The main focus of this week in the Story Lab was our guest lecture from Dr. Troy Innocent, who deals with the elements of code and other digital artefacts in the physical world. Troy’s lecture mostly surrounded his work Urban Codemakers – which was a project which injected elements of video games into a real life game with physical artefacts to collect. It was a really interesting lecture, as it gave us more insights into how the things we learn about at uni can have successful, real world applications.

One of the most interesting things I took away from things from the lecture was how, by engaging users in something such physical collection of artefacts, you pushed them to create their own story, as well as engaging more in the story you have already created. Troy also spoke about how the locations of the physical tokens which were used for collecting points, often held significance in relation to the project as a whole In relation to our project, it encourages us to think more cleverly about how we create push off points between each of our artefacts.

Another thing I took away from Troy’s lecture was his emphasis on the endgame – that closure to a project is incredibly important. I think we definitely need to keep this is mind with our project, as we are encouraging users to piece together the story themselves. I think having a fully fledged story, even if we are the only people who know it, would be very helpful overall for our project.