Bounce San Jose, 2006
This summer, August 7th-13th, the city of San Jose is hosting a global arts, science, and emerging technologies conference, ZeroOne San Jose: A Festival of Art on the Edge. This event is expected to attract a diverse group of attendees from over 50 countries. UC Berkeley's team of game designers, including Jane McGonigal, Irene Chien, Ken Goldberg, and myself, is presenting a new game at the conference, Bounce//San Jose, which engages conference visitors and senior residents of San Jose in an exchange of life experiences via telephone. The hope is to enrich each other's understanding of personal experiences across generations in a fun and playful way. Bounce//San Jose is a non-competitive conversation game in which two people separated by at least 20 years of age work together.
Each conversation starts with a phone call from a conference participant to the Almaden senior community center. The goal of the game is for the two players to identify life experiences they have in common. What is something you both think has changed for the better in the last 20 years? What is something you both regret getting used to? Or, what is a skill that both of you learned from one of your parents? Finding these common experiences can unearth intriguing differences and also surprising similarities between generations and across geographic distances. At the end of the game, players receive an inventory of their common experiences.
The apparent goal of the game is to encourage a natural
inter-generartional conversation. The game also gives us the
opportunity to store many responses to a catalog of questions, as well
as the time it took for players to find these answers. This database
allows us to identify which question generates the most diverse
responses among all players. Our hypothesis is that the question which
generates the greatest diversity of responses is the one which produces
the most personal conversation. Apart from any statistical evaluation,
our catalog of responses demonstrates the diversity of the
conversations among all players, and underscore how many points of
intersection exist in the wide spectrum of human experiences. To play
the most recent version of Bounce, now in Spanish, too, please visit
the game link here.
Egg: Optimization at Play
In 2004, the psychophysicist Dr. Sergey Gepshtein, and I developed a basic research game to help study if games can enhance perceptive and cognitive skills to optimize rapid decision making. To this end, we developed a game in which a player is asked to catch the larger of two eggs dropping from top to botton on a computer screen. The drop speed and the difference in the height and width of the eggs varies over the course of the game. The more correct decisions a player makes, the more the difference between the egg sizes decreases, and the more the speed increases. If the player starts making mistakes, the size difference increases and the speed of the eggs decreases.
After 100 iterations, we expect the game to have adapted to the player's perceptive and cognitive skills optimally. The player, in turn, is operating at the optimal stimulus level for his or her decision-making capacity. We also expect to see players increase their optimal rate of decision-making over time. The game model implies that adaptive game design allows players to move into optimal zones of interaction. Traditionally, games are designed to achieve optimality through level design and through competitive multi-player dynamics. Adaptive game designs respond to player actions in every turn. The area of decision-making is particularly interesting, because increases in decision-making in a game may lead to similar benefits in real-life situations. If we can prove that players can increase their decision-making skills through gameplay, we would show that game interactions produce significant cognitive benefits.
Due to funding challenges, our project has not yet been completed. The game link is here, and the paper describing the research goals is here.