Talking it Out

So after another week in capstone, I don’t have too much to report on from a standpoint of grabbing more materials, but I was able to talk at great length with many different people about what I would like to do for my capstone, which has helped me to get to move forward, even though I felt like I lost a lot of steam this past week.

Results from Talking

My peers in the HCI/d program were extremely helpful in helping me to look at different aspects and far reaching-ness of the totality of cosplay and self-expression. I was suggested to maybe look at how people dress their avatars and try to make sense of how that maps to real life clothing. Some suggested to just take a look at what people are wearing and see what aspects of their personality are found in their expression of their clothes. I was also asked to see how the DIY culture can be found in cosplay and maybe discover something in that realm. I plan also looking into exemplars like the gap app for the iphone which help one to see what they will dress like with certain clothes on.

A repeating concept that was suggested was to look into how people form their own identities through their clothing and their actions, and I’ll be definitely looking into that. I was also referred to more websites and groups online who practice modding their own clothes, and I would like to see how those actions help to create whom the person is. I’ll also take a look at spyn, and the history of quilting as well to see how the story is embedded within each of our clothes. I was also reminded that some cosplayers like to have many different costumes, and to see why and how people choose the different costumes they choose to make and wear.

BUT…

This past week I also got in touch with some of my friends who are actually cosplayers. They are extremely good people and are quite willing to talk to me about cosplaying. So, I starting talking to them about how it was to dress in costume and then go to cons, and I found out something extremely interesting: while in costume, the cosplayer feels the need to be sociable, but is quite intimidated when around certain spectators at the con. This is the start I needed, and now feel the need to start researching and designing!

Protip: talking to actual people whom you care for in your design will help you substantially.

So, a Mini Elevator Pitch

Here’s a crack at it:

Cosplayers are a group of people who like to dress up in their favorite gaming and anime characters’ costumes. One of the places they go to express their love of anime and gaming is cons (conventions). While there, they feel the need to be sociable to the spectators and other participants, but there is a reluctance to talk and reach out to other people at the con. What I would like to do for my capstone is to take a look at the process of cosplay, the con life, and to see if there is a way to help vocalize this love to others who share the love of anime and gaming.

In order to do this, I plan on researching the self, costuming, the process of cosplay, the con life, and how the con changes the “game”. In order to do this, I plan on taking an ethnomethodological approach to studying the cosplayer and the con, by utilizing ethnographic observations, contextual inquiries, participatory design, focus groups, and experience sampling. Ideally, I would like to be able to go to a con to try out my tool to help vocalize the cosplayer, but if not, I’ll at least try and get a holistic view of their world through interviews and such.

I would like to attempt to make my submission eligible for the student research competition at CHI, hoping to represent the human-centeredness and practical approaches our program has to offer.

My RE5 Experience




















Over Spring Break 2 weeks ago, I bought the new game for the 360 “Resident Evil 5″. I have played nearly every game in the series, and I was quite psyched to play this game. I even bought an additional controller so that I could play this on co-op, but my review/critique will be from the single player perspective. I am also a seasoned veteran of gaming (or at least people tell me I am), so please keep that in mind while reading my thoughts on the game. I also beat RE5 in 12 hours roughly over 3 days, which also shows how enthusiastic and excited about getting to play these series. Oh, and there’ll be spoilers here, so sorry about that.

Story

RE5 puts you in the role of Chris Redfield, who has to go to Africa because there are reports of activity from Umbrella and terrorism going on there. Through the story, you end up going through the villages of Africa, oil fields, caves, and an oil tanker (of all places). At the end, you find Wesker trying to take over the world, citing the typical “destroying the world and rebuilding it to make it beautiful again” rationale. This was a very big let down for me, as it shows the lack of writing put into this game. RE4 had roughly this much worth of story, but at least it was disguised all the way up to the final battle, which this giant letdown was revealed to you in a file.

Anyways, from my perspective, the stories of the previous RE games were very MUCH better. This was probably due to the emphasis on the action, which will be described later. In addition, the pacing of the story of this game in peaks and troughs, given to you in very tiny bits at either in the beginning, or right before the end of each subchapter. The only linking glue to these events (before discovering them yourself) was that you had to stay alive since there were so many people coming after yo, and you had to kill them.

Action

The action was very intense. From the very beginning, the designers set the action to 11 (see a previous to see the reference) in the very beginning, and never let it go down. There was action almost all the time, and very little time to take a breath. There were mostly opportunities to shoot every zombie coming after you, but very few opportunities for 1-on-1 encounters to use the knife to save ammo. One had to also collaborate with the computer to get special attacks on zombies, but a lot of the time, this couldn’t happen for me (see below). Also, I had to barely survive through the whole game, as there was only just enough ammo to survive, unlike RE4, where there was TOO much, even on professional. There were also just health pickups, as opposed to having TOO much health in RE4. This amount of developed action was always present, and definitely squashed any attempt at major storytelling here, and this makes me a little sad at the series. In addition, by allowing one to keep the upgraded guns between difficulties takes away the difficulty of Hard, thus making the game super-easy.

Interactions

One of the better improvements I have found to this game than when I played the demo was the explanations of the different control schemes. Type A is the best, as it mimics the play style of RE4, which is close to the original control schemes on the PlayStation and GameCube (how they should be, for SURVIVAL). The default control scheme for RE5 mimics FPS and action games, which makes sense in the sense of where the designers want to take the series, which is away from the original roots and story of the series.

The UI for the game is much better when one has a full screen, as opposed to a split (when I played it on the demo). I get peripheral vision and depth of field, which allows me to plan my moves on how to get through the areas. Many times I had to use this in order to figure a way out of the areas, as many times there were too many zombies (and I only played it on Normal!). Essentially, my eyes only shifted from the upper-right hand corner of the screen, where the map was, to the center of the screen, where Chris was, to allow me to defend myself and find where I should be going next. They even put a colored indicator to show you where to go (it took away from discovery of the world and after beating it, one has to stop looking at the map to get all of the achievements).

The sounds of the game were very lifelike, along with visuals, and were helpful in cuing me to save Sheva (or myself). I had to abuse the primary game mechanic of saving each other to keep myself alive, especially when I ran out of health pickups (patting each other on the back is quite handy, especially when one was just shot or speared!). The satisfying sound of the gun being played when the guns were upgraded was gone, too. This is another let down.

There were interactive sequences during this game as well, but they were only stuck in when it only seemed relevant, and also when there wasn’t one for a long time. I especially hate these type of cutscenes, mainly because they are fancy means of negative enforcement and have to be done multiple times over in order to move on (e.g. Krauser fight in RE4). This was still annoying, and only added more annoyance when the designers put this mechanic in at the most pivotal of scenes. I also don’t like these, as they go against the notion of what a cutscene is (a chance to recontrol pace and let me put the controller down for a sec, for example, amongst other purposes)

Overall

Overall, while I did enjoy the action at times, there were very many negative experiences. Sheva shot me just as often as she did the zombies. In addition, she ended up kicking me down to the dirt quite often, too, as I was trying to knife the zombies to save ammo. For many of the areas, I had to learn how to get by the huge amounts of zombies by first using the checkpoints, and then learning what I should do from my earlier deaths. This was ultimately frustrating, especially on the boss battles (for the ones that weren’t extremely obvious, which were only a couple). There was only one really fun boss battle, in which I got to use the aptly named (from ATHF) “quad laser”, which beamed down a laser from the heavens.

I also was let down, like mentioned earlier, by the poor story. The use of terrorism as a main story device is quite lame, and could be done much better. And also what they did to Wesker in terms of the story was also anticlimactic, as well. The lasting impression from this game was from the interminable lengths of the levels and fights. Whenever I was done with a fight, I would constantly ask if they were done throwing zombies or bosses at me. Sometimes I had to put down the controller for a respite. But the most annoying part was the final Wesker fight. As you can see from the image above, it took me over an hour to finish him off. There was no self-destruct sequence in which I had to kill him in a couple minutes. That’s just a failboat. I would still recommend this game to others, but there is just as much wrong, in my opinion, as there is right with this game. It’s just a generic action game, not a Resident Evil game. There’s also a LOT I left out here, but please feel free to comment if you want to hear more.

And for those who want to see the quad laser from ATHF, here’s an AOL video of it:

The Other Side of Usability Testing

Experiencing it Remotely

A couple weeks ago, I qualified to be a part of a remote usability test for a site which was undergoing a redesign. The interesting factor for me was that I was not the one giving the test, and I wasn’t in the same room as the facilitator of the test. It first began with having to go to a special site and downloading a player where I could see the facilitator’s screen over the internet. Once I could see the screen, we began the test.

We first did the formalities, and then got into the meat of the study (test). I first given wireframes in black and white of what they wanted the site to look like (some of which were well designed, and others, not as much), and I was asked to perform simple tasks with the wireframes. Whenever I wanted to scroll down or go to a different page, I had to ask for the facilitator to switch the screen, as I had no control. At first, I was tempted to stay with whatever the facilitator showed me, but sometimes I wanted and needed to see what was below the fold and on other pages that I had to ask. It got easier each time to ask for this help.

Once I was done with the wireframes, I was asked to do some more tasks with wireframes marked up by web and graphic designers. Like so many times I have heard before, what was preached was true. I was only able to give superficial feedback on the “prettier” wireframes until I told myself to start looking at the interactions behind the prettiness. Only then was I able to give effective feedback for the team. This is a classic case of having a real life experience augment what is taught in the classroom.

Here are a couple of other important observations from this experience:

  1. Phone Quality Matters – not only was this done over the internet, but I was able to talk to the facilitator over the phone during the test. The room in which the facilitator was talking from had many echoes in it, making it hard for me sometimes to understand her.
  2. High Speed Internet – without this, the usability test would have taken hours instead of 45 minutes. Thanks, technology!
  3. Preparation and what actually happens – it is almost never the case that a facilitator can be truly prepared for everything a participant will want to see. Sometimes, I couldn’t see something because it didn’t pertain to the test, or it wasn’t mocked up yet.
  4. Language – the black and white mockups contained formal language, as did the facilitator. I can’t remember the language of the web designed mockups, but I am pretty sure they were more colloquial in manner.

Have a story from a usability test you would like to put up? Please do!

Experiencing the Experience Prototype

The Obvious Tips for Our Final

We were entrusted with some words of wisdom to think about when we are starting to do our final experience prototype and disability exercises. The first tip: you have the free will to say no to a specific disability exercise if it makes you feel uncomfortable. The second tip: don’t perform any unsafe disability exercises. The third tip: remember that different people have different social levels. In other words, there are people who aren’t very social and those who are, and factor these into the creation of these exercises.

Returning to the Last Movie Experience

Trying to draw a dragon in Spirited Away is especially tough if one hasn’t seen one, never mind trying to feed one. In order for an animator to do this well, one has to know how to draw the motions and emotions behind the movements.

Putting together these facts, and the emotions of the movie, we then analyzed the movie to find the underlying concepts and experiences waiting for us: the care and protection of the main character; how does one tame a wild beast?; the underlying allegory of the dragon and how humans should act towards each other; how to be brave; what it truly means to be brave.

We also looked at this movie from the anticipation one has when the word dragon is used. We also looked at how the Western notion of the dragon (evil, terrifying), contrasts the Eastern notion (reverence, sign of luck), all of which intertwines with the anticipation of the dragon. There is a fancy word for this: intertextuality – the blending of different texts and expectations, culminating in a shared meaning of an entity. We also looked at the emotional realism was playing behind the dragon: though it did look like it dragon, it contained the face of a dog, which humans invest certain emotions in (love, for example), which contrast the typical notion of what a dragon is. Without this emotional realism, or if this was changed to a different type of realism, these emotions and nuances would be completely different than those mentioned here. These nuances are also combined with the other metaphors of used in the dragon’s behavior and motion: the eel, snake, and gecko.

More From Buchenau and Suri

We continued our look into this influential paper. We first relooked at the definitions presented in the beginning of prototype, experience, and experience prototype. From this, we then took a look at the goals of the paper and the technique: develop experiential understanding, explore and evaluate ideas, and communicate the results to others.

The general flow of the paper was written as follows: project description, prototype creation, generation of insights, and sometimes the validation of those insights. We looked at two examples – the AED vest and the ROV operation.

For the AED project, the folks at IDEO asked: what is it like to be a patient? Hoe does it feel to unknowingly receive electrical shocks, and how does it affect life for me and others? To answer this, they wore beepers and wrote down the experience of when/where/whom they were with as it happened. They found out that it was important to get a warning of when the shock would occur, and also to let others around one with the AED know of the situation.

In the second example, they took a look at the controls of a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV). The problem they were trying to solve was the cognitive confusion of the operator. To gain insights, they first rolled up a piece of paper, held it to their eye, covered the other eye, and tried to find a PostIt note in their office. For more insights, they developed a 2 person game, where one would hold a camera, and the other would give verbal controls as to where the camera should go, all the while avoiding the obstacles in the office. They found the necessity to clearly distinguish between the camera and controller operations. They also asked someone who did this for a living, and the guy validated these insights.

From our professor’s standpoint, he felt that the technique is quite worth doing, though the writing of the paper made the insights and prototypes appear very superficial. The writing also didn’t present a “robust theory of experience and prototypes”, which was only a couple paragraphs long, as opposed to this 15 week course on experience and its design.

Drawing Upon Media Studies

Remember when we talked about media? We talked about the power of the medium and its ability to communicate some expressions well, and others not so well. Media studies does this all the time, and we can use their theory to make our experience prototypes better. We can think of our prototypes as a medium, which participates in the culture at large – don’t forget about the power of intertextuality! This allows us to combine different media to create a better and powerful experience for all the senses. We can also use the theory of 4 models of remediation to bolster the experience, and make it resonant within our body and soul.

More FAQs

We can think of this prototype as a process, whose interactions are developed over time. This draws upon the philosophy of Dewey, the whole experience vs an experience argument, the notions of doing and undergoing, the beginning, middle, and ends of an experience, the losing and reestablishing equilibrium with one’s surroundings, and utilizing all of this to do a better job at making a prototype than IDEO did. Our prototype should have uniformity in its variety of interactions, should also have an overall quality leading to an emotional quality, and help to provide some sort of closure.

Whenever we start talking to each other, we are relating experiences to each other. These are the notions of reality (life as lived), experience (life as felt), and expression (life as told). Using all of these theoretical tools will help elicit greater expressions from us as designers, and begin to get our heads thinking in the right direction. We can use interviews and experience sampling to also gain insights as we go along in our disability exercises. If there is any change in what one considers routine, then it should be expressed and written down as useful information. In order to do this, though, we have to start researching some disabilities and be as specific as possible to help the others in our group learn through these exercises, which could be of permanent or temporary disabilities.

See you after CHI 2009!

The Origins of 11

It has been mentioned many times in class to turn our efforts up to 11. The origins of this phrase are actually from an awesome movie This is Spinal Tap, which is one of the main references Guitar Hero draws upon. The movie, from YouTube, is shown below for your pleasure.