed walking routes the map offers to me, following an improvised scenic route or exploring a different block every time I go somewhere familiar. Another antidote involves opening up randomstreetview.com and zooming through unfamiliar countrysides, in the hopes that I’ll stumble across a site of intrigue like those documented on Jon Rafman’s 9-eyes.com. As long as I retain a sense of wonder and incredulity towards Google Earth, I hope that I can be the one conducting the evasion that otherwise targets my individual awareness in the age of surveillance capitalism (14).

According to the Pew Research Center, about one out of every ten adults first met their partner on a dating site or application, and three out of every ten adults have reported using a dating application at some point. As someone that used to be relatively active on dating applications, I kept drawing parallels between those platforms (such as Grindr, Tinder, and Hinge), gamification, and surveillance while reading Jennifer R. Whitson’s “Foucault’s Fitbit”. In this blog post, I seek to explore how online dating has become gamified and the ways that we willingly govern and regulate ourselves in the pursuit of love and sex.

 

Grindr is the largest gay dating application in the world, and a lot of its popularity is due to its ability to give its users the chance to locate and connect with other people in the area. We can draw a lot of comparisons between some of those features and popular games. Grindr features a geolocation feature that, unlike Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, or similar swipe apps, displays all profiles within a certain walking distance. As you walk through an area, the profiles on the screen change, along with a distance counter that can track how many feet away the user is from another profile. This isn’t incredibly unique from how Pokémon Go works, with the one difference being that you can run into potential dating opportunities instead of Bulbasaur on a nightly walk. Grindr also gamifies characteristics of its users, much like an RPG. Not only does it ask users to input their height, weight, and ethnicity, but also asks everyone to classify themselves by “Tribe” (usually defined by physical characteristics), vaccination status, testing status, and HIV/AIDS status as well. These characteristics allow other users to search and filter for their potential partner based on any of these answers. Additionally, the “tap” system on the Grindr allows anyone to press the fire emoji if they find another user’s profile appealing, which are then compiled into a sum to be presented to a user as if to say, “Look how many people found you interesting!” whenever you log in.

 

Having such precise data can be fun, but it presents opportunities for unwanted surveillance on an already marginalized community. Nivedita Sriram in “Dating Data: LGBT Dating Apps, Data Privacy, and Data Security” covers when discussing trilateration and how there was a huge lack of security when it came to Grindr’s servers. Examples included a researcher being able to pinpoint where any user was down to a few feet despite the user having their location sharing on the application turned off in 2016,  a website collected all the private data from the phones of anyone with a Grindr profile in 2018 including finance information, and another researcher able to uncover the HIV data from everyone in their area and where they lived as well. It’s through this level of surveillance that this game of dating endangers all its users, especially who might not be in the most queer-friendly spaces. How much do we need to play before we’ve given too much of ourselves away, and how have the game-makers creating a space that may further perpetuate queer oppression?

Every few months, my company announces a (completely optional) step challenge. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find several coworkers to form a team to collectively achieve a herculean amount of steps in a month. The challenge usually has some sort of journey for a theme, such as exploring National Parks or walking the Great Barrier Reef. For a month, each team member will log their steps hoping to achieve this goal. The two teams who get the most steps per major sector of the company will receive a bonus day of PTO. For those who don’t win, each participant will be entered into a raffle, where six lucky individuals will receive a bonus day of PTO. Progress determines how many raffle tickets are entered on behalf of the participant.

The system itself is fairly simple. Once you have formed your team (either by joining people you know or fishing around until you find people you have maybe seen once), you can either link your fitness tracker of choice to the challenge software, or enter your steps manually. At certain step intervals, your team will progress through the journey, as shown by the picture and label when you log in. You can also see a progress bar showing how far along you are (i.e. 1.1 million out of 2.4 million steps). Then, the app will calculate how many steps you take on average and rank your team members’ average steps in a leader board.

Interestingly, when manually entering activity, instead of adding step count directly, you enter how many minutes you spent doing a specific activity. The app includes: aerobics, biking, circuit training, dancing, elliptical, hiking, housework, running, skiing, swimming, walking, wheelchair use, weight lifting, yard work, and yoga. Once you enter the minutes (no decimals allowed), the app inserts the time into an equation tailored for that activity and spits out a number of steps (i.e. 10 minutes of walking = 1000 steps). This system A. leads most users to link their personal fitness tracker and B. drastically simplifies the step taking process. While the goal might be to increase periods of fitness, I just take a look at my step count for the whole day, round up to the nearest hundred, and enter in that many minutes of activity.

From Zuboff, the dynamics of the application may vary, from healthy competition to personal satisfaction to a desire to earn an extra day of PTO (depending on how likely you feel that your team will achieve this goal). The mechanics are simple – log your activity, either automatically or manually. The main components are the milestones of your journey, the step tracker bar, and the leader board.

Aside from a few other features that you can click into on the website (i.e. personal stats, a company wide leader board, how many raffle tickets you’ve earned), that’s pretty much it. There aren’t any reminder messages telling you to shape up and get off the couch. If you miss your goal, you’ll never hear about it again. The app itself doesn’t send any specific nudges. For conditioning, it provides mid journey goals by progressing the background image according to your progress and puts you in competition with your teammates.

As Sicart would say, the journey allows you to “disclose the world” by linking your progress with Earth’s natural wonders, engaging in appropriation by having you and your coworkers take on the role of explorers. It also allows for self expression by providing more eligible activities than walking – it encourages the user to begin or develop whatever practice(s) are right for them. However, the app’s hands off approach in continuing to encourage the user would likely mean that Sicart would not find this a application particularly great source of play.

The trick of the application lies in its second form of conditioning – prompting you to compare yourself to your teammates. The large step goal (in the millions) necessitates users to participate in a team. This creates a panopticon or sense of self-governance of sorts since every member of the team can see where you rank on the leader board. You cannot hide how much (or little) you have contributed to the team. Furthermore, the application prompts you to increase your daily activity since the leader board only shows your average steps. It doesn’t matter much if I do 10,000 steps in two days if I only do a few hundred most days. The bottom participants provide a lower limit (you don’t want to be there), while the upper members provide a goal to strive for. Furthermore, you don’t know who is secretly judging you for ruining their chances of gaining a free PTO day, providing further encouragement.

At least, it would, if you didn’t talk to your coworkers on a daily basis and realize that you are all too stressed out to pay much attention to how many steps you’re each taking. This application very much depends on its members subscribing to the goal to be its most efficient, as do all games and gamified systems. For myself personally, I find myself trying to find excuses to take little trips or walk more throughout the day, though I usually fall fairly short of my goal. After the challenge is over, I mostly return to my old habits – the focal practice has not taken root.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that the challenge is provided by Mobile Health Consumer, a company designed to:

• encourage self-care practices among employees to improve well-being and decrease healthcare costs for the employer,
• Provide management resources for chronic conditions to again decrease health care costs for the employer
• “Aggregate disparate HR, benefits, wellbeing, and healthcare data” so the employer can “can create on-demand cost-control strategies” (their site).

There isn’t a mention of what happens to your step data after the challenge. From Zuboff’s discussion of Surveillance Capitalism, one may wonder if health data from corporate health challenges could be used in determining health insurance rates or other biased treatment toward an individual based on their perceived / self-reported health. To be clear, I am not accusing anyone of using challenge data in this way. I am simply pointing out that given the lack of clear information on how this data is handled, self-volunteered health information could be used as a source of health bias among an organization.

 

 

Reflecting on the creation of our web-based game inspired by Alice in Wonderland, this project provided invaluable insight into the process of transforming a literary work into playable media. Nick Montfort’s concept of “playable media” guided our approach as we reimagined the reader’s role from a passive consumer to an active participant. What started as a traditional text evolved into something interactive and dynamic, where the player could make choices and even co-create parts of the story.

in the beginning, we understood that our goal was not just to adapt the text but to create a system where players could engage with it in meaningful ways. trying to figure out the best course of action in a short amount of time with our schedules clashing was a rough task. Instead of focusing purely on aesthetics or narrative coherence, we centered our efforts around player agency. We wanted the players to feel they were influencing the story rather than just witnessing it.

In terms of my role, I was responsible for the ideation and mood board, as well as creating a wireframe for the game’s user interface. Using Miro, I built a visual skeleton that outlined the flow of the player’s interactions within the game. While not a highly complex task, the wireframe served as the structural foundation upon which the rest of the project was built. My focus was to ensure that the flow was intuitive, allowing players to seamlessly navigate through the choices and possibilities that the game offered. This was crucial because, in a playable media piece, the UI is more than just a delivery mechanism—it actively shapes how the story is experienced.

The most valuable takeaway from this project was the diversity in which we seen the game, and all of our background skills fitting perfectly within our task. Reading articles is one thing, but once you’re in the thick of creating something interactive, you quickly realize the importance of balancing creative expression with technical constraints. Theories of play, while fascinating in the abstract, can feel quite disconnected from the reality of making something that functions (like the magic circle).

For example, in annotating a text, one might simply highlight passages of interest or provide commentary. But when transforming that text into a game, every choice—whether it’s where a button is placed or how the player’s input alters the narrative—becomes an annotation of sorts. It is an interpretation of the original work that invites players to engage with it on their own terms, rather than simply absorbing what’s given to them.

In conclusion, this experience taught me that the process of creating playable media is far more than just reinterpreting a story. It’s about building systems that invite players to think, question, and explore. That’s something that no amount of reading alone could have taught me—it had to be experienced through doing.

Prior to this assignment I had never read Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll before, but I had seen the Disney movie so I thought I knew what to expect. The entire time I was reading I kept waiting for the twins to show up and contemplating the ludic world of twins. Sadly, the twins never materialized (wrong book!) and I had no idea where to begin. I found reading the text itself to be surreal and maddening and illogical and I wanted the game to make the player feel the same way. Initially we weren’t sure what kind of game we wanted to make. Did we want to take advantage of Wiktor’s game design skills? Would we use Twine? Eventually we decided to utilize Tasha and Matthew’s coding skills. Matthew designed the layout and look of the game and Tasha coded it in Javascipt. They were the backbone of our group! From there we decided that the structure of our game would be text based and a branching narrative and we each assigned ourselves a chapter to play with. Murray’s kaleidoscopic narrative informed our choice for the branching narrative. We decided to use the text as the structure of the game, which acted as our guardrails for the multiple narratives. In our conversations we talked about agency and control. We wanted the player to feel like their choices had an effect on the narrative, but regardless of the player’s choices the story ultimately moves along a set path and ends the same way every time.

I approached the project first by going through the text and creating an outline of “actions” in each chapter, essentially using those moments to allow the player to make a decision for Alice. Eat the cake? Drink the bottle? Follow the rabbit in the first place? I wanted to invoke Murray’s concept of simulation and exploration in games (168) where the player could skip to different parts of the story, end the game on accident, or experience something disorienting/maddening/surreal, but ultimately at the end they still get the whole story. Once we decided that we would each do one chapter I had to decide how I wanted mine to look. I was really inspired by Loss of Control (Serge Bouchardon, et al.) and Sea and Spar Between by Nick Manfort and Stephanie Strickland and the way the text was manipulated and how that evoked a certain experience and even nonsensicalness. In the game I wanted the player to feel like Alice did when she drinks the bottle in the White Rabbit’s house and she grows so large that she’s nearly busting out. I wanted to show this by have the Drink Me button trigger the text to become so large that the player would be unable to even read it. They would then have to select the Eat Cake button in order to trigger the text to shrink, but click it too many times and the text is so small you cannot read it. There ended up being a lot more text in Chapter IV, which lead to needing more breakpoints than I had initially planned and based on our time constraints we were unable to really make the text manipulation happen to that extent.

In the end I thought this project was really fun. I felt really intimidated by this project at first because I can’t code, am unfamiliar with Twine, and didn’t really know where to even begin with the text. I was so impressed by everyones different skills and what they contributed and how we all worked together. I think it brought a surrealist quality to our game that I really enjoy. It was so exciting for me to see what Tasha, Matthew, Wandi, and Wiktor did with their chapters and the collaboration was actually fun. This whole experience was rewarding and I’m so proud of what we created. In our first meeting I was filled with dread and anxiety about how this was going to work and in our last meeting I found myself beaming with excitement as Tasha walked us through the game. As I finish this I am thinking about Bogost’s Play Anything in the introduction when he says “Play is a way of operating a constrained system in a gratifying way” (xi). I feel like this project really brought that concept of play to life for me.

I’ve loved Alice in Wonderland since I was a little kid, so the prospect of creating a playable version of it was an exciting opportunity. This was especially true because of my wonderful groupmates who made the process of collaborating on this assignment particularly fabulous! After the groups were assigned, we met and discussed the ideas, influences, and general design philosophies for our game. It became clear relatively quickly that the Cheshire Cat was the character that we gravitated towards the most, and in true Murray-kaleidoscopic-storytelling fashion, we conceived of a branching narrative where the user inhabited the Cheshire Cat as he guided Alice through her Wonderland journey.

 

We divided up the workload, with me focusing on coding and developing the game we would present during class. While everyone else in the group wrote the script, made the design maps, and created our assets, I set off to bring the game to life. I started by creating a directory in a remote server I already owned to host our program. Afterwards, I coded a skeleton version of the game where the user could simply read the story and go through all the text. Brandon’s game map inspired this section, as it helped shape the text reveal function on all of the pages and the image reveals of the Cheshire Cat in his multiple stages.

 

I then added the buttons and organized my functions to create different pages that would take the user down the different narrative branches based on how they decided to make the Cheshire Cat act. It was at this point that I went to the script that Leila and Alex had produced to learn the narrative shape of the story. Using what they wrote, I replaced my filler text with Alice in Wonderland and made the actual decisions since I had already finished building the mechanics.

 

With this completed, I started adding crucial design elements to adhere to our new framing device, which was a futuristic retrospective of the classic text. This included adding the title screen and having a cyberpunk aesthetic and framing each piece of text either in “the book” to signify that it was a part of the original story or a part of our diegetic framing device. Ironically enough, it was during this part of my coding process that my real-life cat, Willow, jumped on my computer while I had briefly stepped away and caused a slight delay since I had to debug all of her new additions to the project.

 

As I kept programming our project, there were other design ideas that I tried to implement to help create this idea of a living game rather than just the book in digital form. This included using the incredible assets that Travis made to constantly highlight, move, and adjust the images of the characters to communicate which characters are actively moving, talking, or making decisions during the game. I also found some great royalty-free music to add as a background track, along with sound effects that I plugged into the game whenever the user clicked on anything. By this point, every action had a dedicated visual or auditory response so that it was clear what could be played with. When I was done coding everything, I pushed it all online, emailed it to my group for comments, and then made some quick revisions before class!

 

The biggest thing that I learned throughout this experience was that the process of collaborating was play within itself. There was so much possibility and play throughout my time working with everyone, and it’s definitely something that I would have missed if we stuck to just reading about play instead. I’m wildly grateful for my teammates, and I look forward to the second half of the semester!

In deciding how to spin Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into a game, my group took cues from Carroll himself in dispensing with rules or decorum in service of more playful ends. That is to say, we broke the text open, stepped inside, and turned it upside down. 

From the start, we were drawn to putting the text into some kind of motion. We briefly considered altering how a reader reads the text (e.g., manipulating the materiality of the text by playing with its shape, size, etc.). But we wanted to push this further by rethinking the reader’s role altogether. We decided to turn the reader into a player with the capacity to influence the directions and outcomes of the text. And so we built a game out of it.

In our initial brainstorming, we kept circling back to the Cheshire Cat as a wholly unique character, even in a book full of unique characters. It is one of the few characters to repeat across numerous scenes, to the point that the cat becomes a kind of (maddening) spirit guide to Alice. Because its intentions, desires, and goals are never made clear in the text, we felt the Cheshire Cat would be a perfect foil for the player, who could similarly engage with Wonderland and its inhabitants without a defined set of aims.

It was important to maintain the Cheshire Cat’s moral ambiguity in the incentives and goals of the game play. Accordingly, the game never insists that you should prefer one outcome (e.g., keeping Alice in Wonderland) over another (e.g., waking her up). The player gets to interpret and enforce one or the other modes of intervening in the story.

To distribute the Cheshire Cat’s presence throughout the narrative, we decided to rewrite portions of the original text to interpolate the cat’s presence in scenes where it was previously absent. I primarily focused my efforts in this area, writing the Cheshire Cat into multiple “decision points” that would serve as forks in the branched narrative of the game. I also converted the narrative into a more game-friendly format, which often meant sacrificing Carroll’s circular brilliance for something more direct and fast-paced. (We didn’t want to lose the player’s attention — we’d all had our own experiences playing video games with interminable cutscenes.)

It would be fair to ask, If you’ve changed the plot points, and now also the writing, is this even Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland anymore? While I can’t easily answer that, I can say for certain that the original text has been dislocated — from its time, its place, and its objecthood. By transforming it from a linear story into a “narrative world” (to use Janet Murray’s term), we’ve changed the terms of the story and the assumed expectations of roles like “reader” and “author.”

I also wanted to briefly discuss the group element of this project. We all came at this with very different skill sets and areas of interest. And it was only in collectively moving toward the slippery areas between our respective competencies and capacities that we were able to create this wonky, mischievous piece of digital ephemera. Now that the game is live, any player that enters the game from this point forward will also participate in co-creating the game space. In a way, they’re going down the rabbit hole with us.