08 ARD 215 Communication and Media

This brief had to produce 60 seconds of interaction, for 2 people using mobile phones. They may or may not see one another was also part of the brief.

I managed to produce a mind-map that produced results, I find that they rarely produce any inspiration directly, but they do stir the imagination. Part of my map came up with the word backwards and this reminded me of when I was a member of the PTA when my children were at school. They organised an inter PTA sports day and one of the games I was part of was pushing a wheelbarrow backwards blindfolded with a colleague giving me directions. Apart from the confusion of realising that my lefts and rights were reversed my colleague had to think twice about which direction to shout out! Needless to say, my directional skills were useless and despite being given the instructions I was in fact going the wrong way, When I was instruct to go left I did in my mind go left, but in fact I was going right. I thought I was going the right way but I eventually went off at a tangent with my colleague screaming at me. We lost! Came last, no surprise there, maybe in hindsight I was not the best person for this game, I had collapsed in a fit of laughter and I have never forgotten the experience.

OK, I had the raw idea about going backwards, and at first I thought about a game of chess, but I thought that was too complicated. I then thought about chequers, a simple game in itself but facing backwards? The idea was for each person to move the other, so that eventually they would meet. Then I experimented with various grid sizes to find a size that wasn’t too big, nor was it too small. Eventually I came up with a 9 x 9 grid which was big enough, but not too small. I marked out room 41 with a grid and found a couple of volunteers to try the idea out. The opponents are not allowed to look at one another, we did not use mobile phones but we were able to communicate each move, and for the test I used pieces of paper to plot the progress of each player. It worked surprisingly well; I would be a little more awkward to communicate using mobile phones to talk and the phone’s screen to plot the progress.

So I came to plotting the game using a grid and directional arrows. One part of the game I hadn’t thought out was… what if you move a player out of the grid system, after some thought, the game would belong to your opponent. As the game progressed, you would move a coloured disc to the square you had instructed your opponent to go to, so each would plot both players on the screen of their respective mobiles. If you touched back to back (Name of the game) then you would win if your opponent came into your back, and vice versa. If your move brought your opponent to a square diagonal to you or a move put you opponent on the same level then your opponent would win.

I did produce a storyboard of an intro to the game Back2Back. After thought, I felt the game was perhaps too easy, so I would script the coloured discs to gradually fade and eventually go invisible after 5 moves from each person, from there on you would have to go by memory.

I enjoyed this brief, apart from rekindling an old and happy memory; it was fun thinking and plotting it through. I did think about using blinkers but I thought that OTT. What would I have done differently, I don’t really know because once I had the idea about the backwards game of all those years ago, I could think of little else.

Images from the brief.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25867722@N03/sets/72157605146575925/

More Images

http://flickr.com/photos/25867722@N03/sets/72157605158146509/