Michelle Toni
Ciara Marino
Raechel Gulledge
Jillian Burnette
Ryan Haugland
Looking at the Aris website, we decided that the app was a compilation of learning games organized by grad students of UW School of Education's Games and Learning Society group. We checked out one of the many articles about the game called "2011 ARIS Global Game Jam draws participants worldwide" which was written in 2011 in the Isthmus. The article mentions that the main goal for the app was to take advantage of mobile learning through "growing an open-source community around mobile location-based games to find out what's possible with the medium." In it, the author mentions the growth of the app: 50 new games were added to the app within the first 50 hours. The term "growth" is then a perfectly acceptable term to describe the path of the game. After this, we were eager to see what the fuss was about.
After downloading the app, we created an account and went directly to the location-specific game as directed. Not sure where to go from there, we scrolled through the games and noticed some were rated well, some rated poorly, and some not rated at all. We started with a top-rated game: the campus tour. We were sort of confused at first what the point of the game was, but eventually we realized we simply just had to go through the all checkpoints and listen to the video recording describing each checkpoint. Although it didn't seem like much of a "game" it was really cool as you could literally walk to each checkpoint using the map they give you and et a full campus tour for free. (Because we have all already been through a campus tour and because of the weather, we decided to just enjoy the tour through the comfort of our warm coffee shop meeting place.) We checked out another game that showed us some street art that was scattered throughout the UW campus and that gave us prize arts if we completed certain "quests."
Overall, while these games weren't your typical "games" they created a mobile-interactive, location-specific way to learn about the location your in and other topics such as art or botany. We enjoyed exploring the app but wouldn't turn to it as our first choice of mobile gaming.
I definitely agree that theres games were not ones that we would first think of when we think of "games." I picked a game that was similar in that it was a "tour oriented" game, and I thought it was unfortunate that this assignment fell on a weekend that was so cold. This app has some interesting content that is worth exploring.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was playing this "game" i thought the exact same thing. A game that makes use walk around campus in the cold air doesn't exactly seem like a game I would enjoy playing. However, it was cool having an app use my location to complete objectives. My first choice of gaming in this winter weather would most certainly not be one that makes me walk around campus, so I agree with you there.
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