Gaming The System @ UW: Team 3 Personal Review

Design Goal:

First off, we wanted to come up with a theme that was well known and that people would feel comfortable participating in. We ended up picking a Mario theme. To catch attention in a easily understandable way, we decided to use the giant, yellow exclamation point that is seen in so many games. By using something that people would recognize, we hoped it would draw more attention to our game. We created a sign that asked the player to bring Mario(a plushie that we let the participant keep) to the castle to save Princess Peach. To direct the player, we made a few signs that were designed around dialog boxes in a video game. The first sign that I made had CASTLE and and arrow written on it, as well as a brief notice that the player would need to stop near the castle for a "screenshot". Each of the castles were placed near flags and had Mario themed miniatures that the player could pick up along the way. After each of the castles near flags, we had another sign that said SORRY, princess peach is at another castle. The last sign was for the Final castle. At the final location, we had Princess Peach (a peach with a crown).

Reflection:

Once the game started, we were a bit worried about getting someone to actually pick Mario up. We had a lot of the tour groups look over, but were not able to participate. Other than the tour groups, only a few people walked by and actually looked at what we were doing. We had signs facing both directions along the path, just in case someone was willing to backtrack. Turns out, that actually happened. Our participant ended up being incredibly into the idea and was interested in the entire process, even when we temporarily lost track of where we were leading her. We all just ended up laughing about it, and she understood what was happening even though we couldn't tell her. We moved through the course a lot faster than I had expected. She picked up Mario around 10:05 and reached the endpoint by 10:18, after stopping at 3 flags along the way. Other than struggling to move the castles ahead of the player, everything went pretty well. In future runs, it would probably be better to have castles for all the flags, and possibly try to reach more of the flags.