APD_Week5_Play with Forces_Kory

Theme:

This week's theme is Play and Force. I made a prototype of a sports night running software. The software makes exercising more playful by changing the strength of motivation of people to run and explore at night. First of all, I need to explain that motivation is a kind of force, and motivation is people's willingness. It is a kind of force that can affect what people will do next or people's choices. When the motivation is strong enough, people will want to push toward a particular event. So motivation is also a kind of force.

Method:

First I used triangular brainstorming to help me think. I thought of navigation software through the keyword: navigation. Navigation will guide the direction of a user and it has a strong relationship with the force. So how to make navigation more interesting is my first direction. In the brainstorming content of the play, I thought of serendipity, adventure and chasing something. It might be more fun if the navigation has these contents. However, I've found that generally, people who use navigation are purposeful, that they can't change their route and destination just for fun purposes. If the detour happens to the person using the navigation, it will be frustrating for the person using the navigation. Through further exploration, I found those night runners do not need a fixed route, so I converted the target group into night runners and using force to enhance the experience and playfulness of night runners is the further research goal. It's considered that runners usually guide the running route and present some running-related information through sound. So, I am thinking to provide runners with some more interesting scenarios which can only be felt through sound. And the user's account will be unlocked to record the coordinated position of each scene that the user encounters. The advantage of this is that it is convenient for users to find and experience that scene again, or take friends to that place, and share the scenes that they found with their friends. There are even some achievements that can be unlocked to make users feel more playful. When the user feels more playful to use this software, the force brought by the software will be stronger, which drives the player to explore and chase different sound scenes at night.

Context:

There is a sports exercise software called keeping, and running is one of his software contents. It motivates people to run by simulating scenarios and changes the speed and way of running. For example, when the user needs to run quickly, he will play some movies or TV dramas to the user through a voice that needs to escape quickly, so that the user can feel the urgency and speed up. If the user needs to slow down to jog, keep will play a plot similar to the Jurassic Park movie, where the user needs to keep a small movement and run without waking up the scary monsters sleeping around, so that the user runs carefully and reduces the running speed. The way of software Keep was introduced to me by my friends when they saw my work. The software Keep reminded me of the relationship between motivation and force. The way Keep motivates users has the same thing in common with the prototype I designed, that is, to strengthen the player's motivation and run through a strong motivating force user. But running is only one part of many functions of the keep, maybe due to the volume and complexity of the software, they have not carried out more in-depth iterations on this function. So I conducted more in-depth research and design on the experience of night running groups and finally produced a night running software prototype. Another related design is from the open-world game Zelda. It entices players to explore new and unknown areas through vague light points, and game designers ensure that users can easily be attracted to another goal after completing the event of reaching a key area (2018). So regarding the connection of sound effects in different areas, I designed it so that when users are in one area, they can vaguely hear the sound of another area. This way attracts users to the sound scene they are interested in.

Reflection:

I also consider that the content and geographical location of the sound scene cannot be constant, and how to update and change the content needs to be considered. The first pain point that users will face is that they will lose interest because they know too much about regional content after using the software for a long time. So for future iterations, I thought of random events or NPC plot missions to make the scene dynamic.

Reference

YouTube. (2018). Developer Insights: Breath of the Wild & Player Motivation. YouTube. Retrieved August 24, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZAEI_J0epI.

Link to introduce Keep App: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etDtQbPX0ms