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Below is the written version of the paper I presented in the 'Innovative Research Methods' session at the RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum Midterm Conference on 25th April 2019. Each paragraph in the text corresponds to one slide in the embedded Powerpoint above (you can view the slides separately as a PDF here).
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Today I’m going to discuss the
potential of creative and practice-based
approaches to researching digital media in cultural geography, specifically how
they’re used for storytelling purposes in games and locative media.
I’m going to propose that,
through the constantly evolving, problem-solving process of game development,
creating a digital narrative as a researcher gives you a clearer understanding
of the affordances of the medium’s technologies, discourses and relationships as they come together in practice. In
turn, being involved in this design process from the early stages gives you
access to aspects of digital media production that are often invisible from widely-used
ethnographic methods of observation, participation and interviewing. As I’ll
indicate, however, there are still questions about possible barriers to
participation for researchers aiming to engage practically with digital media,
as well as how to effectively record and manage the ‘data’ produced from this
kind of methodology.
So in cultural geography, we’ve
seen in the past couple of decades increasing value being attributed to practice-based
methodologies as an approach that can ‘get closer’ to the affective, material
and embodied qualities of experience, eroding a perceived division between
thought and practice. When it comes to the study
of media arts, the concern amongst cultural geographers at the turn of the
millennium was that the methods of analysis employed by researchers remained
largely detached from the processes through which different media are produced
and consumed in everyday life.
But to what extent have creative
and practice-based approaches been applied to digital media? It’s now widely understood that geographers can
practice film-making, photography, and creative writing in response to research
questions; yet the idea of a geographer making a game, for instance, would
appear to be unusual and much less common. There are many possible reasons for
this, which I don’t have time to go through in depth today. But from my
experience, I’d suggest that they could include a lack of training
opportunities in creative digital skills; a lack of time, resources or funding
to learn and use appropriate technologies; perceived barriers to entry, such as
the need to know programming languages, which for some projects might actually be
necessary; and finally, wider social and cultural attitudes towards digital
artforms. For example, many scholars would still dispute the idea of video
games being a form of ‘art’, or even worthy of study.
Nonetheless, it’s evident that digital
media increasingly provide the platforms through which we not only communicate existing narrative works, such as
e-books for text and video streaming websites for film, but also find whole new ways of telling stories. Of
these digital narrative forms, video games are by far the most prolific and
popular, and their relative cultural, economic and social importance really
can’t be understated. 2.3 billion players now spend a total of $137.9 billion
US dollars on games globally, which not only eclipses spending on music, film
and TV, but is worth double music and film combined.
Cultural geographers have already
begun to research video games as a medium with particular spatial characteristics.
By attending to the sites at which digital narratives experiences are produced,
the study of interfaces and methods of visualisation by the likes of James Ash and
Gillian Rose has proved influential in making sense of how their constituent
material, bodily and social processes interact.
Nonetheless, there’s a lack of
practice-based study in geography of the creative
process behind digital artforms, even though this is where many of the
relationships that produce distinct narrative experiences are formed – from the
development of initial ideas, to testing these ideas, and then onto the final
production and feedback. Even where geographers have gained access to earlier
stages of video game development such as testing, this has mainly focused on
the relationships between game mechanics and physical bodily responses, as
opposed to narrative development.
My PhD project is essentially
trying to bridge this gap – to find out what geographers can learn from the
whole creative process of making a digital narrative game. I’m going to be
making a locative treasure-hunting game in my home city of Canterbury, that
aims to create a playful platform through which people can both share and discover the stories that make locations in the area meaningful.
As part of this project, I’m
having to create some prototypes of initial design ideas I’ve had for my final
game. However, the first stage of this process came about much earlier than
expected, through an opportunity that fell into my lap before my PhD had even
started. I was commissioned by a group of small, independent businesses in
Canterbury’s historic Cathedral Quarter to make a digital treasure-hunting game
as a one-day event, with aim of drawing people away from the chain stores of
the high street into the unique historic environment of the Cathedral Quarter, showcasing
what makes it special as a place to visit. In this presentation, I’m going to
talk about what I’ve learnt from this prototyping process about the
practice-based methods I’m employing for my PhD project, talking through the
production of The Timekeeper’s Return from the initial design, to testing, and
finally to the eventual release.
From the earliest stages of the
design process, making a digital game involves navigating affordances – in other words, understanding what the
medium you’re using allows you to do, and working with these ‘limitations’.
No matter what kind of creative
project you work on, there will always be limitations in terms of the
capacities of the technologies being used, the cultural demands and
expectations of the medium, and the resources and skills available to you. The
design process is characterised by how you resolve to work within these
affordances to produce something that achieves the project’s aims. For
researchers, this can teach you a great deal about the kinds of negotiations artists
have to make when using a particular medium, and how these relationships can
influence the eventual experience people have of a creative work.
For The Timekeeper’s Return, my
limitations were that I had to make a treasure-hunting game that was suitable
for all ages, drawing attention to what is interesting and unique about the
Cathedral Quarter, but also using digital technology in an innovative way. Oh,
and this also needed to be affordable!
My solution to this unique set of
challenges was twofold. First, I opted to use QR codes as the mediating
technology for the event. Not only is this technology affordable to work with
and widely accessible, with most smartphones having QR code readers
pre-installed or freely available, but it was also novel enough to gain
attention as an event. There was something that captured the imagination about
the act of decoding – the idea that by engaging with the environment in a critical
way we can obtain secret and intimate knowledge about the events that have
shaped our enveloping landscapes.
The second design solution was to
make the event story-based and immersive, with the treasure-hunting
activity based on the premise that participants were helping a time-travelling
researcher called Mia Augustina. Using her time machine, the astrolabe, Mia had
studied what different sites within the Cathedral Quarter were like in the
past, and recorded research diary entries that appeared as QR codes you could
scan in the relevant present-day locations. However, the machine had
malfunctioned, trapping her in the past, and only by scanning these codes could
the machine calibrate itself in time and space, and Mia could return.
As these design ideas progressed,
however, I was soon faced with a different kind of limitation – that imposed on
me by the independent businesses who commissioned the work, who were keen to
see some tangible and material benefit from the event. What really put a
spanner in the works was their desire to see participants actually enter their
businesses, rather than just engaging with the Cathedral Quarter on a surface
level. Suddenly, as a designer I was faced with the task of simultaneously
telling a story that engaged with the historic fabric of the city, while also
encouraging people to see what the local businesses had to offer.
In this case, my solution was to
alter the overarching narrative of the event to make the action of entering the
businesses more immersive. Mia Augustina was now a Canterbury local who
frequented the businesses in the area, only sharing the knowledge of the places
she was travelling to with her friends who work in these businesses. Only by
entering them and speaking to their staff could participants get the
information they needed to find the QR codes and help Mia return to the present.
This solution turned out to be very
effective, as the process of gathering the narrative information from both the
‘historic’ QR code sources, as well as people embedded in the everyday life of
the Cathedral Quarter, entwined together the stories of past and present in a
way that mirrored the palimpsest of different time periods in the material
environment today. Participants indicated that they were provoked by the game
to care about previously unknown personal stories that have made the place
meaningful over time. But it was only by having to negotiate these different
affordances as a designer that I was able to appreciate how different
mechanical devices and narrative devices can influence how diverse publics
interact with the storied fabric of the city.
After forming the initial designs
for a digital narrative project, the next stage of development is iterative
testing. This involves judging the viability of your ideas for a full-scale
experience, and adapting how they’re implemented according to observations and
feedback. From a geographical perspective, testing’s especially important
because this is typically the first time that the designs are implemented in
their appropriate spatial context.
Whether this is a physical location in the case of locative games, or a
screened representational world such as a video game, testing allows you to
understand how both the game’s mechanics and the content of the narrative
change how participants interact with their mediated environment.
During the development of The
Timekeeper’s Return, after researching the Cathedral Quarter’s local history
extensively, and scouting the area for hiding locations for the QR codes, it
was during testing when I got to see how the story I’d written could actually
play out in physical space. At first, this simply involved walking the route of
the treasure hunt myself, and reading the research diary entries at their
appropriate locations. One example was a street called Butchery Lane, where it
occurred to me during this initial testing that when you stand in the middle of
the street, all the buildings on one side were rebuilt after WW2 bombing, while
on the other side everything had survived the war and was hundreds of years old.
I realised how powerful this ‘two halves’ visualisation of the street was, and
in the eventual text, the character Mia directs participants to do the same
thing, visualising in their immediate surroundings how WW2 changed the physical
surface of the city. This was a moment that participants told me was
particularly eye-opening in changing their perceptions of the area, making the
events of the story and the real-life history they represented became that much
more tangible.
However, the most important part
of the testing process is getting members of the public who have no prior
knowledge of the project to take part in early versions. Outside testers help
to reveal the inherent biases and blind spots that come with being the creative
force behind the project. In one example, my testers had particular trouble
with a QR code on Sun Street, which was stuck on a bollard underneath a
historic hotel. I was worried that it might be too obvious, but the difficulty
players had was that the details they had to notice were quite far from eye
level, and also faced the opposite way to the direction they’d arrived from. Of
course, there was a balance to be struck too, because it was a treasure hunt – I didn’t want the
sticker to be too easy to find, otherwise it would defeat the object of paying
close attention to your surroundings. In this case, all that was required was to
move the sticker higher up. It seemed like a really small change, but further
testing showed that once people spotted the historic hotel, they almost
immediately then noticed the sticker, which was no longer so close to the
ground.
The other blindspot my testers
revealed was just how bad the mobile internet signal is in that part of Canterbury.
While the network on my phone was mostly usable in the area, my testers
couldn’t connect at all in some locations. But because I’d identified the
extent of the problem early enough through testing, I was able to visit many of
the local businesses, asking if they’d be willing to open their Wi-Fi for the
day, so players could read the QR code texts. This meant that even in the worst
mobile internet blackspots, people on the day were still able to continue
playing the game.
Ultimately, testing can often teach
you more than the final release, as it highlights both the points of attunement
and inconsistency in the spatial relationships that are developed through different
iterations of the game’s design. It allows you to observe how these
relationships manifest physically to change people’s behaviours and
experiences, and gather data through feedback questionnaires and interviews.
The final stage of digital
narrative development is when the project goes live. From my experience, this
is the point when all the challenges that were previously conceptual become logistical. The project typically has
to be publicised and marketed, the physical and virtual infrastructure needs to
be in place, and people need to be on-hand if and when problems occur.
I found that the process of
preparing for my live event taught me a great deal about the materialities involved in running a
full-scale locative game. Not only was I responsible for printing the QR code
stickers, but I had to decide things like whether to pay extra for waterproof stickers,
and how many spare sets of stickers I’d need to carry on the day.
This is also where collaborating
with an outside group can really make a difference, as they were able to fund
the costs for printing and marketing, and also timed the launch of their new
website to coincide with The Timekeeper’s Return. The website ended up providing
the virtual infrastructure to host the QR code texts, while also helping to
promote the event. I essentially became aware of exactly how all the different
components of the event had to fall into place.
But no matter how well you
prepare, the live-ness of interactive artforms will always throw up unexpected occurrences,
whether the narrative experience takes place in a living physical environment,
or an app you’re releasing to the world. This is because the scale of people
engaging with the thing you’ve made increases significantly. In The Timekeeper’s
Return, we had one unsavoury incident where a group of people were drinking
alcohol and swearing loudly in front of children playing the game. When one of
my assistants asked them if they could stop, they physically threatened her;
and in the end, I had to improvise by taking over her role for 20 minutes while
she took a time out. However, serendipity can work the other way too. Even
though it wasn’t planned, we discovered that the opening day of a city-wide
arts festival happened to be taking place on the same date, which gave us a
much bigger audience for our own event. We were also lucky that the weather was
stunning on the day, which meant the non-waterproof stickers were fine, and we ended
up with over 200 participants in what turned into a very successful event.
What these examples indicate is
that being practically involved in running a live digital work gives you access
to a wealth of insights into how these kinds of cultural experiences are
mediated, because every action you take goes towards trying to make sure the
story is told in as smooth and immersive a way as possible. It’s like a duck
swimming on water, where you don’t notice how hard their legs are paddling
under the surface. But it also shows that if you’re a researcher that only
observes the project as a player, or interviews those involved afterwards, then
you’ll undoubtedly learn less about the material and social relationships that
produce the kinds of experiences you’re studying, however tacit and
circumstantial they might be.
So to summarise, what did I learn
from The Timekeeper’s Return about practice-based methods for studying digital
narratives?
Well, I gained insights into the
processes of conceptualisation, negotiation and logistics that go into both
designing a digital narrative game, and making it physically happen.
Furthermore, this prototype demonstrated that practice-based methods have the
potential to advance disciplinary conventions by involving scholars in processes
of cultural production that are often invisible to scholars on the receiving
end of these works.
I also found that this creative
method was effective for engaging wider publics with geographical concepts of
place. Not only did the project reach a broader audience than if I’d given a
talk on the history of the Cathedral Quarter, for example, but feedback from
the testing and final release indicated that participants became newly
appreciative of the events and people that have shaped what the city is today.
And lastly, I learnt how the
dynamics of collaboration shape the storytelling opportunities you can pursue
with a work like this. While they impose limitations on the material and
aesthetic qualities of the project, the process of negotiation and compromise
was ultimately productive for the game itself, making the experience more
engaging by asking players to talk to people who work in the Cathedral Quarter
today. Working with partners was also valuable from a research perspective, in
terms of understanding the kinds of decisions that shape the way a digital
narrative is designed, and providing data that’s recorded in emails and minutes
from meetings, for example.
So I’ll finish by briefing
explaining what’s next for my research. I’m currently working on the design for
my much larger Canterbury-based project that’s comprising the bulk of the PhD, and
this currently means making more prototypes to test out my ideas! At the moment
I’m putting together a smaller project in the local area, using the autobiographical
writing of a local author to encourage people to make their own ‘archives’ of
place, using the locative game Geocaching. I’ll then use the feedback from this
prototype to inform what I decide to do going forward, and hopefully be in a
position to share even more insights about practice-based methodologies in
future conferences.
