I Like Frank

Design Issues

Setting a context

For Street Players, I Like Frank took the form of a one hour experience as part of the 2004 Adelaide Fringe; a festival of performance, art & theatre in South Australia.

The 60 minutes was bookended with one to one interactions with performers. To begin the game, Street Players were given a time to turn up at a specified room on the University campus. There, players were registered, stripped of their personal belongings and inducted into the task of the game before being given a mobile phone and sent out into the city.

The induction was carried out by a performer whose role was both to instruct players on using the phone and to set the mood of the event. The induction lasted less than 5 mins, allowing a maximum of 12 players per hour.

Mapping and building a location

Map showing the I Like Frank game area, approx 400m x 300m (scale 1px=1m)

The process of mapping & building the location for I Like Frank took place over 7 weeks. The boundaries of the game area were initially defined according to some of the practical constraints of the work; in particular, how far Street Players could walk in the 40 minute time limit and the extent of the test 3G network's coverage.

Beginning with a series of exploratory walks and discussions with local artists, this area of the city was mapped with photos and written observations. Observations extended to personal recollections of the area. Particular attention was paid to mapping the peculiar corners: cut-throughs, alleys, dead ends; zones more often inhabited by someone taking a fag break than someone passing through.

These observations became the messages that Street Players received from Frank while they walked through the city. They sought to build awareness of the city's public spaces as a home to private experiences of loss and longing.

At the same time, they aimed to guide Street Players through the city to one of a number of locations where they could help/be helped by Online Players and eventually find the final, secluded destination of the work.

For Frank's messages to work in this way took a long process of iterative testing. Initially, Frank's messages were numbered and these numbers were written drawn onto photocopied street maps. Test players read out the number of their location via a phone or walkie-talkie and received the corresponding message.

As the map became more established these messages were transferred to a 'colour map' - the design tool written by Martin Flintham to use coloured coded zones on maps for structuring allocating location-based content.

Colour map used by the game server (scale 1px=1m)

As the work developed the colour map became more sophisticated allowing multiple messages to be attached to locations, sensitive to a player's time in the game and if they'd visited the location before.

Working with the colour map allowed relatively quick editing and tweaking of Frank's messages, even after the work had opened to the public.

At the same time as developing the location-based content and colour map, matching maps were produced for Street Players' phone interface, for performers to use while on the streets and for the control room's management interface.

Finally, a virtual model of the same area of the city was built for the online interface.

View of the virtual model used in the Online Interface (scale 1px=1m)