Week 11 Update
This week I began sketching and prototyping for Project 3, the perspective inversion exploration. I began by mapping out the qualities of my last few projects and their opposite polarities:
| Recent Projects | Opposite Polarity |
|---|---|
| Non-commercial | Hyper-commercial |
| Reflective | Instinctual/guttural |
| Qualitative/Personal | Quantitative/Impersonal |
| Calm | Stressful |
| Non-goal oriented (Atelic) | Goal Oriented (Telic) |
| Present/Aware | Distracted |
These help map out the end experience I want for the participant: overwhelming, stressful and impossible to manage. However, it also needs to be fun and engaging, at least at first – the player/participant must be willing to enter into the critical dialog in the first place. By embracing the hyper-quantitative and distracted qualities of interaction design, the intervention will aim to generate critical awareness by becoming increasingly terrible to participate in. I can really lean on my previous experience in UX and e-commerce for this project: just do the opposite of everything that's good and holy (or for the corporate-speak crowd: by leveraging worst practices).
My initial sketches for creating this experience involved using multiple, simultaneous points of interaction to create an impossible to manage, always out of control dynamic. After some more ideation, I landed on a concept of simultaneously trying to 1) mow lawns to earn money, 2) spend money buying trinkets online and 3) text with potential clients to line up new mowing jobs. If this was an arcade game, it could look something like this:
I committed to the approach buy purchasing a used USB racing wheel, a 10-key number pad and a USB volume spinner/button that will serve as the controls for the game. While I wait for those to arrive, I started testing prototype interactions in Godot. I got a little bogged down trying to figure out how all the game mechanics and systems would work together, which felt dispiriting. I jotted down some loose notes before deciding that I should just start coding the thing and I'd figure out the guts later.
My new goal for the week was to get something working in Godot and see if I can control multiple parts of the game/UI at the same time. I found a prototype that I made last summer while learning Godot: it's a top-down driving prototype for a car game. With a little moxie, it could also work as a mowing game. I added a number input and a text placeholder to try passing number values from the keyboard to the UI. So far everything is working, and the next goal would be to add a scrollable list of things for the shopping mechanics. Driving and typing numbers at the same time already feels impossible, so I think it's on the right track.
