Victouria is an augmented reality app designed to encourage the exploration of urban and Parklife settings around Melbourne. Whilst the app itself isn’t entirely a game, it focuses on using a gamification platform to breathe a level of fun and interest into exploring various sites of Melbourne and learn about the culture and wildlife of the area.

Games themselves can exist in a critical display of culture, social and political themes (Flanagan 2009). So whilst Victouria isn’t designed to be an exact display of current cultural states, it strongly keeps in mind that acknowledgment of past cultures and politics is very important to current day life. Mary Flanaghan touches on the difficulty of including critical play of these themes in games, whilst maintaining a level of fun.

Victouria will hopefully maintain enough fun, in its promotion of encouraging exploration. By being an interactive app that affords the users to be able to search up various walks and parks inside the app, it already serves a purpose as a walk/hiking place generator. But we would like to add an extra layer of complexity to the app, by including historical and cultural information in relation to Australia’s rich indigenous history.

The app would also have a map system that rewards players as they hit milestones along a particular trail. Whether that is every 250 steps on the 1000 step Dandenong walk or a 1km mark along the Merri Creek – the app will reward the player with some form of achievement point and in doing so will also display new information about the area they are currently exploring. Hopefully, this will challenge the user to want to complete the walk, not only for achievement points but also to find out the next part of a historical story about indigenous culture in the area.

 

Victouria will blend reality-based gaming and a paideiatic platform with a more pervasive gaming style. Whilst the app itself is mostly focusing on nature walks itself, we’re hoping to include playful stories (Dreamtime) and augmented reality animations of historical fiction moments to blend the reality of the world into the cultural-educational magic circle. 

Duggan (2017) notes that encouraging urban play in adults is difficult after adolescence, but I think that adding the educational values, and cultural information that we as adults should be interested in should hopefully lure the user in. Melbournians are also overall obsessed with getting amongst nature, and finding what is in our own yard – so if that’s naturally happening, why not include some cultural background to our exercise and holistic yearning for the outside.

Blending these two layers of reality activities (the walks) & story-based media (education) is important in how the users interact with the app (or game) itself (De Souza 2008). By encompassing both we’re allowing the user to take in as much from the app as they want; whether that’s an inspiration for where to hike on their weekend or a genuine interest in learning about the local area.

For the iterative cycle I asked two people what their opinions were on the original concept;

First, was my friend Jesse. A recluse gamer, who has no interest in the outside; and his general consensus was… why? So an unsuccessful response, which is where I think it was important to think about our target audience. As an outlier in Melbournian explorative culture, we wanted to focus the app towards tourists, and those who already love to explore – but would like to add an extra level of engagement to the walk.

Second was my partner April, who really liked the idea – but she wanted to know what set it apart from the various websites that already list walks and hikes along with information. She suggested that really leaning in on gamification would be a good way to go, which is why we wanted to include the checkpoint achievement system, as well as focusing on clean modern UI – which most of these websites are not using (hello Google Blogspot websites circa 2009). We also spoke about potentially adding a community system to post about your own stories and information on the land, but thought that it could possibly be quite difficult to moderate and fact check the information – possibly adding a disclaimer **User information, not confirmed**.

 

In the design of Victouria I think one of the things I learned is that perspective and research is immense in the development. There were so many ideas I wanted to execute and implement, but I didn’t have the education or perspective to implement them. I think to make a really powerful app or game that successfully shows off a form of critical analysis of culture, politics, or representation it really needs to be a hugely collaborative effort.

I think next time around I’d really want to focus more on the details of the stories. It would be really cool to include stories, videos, animations from local indigenous artists around Melbourne. I wanted to have the checkpoint system release information from a different Dreamtime story from the area along with indigenous artwork animation, for a really cool immersive method of education. Fully integrate indigenous culture and perspectives into the app rather than just creating it from the lens of a few white uni students. I’m not all over the cultural information of Melbourne and Australia, so I think if this app existed and was executed really well, I’d love to use it.

 

De Souza, A, Silva, E, & Sutko, M 2008, ‘Playing Life and Living Play: How Hybrid Reality Games Reframe Space, Play, and the Ordinary,’ Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 447-465

 

Cote, A 2018, ‘Curate Your Culture: A Call for Social Justice-Oriented Game Development and Community Management’, Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice, University of Washington Press.

 

Duggan, E 2017, ‘Squaring the (Magic) Circle: A Brief Definition and History of Pervasive Games’, Playable Cities, Springer. 

  

Flanagan, M 2009, ‘Chapter Eight: Designing for Critical Play’, Critical Play: Radical Game Design, MIT Press, Cambridge MA.