Lights, Camera, (Inter)action | Week 13 | Assignment 3 Reflection Statement

Each assessment has been getting harder and harder throughout the whole semester. For this final project, we were given the freedom to use either tactile or non-tactile interaction. However, it is a requirement to create something that sustains audience’s attention for 5-7 minutes. When I first learned about it, I thought that it would be impossible for me to achieve with my lack of skills in Max. I am a person who gets stuck very easily whenever a topic is very broad and I am given alot of options to choose from.

For my solo project, I was very indecisive of what concept I was going to do for my project throughout the whole final assignment period. I tried executing multiple concepts and I changed it entirely whenever I faced a dead end. Finally, I made a decision to replicate this card matching game that I came across during my class visit to the Melbourne Museum. It was an exhibit about memory through sound. I thought that the concept is quite simple and clear but I knew that it had room for more innovation. That is when I remembered what Camille had said once during class about a student creating an ‘impossible’ game in order to make its players to keep playing. This was what gave me the idea to make my game even harder so that players spend more time thinking on my game.

From there, I thought to myself about how I could make the game extra confusing for the players. I made a decision to display 16 cards which comes to 8 pairs. Firstly, I found a picture of all the different types of cards and I edited them in the format to create toggle buttons in Max. I picked only black cards with big numbers that look similar to each other like the numbers 9,10, Q, K. I’ve also made sure to edit out the numbers written on the cards. This was so that the players do not get the benefit of obvious colour and number distinction. After creating 16 toggle-like cards on Max, I connected all of them with different alphabet keys on the keyboard. Since there were only 16 cards, I only used the alphabets A to P and fortunately for me, the order of the alphabet keys are randomized on the keyboard. This was so that the position of the cards on the screen will not obviously be the same position as the keys on the keyboard. This way, players not only have to remember the position of each card, but also which alphabet keys triggers which card on the screen. That was the tricky part in my game to confuse the player’s memory skills.

When going deeper about the technical challenges that I faced, there was the crazy amount of effort and time it took for me to connect every object to each card. As I have 16 different cards, there are only 8 correct answers/pairs but about 224 of wrong possible answers for all the cards. I had to create/list all the wrong possible answers in order to let Max know what to do when a wrong pair is selected. It was extremely frustrating for me because all the lines made it hard for me to see all the output and input points and it made my computer lag very badly. There were times where I missed or connected an object wrongly and it took me almost forever to figure out the problem when there were so many lines covering the screen. What I’ve learned during this process is that, I should always do a simple version to do some trial and error first before working on a much bigger scale. This is because, one small error could affect the whole entire thing and it becomes a waste of time.

For my group project that I did with Lauren and Charmaine, we had a similar concept of making an impossible game so we created a jigsaw puzzle. Not only that, we added a timer that will reset the jigsaw puzzle again back to the start after just one minute. This game would be extremely hard for someone to match all the pieces quickly when you’ve only seen the original picture for the first time. We wanted to create that moment for players where they think they were close to success, only to be disappointed as soon as the timer ended. Our group decided to divide a picture into 36 pieces and get them to start in really random locations.

I would say that both my solo and group project have been quite successful because I’ve watched players interacting with the projects for more than 7 minutes during our media exhibition day. Mine was especially quite hard for some players. There were some players who gave up mid way and some took more than 10 minutes to complete. I think that both work is perfect for people who loves a challenge and loves to win. It requires a lot of focus and time to complete both games.

From this experience, I think the techniques of interacitve art making requires one major element, curiosity. An artwork should have a good first impression or an attractive presentation to make people curious to want to find out what happens next. That is how a person can keep their attention on one thing longer.

Lastly, there are a lot of things I believe my work could be improved on. For example, for my group project, it would be good if the timer in the project could start automaticlly on its own when the first pictures is being moved rather than having to start manually. As for my solo, I believe that it still has some flaws when the rules I’ve created are not followed. For example, the cards would flip if it was clicked on with the mouse. It would also be good if I could figure out a way to restrict only two cards to be allowed to be flipped over at a time. Currently, if multiple keys are pressed at the same time, they all open together. However, all in all, I am very proud of what I’ve achieved with very little knowledge of the software, Max over the period of 3 months.

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