Reflections on running Ambient Quest at the 2007 Women in Games conference
University of Wales: Newport
19th-21st April 2007

The game Ambient Quest was selected by the Women in Games steering committee to be run as the conference game at the 2007 Women in Games conference.

An instruction sheet and a pedometer were supplied to each of the delegates when they registered on the first day of the three day conference.

I spoke briefly to the delegates after the opening address at the start of the first day of the conference and explained that they should wear the pedometers and that they would be able to use the number of steps measured on the pedometers to determine the number of moves they could make in a simple 2D virtual world.

During the first day I had many people coming up to me and telling me that they were wearing their pedometers and curious about Ambient Quest.

Over the second day I had the same experience, except people were also now telling me how they were managing to cheat (shaking their pedometers) and how far they had walked. They seemed happy that they were managing to cheat and even happier about the distances they had walked. There were also a number of conversations about how far they should be walking each day (the consensus was that they should be walking 10,000 steps).

People were also telling me how they had walked further in order to increase their pedometer readings, for example walking instead of getting a taxi.

There was also a further interesting development which was as a consequence of the way the pedometers were built. They had an external reset button which was easy to accidentally press, returning the reading to zero.

People were telling me how their pedometers had reset, normally after they had accumulated a large number of steps. Then people started to ‘mod’ their pedometers by pulling the reset button off them, so that they could not be reset accidentally (I think this modding movement may have been led by Barry Atkins, at least he seemed to be a leading proponent of button removal). This pedometer modding was unexpected, emergent, game behaviour that I had not predicted. 

During the day a couple of people asked me to put their moves into the Ambient Quest game programme, but this was a much smaller number than I was expecting (I had installed the game on four or five computers and shown one of the student helpers how to run the game).

Despite this low engagement with the virtual world it was very clear from the conversations that I was having with people that they were aware they were playing a game and that their movements would affect movements of an avatar. I had a very strong sense that people were engaged together in an ambient game through their comments. I had thought that they might ignore the game altogether, or just compete to get higher readings. However there was a very real sense that the virtual world of Ambient Quest lay behind the conference.

By the third day it had become clear that the delegates were largely not interested in the process of transferring their pedometer readings into the Ambient Quest 2D world though they did continue to refer to the game. They already had a good idea of the gameplay and it was as though they didn’t actually need to go and see it played out on a screen. They could imagine it, which may not be surprising considering the conference delegates were mainly game researchers and developers. Additionally the conference had an extremely full program; there were a lot of distractions and lively networking between delegates.

After the end of the conference I had a conversation with Julia Sussner (who had spoken on ‘Interactive environments and the heterotopia of multiple-mappings’ on the first day) which clarified and confirmed some of the game playing behaviours that were occurring. Julia suggested that the cheating was fine while the reset button was intact since the pedometer had cheated by resetting itself. After removing the reset button she didn’t want to cheat any more. She also confirmed that she had changed her behaviour, walking instead of getting a taxi. This was confirmed by other delegates.

Julia also made an interesting observation about the way people were reduced to ‘steps’. The ‘steps’ to ‘squares’ transfer when using the pedometer reading to determine moves on a 2D map, involved a numerical to graphical transformation. Perhaps there is a sense of enlargement when taking the scalar steps and using them to create vector moves. In his book ‘Little, Big’, John Crowley describes a world behind our world in which ‘the farther in you go, the bigger it gets’. Beyond the moves on the 2D map there is an avatar with attributes, armour, weapons, supplies, gold, experience and so on. The deeper the player moves into the game the more complexity they will find and the richer the game experience.

The stated aim of this ambient game was to be as ignorable as it was interesting (as specified by Brian Eno for ‘Music for Airports’) and to allow players to determine their own levels of commitment, from ignoring the game to fully engaging with it. Ambient Quest certainly appeared to deliver on this with conference delegates lying on a spectrum of full to superficially slight engagement.

I wonder to what extent the reaction of the delegates would have differed if they had just been handed pedometers without a game attached. My observations and conversations lead me to think that they would not have been as engaged; there was a definite buzz at the conference that something novel was being tried and that something was happening just out of sight, driven by the pedometers everyone was wearing.