Photo Scale Game 

Description:

2 people collaborate on a journey taking photos of gradually smaller and smaller things.

Person A (Alex) has a phone and is on the streets.
Alex is prompted to stop and take photos in 3 different streets/possible directions.

Person B (Beth) chooses a street/direction from the photos and sends the chosen photo back to Alex.

This repeats, though this time Alex is prompted to take photos of 3 buildings on the street that was chosen.

Again, Beth chooses a building and sends the photo back. Alex is then prompted to take photos of gradually smaller and smaller things, focusing in on a tighter area each time...

- rooms in the building/views through windows
- parts of the room/view
- objects or details in this part of the room

Duration: 30mins

What was it like to play?

Partners: (Phone & Online)

Sabiha & Martin - photos/log from phone
Alastair & Irma - photos/log from phone
Jouka & Leif - photos/log from phone

Taking photos on the phone and waiting for one to come back felt slow and arduous.
Making a meaningful direction choice using 3 photos wasn't easy or obvious. There was lack of feedback as to whether photos had arrived/been seen.
The game took too much time without any development - the same gameplay/activity was repeated - no sense of progression

Leif found an unusual stairwell by being forced to look around
Of the teams only Jouka & Leif took photos of smaller and smaller things

What motivations did people use for choosing directions/photos?

For phone player
- took photos to provide good options
- took photos for the other person
- took photos that would be interesting but without leading to embarassing or difficult situations

For the online player
- what might be an interesting direction
- curious about a particular building in the photos (the Gatehouse)
- like chess, planning your moves ahead, ie. what might yield interesting choices later on

...

Sabiha's feedback - I was the one staying "home" and selected the details. I enjoyed receiving the pictures and selecting the details and saw a great potential in how this could work as a game for people that know each other. Moving people through "remote and/or pervasive control" features a lot of excitement but I think it would be important that the person either knows the place or knows the person he/she is directing since it might be hard to imagine and not as exciting to play if there are online unknown factors.

...

Technical

Some photos appeared in a different order than they were taken
- is this GPRS latency?
- where and how are the photos being timestamped?

How could it develop? 

Set a goal to find a particular place or object

Try over a different timescale. Over a long time...
- you're not waiting at every turn, you just go back when a place is chosen
- you may lose the immediacy/momentum

Be able to go back to an earlier place and decide to explore that instead

Generate a tree like structure from all the places visited

Share photos for visitors to explore a place

Link peoples photos into a single big multiuser tree
- other users can append branches
- you build a profile by the branches you append
- search the tree by looking for users other branches (like amazon.com's 'people who bought this also bought'...)

The potential for a family of strangers
- seeing people you recognize from photos

References

Mobilemate - recommender system in Korea
Streamline personal radio - uses database of user/expert/technically defined playlists