Prof. Terri Nelson’s Paris Occupé

Terri Nelson, a professor at California State at San Bernardino and long time ARIS user gave a close look at her ARIS game, Paris Occupy for a COERLL (Center for Open Resources for Educational Language Learning) webinar.

I saw her talk about her game at CALICO last May. I and every one else was on the edge of their seat for the whole hour. It’s a rare and special treat to hear someone talk in depth about their design from both the game maker and pedagogical points of view. You can learn a lot about the potentials of AR games, language learning, and also the triangulation of needs that can happen through the design of game-based learning environments.

It’s great talk and I’m really glad they recorded it and put it out there for us. It’s also a pretty deep game. She is one of very few people who have used the weight feature for example.

Minimize Clutter While Notebooking with ARIS

ARIS is most often used to author content for players to experience. But it also holds functionality for you to send players out to experience the world and share what they find with each other and you. This can be data collection, photo mapping, etc. The Notebook allows players to record geolocated media (video, audio, photo, text) and together to build a collaborative record of their explorations. This functionality has broad potential and combining data collection features with the other affordances of ARIS (making games, telling stories, etc.) is a truly unique thing. Being able to richly establish a context for those who you are sending out to do the collecting is a fantastic opportunity.

Buuuuut, if you’ve actually used the ARIS Notebook, if you really had people go out there and collect some pictures, etc. then you know that clutter is a problem, especially when there is a good deal of non-Notebook content you need players to see. After a bit, the map just looks like a mess.

In ChronoOps, by the 503 Design Collective, notes left by players obscure the map and authored content.

Clutter exists because every note is marked on the game map for all players. This can be useful for viewing notes later, but it can really get in the way too. ARIS will continue to evolve, so this clutter may eventually be less of a problem. But there are some things that you can do right now as an author to clean things up for your players.