Mobile Application
ΠΙΣΕΤΟ designs a digitally mediated group experience to support the game “Find the Artwork behind the Story!”. It implements a mobile application that the visitors download on their mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, orchestrating their actions and location in the cultural environment, through the game phases.
The use of multiple mobile devices entails considerable dangers that need to be carefully considered in the group experience design. First, digital screens tend to monopolize visitors’ attention, notably redirecting their focus from the displayed exhibits to the mobile screen. This situation is widely known as “heads-down phenomenon” in museum studies with mobile applications. Furthermore, mobile devices are often claimed to hinder social interactions, leading to situations where people are physically co-located, but alone in their interaction with the devices, being in a private bubble that is commonly called "mobile cocoon”.
To address these challenges, the ΠΙΣΕΤΟ mobile-based experience design moves away from traditional, information-centric functionality that is traditionally encountered in cultural environments (e.g. using mobile guides). Our primary goal is to support the rich and fluid social interactions that were witnessed during playtesting with physical materials, such as face-to-face conversations, eye-contact and performativity.
Experience Design Suite
ΠΙΣΕΤΟ aims to design and technically support game-based group experiences not only for the environment of a particular gallery, but for multiple exhibitions, permanent or temporary, taking place in diverse environments. To that end, ΠΙΣΕΤΟ implements an Experience Designer Suite, providing tools, templates and guidelines that enable the designers to quickly create a variety of different gameful experiences, customizing them to the specific needs and characteristics of each case.
Through a web–based interface, the experience designer is empowered to upload the cultural content that will be employed in the particular gameful design (such as digital representations of the artworks, narratives, or other resources). Then the designer may create or select one of the available “Game Templates”, customizing several parameters of the overall experience, while also specifying and overviewing its gradual evolution in the cultural space.
The Experience Designer Suite also displays statistics of prior game events, such as timing of encountered participant actions and game phase duration. The main objective of this functionality is to inform the designer how the provided mobile-based experience actually evolved, thus enabling to further fine-tune the original design.
Design Framework
ΠΙΣΕΤΟ aspires to support the design of gamified cultural journeys for groups of visitors, passing through different roles, places, interfaces and times. This process bears many similarities to staging an interactive live performance, where the visitors participate as actors in the play and define how it evolves. Obviously, the design of such experiences in the environment of varying cultural institutions, includes several challenges.
A mixture of factors need to be explicitly considered during the cultural experience design, in a combined and holistic way: gallery environment characteristics (such as space syntax, available seating areas, artwork distribution, displayed narrative labels etc.), as well as different participant roles, timing availability or constraints, group synchronization issues, key content, spatial and interface transitions, group access to physical resources, and personal participant preferences, are only some of the parameters that considerably affect and shape the overall group experience.
The complexity of the multifaceted, durational experience, poses the need, not only for authoring tools, but also for a conceptual framework including fine-grained guidelines, to ease the creators in this intricate experience design process.
Personalisation
Playtesting with the game “Find the Artwork behind the Story!” has revealed highly different player expectations and behavior, over the following main aspects:
1. Pacing. Some participants repeatedly dwelled on the artworks, examining in detail several candidates. On the contrary, other participants maintained a quick pace throughout the whole experience, thus often experiencing long waiting times.
2. Competition. This aspect was regarded in tremendously different ways. Some players practically ignored the scoring aspect, or even expressed a strong dislike on “the feeling of losing or winning”. On the opposite direction, several players focused notably on scoring, highlighting the lack of objectivity and competition as the main game shortcomings.
3. Engagement with narratives & learning expectations. Some visitors systematically went through narrative labels and data, often focusing on the learning dimension of their gameful experience, while others showed a tendency to ignore textual information in general, mostly focusing on visual aspects or creativity tasks.
The challenge here is that individual player preferences may vary significantly between the members of the same group. Therefore, the main issue that ΠΙΣΕΤΟ plans to investigate is how to tailor the shared, group experience, in order to better suit the personal preferences and styles of ALL its group members.