Sophie Sampson

I continue to investigate the question of what can make being in a particular place better, and am still fascinated by the idea of revealing the historical layers of a place. I picked up Penelope Lively‘s City of the Mind a few days ago, which is a wonderfully contemplative book about London, both from the perspective of psychogeography and its physical fabric, where the past is so intricately interwoven with the present. It is remarkable for its spareness and clarity, and is a good lesson in how to strip away unnecessary furniture.

It’s a book where very little happens, but people think and notice a lot. The protagonist is an architect concerned with both historical conversions and new build skyscrapers, which means that his view of the city is constantly shaped by other past Londons. As he walks around the city he’s always looking up, noticing the details of brickwork, and these historical layers bleed into the prose around him – his story is interleaved with interstitial scenes from other people who have inhabited the same places at different times. The book becomes a meditation about the physical city, has space to consider where things came from before they were here, where people came from:

“It is 2:21 and Matthew Halland is at last reaching Cobham Square. It is also, in another sense, 1823, when the square was built, and when a considerable tonnage of bricks was hauled from brick fields not too far away and assembled into walls of Flemish bond, some shrouded in stucco, some not, most of which still stand precisely as they were constructed. Matthew drives around the square impatiently searching for a parking slot.”

The shifts in time are simple – unexplained, but clearly signposted in the prose. This first timeshift is signalled by a tiny explanation and a date – we’re still largely in Matthew’s head. A few pages later is the first proper one, heralded only by two empty lines in a book that otherwise marks its paragraphs with an indent only. And the fact that we’ve slipped to a different time creeps up on you – we start with the familiar and timeless but then:

“Coming into the square, Jim Prothero sees that the trees have almost lost their leaves. He stands for a moment, tired at the end of his day, the noise of the print works still ringing in his ears, and sees the sparse branches, with the small blunt buds from which, eventually, spring will come. The world is turning still, here in the dishevelled, stricken city. There is glass over the road, where windows were blown out last night, and a crater in the next street where the UXB fell a month ago, but the leaves are falling.”

So in those three sentences we establish that this is a man who sees the same signs of spring I see, but in an unrecognisable version of my city where streets violently change on a daily basis. And there are three paragraphs of his London and then two empty lines and then back to “Three twenty-eight (and 1823) as Matthew Halland gets back into his car in Cobham Square, and starts the engine…”

It’s so precisely written that no other signalling or explanation is really required, and the process of realisation as you read those three sentences feels like a little flowering of understanding, an aha! that wouldn’t have taken place if the paragraph had been headed ‘Cobham Square 1942′. It becomes part of the rules of the book that timeshifts will happen, and you start to read alertly when new characters are introduced to understand where and when they are. That attention is rewarded with more tiny moments of revelation, almost a little game the author is playing with us.

So it’s a book where not much happens, but things are constantly shifting. Perhaps it’s partly about how the city is a physical repository of memory – we are constantly remaking its fabric, but the signs are there if you know where to look.

(This is the talk I gave yesterday – it synthesises a lot of the design work I did this summer into a set of rules of thumb for making this kind of work)

These are interesting times for publishers, the very notion of what a book is is being broken down. People have said it’s like the Wild West and you can do anything, anyone can be a publisher. My contention is that just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I’ve spent part of the last year making location-specific stories and games on an Iphone platform called Placewhisper and testing them on the ground with real people. I’m going to talk to you about what I’ve learned – through real experience – and then consider why this sort of work might be interesting to publishers.

Location-specific content is really good at one thing, which is making you feel like you’ve stepped into a narrative. Moments of emotional connection. I started to understand this while making quite a different kind of game – a playground game about the Battle of Hastings for the BBC.

I spent a lot of time looking at diagrams like this:

And by the time the game was made and I was travelling around the country playtesting it in schools. I happened to do a test in Hastings, and on a whim hopped off the train and went to see the site of the battle itself. Which looks like this:

The thing that slightly blew my mind was how steep it is. In all my years of studying the period and hours of looking at squiggly diagrams, that fact had never got through to me. And suddenly the Normans at the bottom with a seemingly impossible task ahead, the Anglo Saxons snugly at the top with everything in their favour, made more sense than it ever had before.

It wasn’t that being in the place was somehow intrinsically better than looking at the diagrams. Without knowing the diagrams it would just have been a field. But the point is that knowing the diagrams made being in the field better. Being in the field deepened my understanding of the diagrams. That multiplication is the nub of what’s important about making location-specific content.

Whatever you are offering people has to make their experience of going to a place better, otherwise why are you asking them to go there? This sounds really obvious when you just say it, but it has huge implications in design terms. The bargain you make with the person who accesses your content is really different to the one you make when you are making web content or physical books, where people have absolute control over where they are when they access it. There’s a physicality to the experience which needs to be considered.

This is sculptor, Anthoney Gormley’s Another Place. It’s a really poetic piece that interacts with the environment beautifully. It stands on the boundary between land and sea, and as the tide goes in and out it reveals and conceals metal casts of the sculptor’s body that all look out towards the horizon. And every year the coastguard get called out several times to rescue people who have got into difficulties while looking at the artwork

Gormley’s take on this (as it kind of has to be) is that people can look after themselves while they’re looking at art, and they don’t lose their critical faculties.  This is possibly true with art, but I know from making pervasive games that as soon as there’s an element of interaction that’s no longer true – people expect you’ve got their back while you concentrate on the challenge you’ve set them.

It’s tempting to make location based work the easy way – google maps, google earth, from the top down. You can’t. Initial research has to include *pounding pavements*

However, there are really positive reasons to make this kind of work, and it’s really not necessary to risk drowning your punters. I wanted to talk about those reasons through the lens of Watch the Water, a project I made this summer with Coney. It was commissioned by Trigger for the Edinburgh Art Festival.

Watch the Water was a location-specific iphone app, made on PlaceWhisper.

It’s a work of fiction: eerie audio placed on places with open drains, which told the story of the engineering that underpins the city with a Lovecraftian twist. (For those that don’t know it, Edinburgh is built on an extinct volcano and the railway station is in a drained lake – how it doesn’t fill up with water whenever it rains is a constant wonder to me).

Five design decisions that made this really work for the people that tried it.

One of the really smart things about the commission is that there was a really clear funnel into the start of the experience – it was designed for people visiting one of six galleries as part of the Art Festival we knew where they would be physically and where they would be going.

It’s a comfortable space to be on foot, day or night.

But mainly, Edinburgh is hugely atmospheric – you get awesome  hi res 3d graphics for free. Let’s just dwell on that for a moment, *for Free.*

You could consume the audio clips – and the story – in any order you wanted. This gives people a bit more agency, allows it to fit in with their other plans rather than having to set aside a certain time to do your experience.

I’m a big believer in doing this with audio. It means there’s no screen between you and the exciting stuff. Instead of looking down at your phone, you’re looking up at the world. Again, it’s all about making connections with what you’re standing in front of, otherwise what’s the point?

Watch the Water was 9 pieces of audio in the space of less than a mile. Each between 40 seconds and a minute and a half. The points could have been more densely packed in the space, but the area didn’t want to be larger – that’s already a lot of walking.

There’s something about making invisible things tangible that people really respond to. The mechanism of discovery gives people a sense of ownership of the work.

This is a new way of delivering content, but it’s something that can fit into traditional publishing models. I have a couple of examples:

Imagine: Everyone at a literary festival is invited to download a free app from the app store, with a story from a new writer mapped onto popular locations at the festival. It’s promoted through the festival as something to do between talks. Those who try feel that sense of ownership, and word of mouth is created. There’s a route to buy the book direct from the app.

Or: A popular crime writer deeply associated with a particular city – like Ian Rankin in Edinburgh, or Henning Mankell in Ystad – spends two weeks writing a short whodunnit you can play in that city over about 2 hours.

It sells for £4.99 in the app store to the writer’s fans and tourists visiting the city who want a ‘different’ ‘authentic’ experience. Not only can this become profitable in itself, people who play feel more ownership of that writer’s stories. People discover more about their back catalogue and in a couple of clicks can buy books that mention particular places they’ve been.

What I’ve learned from all my work with location-specific content is that it isn’t always the right answer. In the right kind of circumstances, though – and there aren’t many of them – it gives you so much for free: hundreds of extras, thousandss of years of history, and the best visuals money can buy.

Most importantly, it reminds the consumer how much you value their imagination.

I’m looking to make more of this type of project, so if you have a situation where there are a lot of people physically in a particular place, do get in touch.

Just to say I’ll be on my way here tomorrow to talk about designing for location-specific storytelling to an audience of publishers, which should be fun. I get to talk about lots of meaty stuff about the precise circumstances in which it’s a good idea, and will hopefully get to stick my nose out into Frankfurt for half an hour or so too.

We’re all used to films coming out with games attached, both console games and for marketing – I’ve made some of them myself. It feels quite new for books though. There have been games that adapt books (Dante’s Inferno and The Great Gatsby for NES come to mind), but games to market books? Not so much.

The Night Circus is a good book to try it with, both because of its structure and its audience. We know gamers read more than the average population, and in particular fantasy has a big crossover population. Failbetter have done a good job of adapting the Echo Bazaar mechanic to make a smaller, simpler game that reflects the content of the book. The only thing I regret is that the stripped out  much of what gives players a sense of agency in Echo Bazaar. You are almost entirely a slave to the cards you are dealt, but it’s an elegant slavery. The strong look taken from the book makes it look fresher than the game its based on – no beige at all.

I’d be fascinated to know Random House’s specific marketing objectives for the game and how it relates to the book. The game had the softest of soft launches, with no fanfare at all as far as I could see. I only found out it was launching from a chance conversation. There are lots of mechanics within the game to get you to share it with people, but a little PR push would surely have delivered many more curious people to the top of such an unusual experience, and allowed it to do that job of amplification on a much wider audience.

The thing I didn’t expect is that having played the game made the book better for me. Meeting images in the book I remembered from the game was always a joy, because I felt they were in a small way mine. I had won them with my card turning. It’s something I think film marketers understand really well, making the content your own before you see a movie, and I was thrilled to meet it here.

So if the goal was creating passionate advocates for the book, I feel like it’s succeeded.

You can’t buy smiles like that, you have to earn them. It was far too hot and sweaty to play an outdoor exploration game, but these guys pushed through and did it anyway. Team Fruitbat won the coveted Master of Space and Time sticker and topped the Time*Trails leaderboard at 910 points. For a game which only had a total of 1070 points available, often extremely well hidden including one 10 point spot you needed security clearance to reach, this was awesome.

We learnt masses about game making doing this, as well as (for me anyway) geeking out about London’s history. Most people played it as a collecting game, rather than doing the story trails, which was the easiest way to get into the game. Lowest possible barrier to entry always good, however fun it is developing characters and sending them off on stories.

I also learnt that a lot of early adopters (and Hide&Seek is a good place to find them) now have Android phones rather than iPhones. And that watching someone get on passworded wifi, download an app and then set up a user profile on it is like raking your fingers down a blackboard – just excruciating. I look forward to having ID chips in our wrists so all this remembering passwords becomes obsolete. Another thing – the app needed to be in the worldwide store, not just the UK Apple store, as we had to turn away people from all over the world. The weekender has an international clientele.

Final thing – people like stickers, and stickers that say Time Ninja in particular. I may have tshirts made.

pics by Michael Dales, not only programmer but also ace photographer