The Greenwich game stemmed from the idea of providing the game players a small fragment of the photograph we intended them to shoot along a map route set out by the game inventors. This idea developed as the group progressed further into the game making stage. Thus a decision was taken, to engage with the players’ imagination through asking them to perform relevant posses for certain photographs. As well as this a map and sets of clues were provided. This added to the dimensions of the game. If I was to expand this idea however, I would include members of the public (relevant to the site) to also participate in the game photograph.
The overall plans and objectives of our group game were met, this I feel content with. However I do think that sometimes the group lacked the inspiration to stick to one specific idea, which meant that we had various elements to our game that could have confused the game players as an outcome. Towards the beginning of the construction of the game, the group shared ideas of placing clues throughout Greenwich, this idea if pushed forward and had been developed would have become an interesting aspect to the game. The idea disintegrated eventually and “clue map” replaced it. In hindsight, I believe that the former should have happened as it would have allowed an attention grabbing element to be added to the game, thus the players would have advantaged from the game to a greater extent. However the Greenwich game had other strengths, such as focusing on the key features of the site. The team carefully chose which sites should go into the game and what was to be most useful, interesting and resourceful to the game players. This benefited the game structure. The visual feedback which the group provided in group meetings made this possible. Also I feel that group meetings were organised well and the material brought to the table was creative and productive. One must point out however that even with much organisation it is still regrettable that a couple of stages in the game did not work due to public spaces being closed. This is not to say that we hadn’t allocated people to research and test out our final game, but it was more to do with sheer bad luck!
If there was a chance to repeat this exercise it would be worth thinking about a common thread, such as a theme or perhaps a link between one clue to the next. This tactic could encourage and motivate the game players to find out more about the game site in an interesting manner.
