Shy Flowers (Week 10 Theme: Play & Stillness)

By Helen Kwok

Theme: Play & Stillness

Context:

When I knew about this week's theme, stillness, I immediately thought of the game Florence (2018), where in a chapter titled 'Letting Go', the player can only progress when they do not do anything. Every time they interact with the game, it would reset the chapter. I thought it was a very interesting way to convey stillness as an interaction, where the player is forced to do nothing.

I wanted to create something similar, where the player is rewarded in an experience through stillness (lack of movement). If I had to combine the two keywords from the Play and Stillness categories, it'd be 'reward' and 'waiting'. I want to create a relaxing "lean back" experience where the player is passive in the interaction (Bogost 2007). Victor Navarro Remesal (n.d.) calls this "slow design" in slow gaming: where a game is designed around slowing down, taking our time, doing nothing, or not much at all.

Method: 

Create an interactive experience where player movement is captured via a webcam, and triggered by motion detection. Any movement resets or rewinds player progress, while stillness progresses it. Players have to wait an uncomfortable period of time in stillness before they get a reward.

Response: 

I ended up going with the idea of flowers blooming, where the flowers are too "shy" to bloom when there is too much movement around them. The inspiration for this came from the night-blooming cereus, where flowers bloom only at night - like they were too shy to come out during the day with people around them. Another idea I also had was animals that come out of hiding or camouflage only when there is no movement captured, but quickly go into hiding again when motion is detected.

After finding a public domain video of flowers blooming, I input this into TouchDesigner and tweaked their motion detection system to trigger two states: when there is movement, rewind the video at a quick speed; when there is stillness, play the video at normal speed. Players have to wait and stay still for around twenty seconds before a congratulatory message appears (the reward).

Special thanks to the following playtestesters:

• Matt
• Uyen
• Si
• Ben
• Rachael
• Phoebe

Video Credits: Flowers video from Pixabay

Music Credits: Clouded by Public Memory from the Youtube Audio Library.

Reflection:

Through this exercise, I was able to delve back into TouchDesigner again which I haven't used since Studio One. It was a good opportunity for me to apply some of the skills I learnt in Brendan's TouchDesigner workshop too. I also learnt how to add code in Python to trigger changes in the video's parameters. I wanted to incorporate the ambience music inside TouchDesigner, but ran out of time to figure out how to do this.

My playtesters seemed to "get" the idea of using stillness to make the flowers bloom quite quickly. I tried to introduce them to the experience with a simple premise: "Try and make the flowers bloom". At first, I had the keyboard and mouse in front of the computer, and playtesters was trying to use them (while sitting). In my next round of playtesting, I put them away, moved the chair so players had to stand, and refined my instructions to be: "Try and make the flowers bloom with your body". It was funny to see how Ben and Matt really played with the movement mechanic and moved their bodies on purpose to get the flowers to "rewind" and "bloom". 

Matt also made some suggestions on how to improve the overall experience, like adding an audio cue when players reach the win state, or stopping the music when the flowers rewind. I agree with this. A future iteration could be to include something more rewarding in the win state, e.g. a butterfly or a bee can flutter in, to make the waiting pay off and reward the players for their patience. I would also like to test this on a big screen in an area with lots of people and traffic - and whether they would slow down and stand still to make the flowers bloom.

Lastly, I found it really interesting to observe players actively being still in order to complete their goal. It's an action that we rarely engage with due to the busyness of everyday life, so I was curious to see how uncomfortable they felt doing so. I was surprised how all the participants was able to reach the end quite easily. Perhaps I could've slowed down the video even more to make the stillness experience longer. 

As researcher Lone Koefoed Hansen questioned (cited in Riley & Nash 2015): "artworks engage participants through degrees of physical activity or passiveness while alternating between states of immersion and reflection... (is) the participant immersed in the experience of the artwork, or are they reflecting on their interaction?" I wonder what went through everyone's minds as they gazed into these yellow flowers? Were they reflecting on their behaviour? I thought today's response was an interesting little experiment into contemplative interaction.

References:

Bogost, I 2007, Persuasive Games: Video Game Zen, Gamasutra, viewed 3 October 2019, <https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2585/persuasive_games_video_game_zen.php>.

Mountains Studios 2018, Florence, video game, Annapurna Interactive, viewed 20 March 2018.

Remesal, VN n.d., Slow gaming, notes for a contemplative game, O Magazine, viewed 3 October 2019, <https://abcdefghijklmn-pqrstuvwxyz.com/slow-gaming-notes-for-contemplative-game/>.

Riley, M & Nash, A 2015, 'Contemplative interaction in mixed reality artworks', Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Electronic Art Annual Conference (ISEA 2014), ISEA International Foundation Board, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, pp. 260-266.