Tag: research

Representations of Dragons in Games

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During my PhD exchange visit at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design, we organized the first GameAnimals seminar. On the day of the seminar, the 4th of October, the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated in Hong Kong, which includes dragon dances in several villages to bring fortune and prosperity to the people and the town. Dragons are amazing. So together with researchers Marleena Huuhka and Dr. Hanna Wirman we set-up a day of investigating and discussing the representations of ‘dragons’ in games.

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Poster made by Marleena Huuhka

Photo 04-10-2017, 12 40 57

Starting off the day in Dim Sum restaurant Dragon Lake House, all 7 participants contributed presentations that discussed different dragon representations from games including Skyrim, Zelda’s Breath of the Wild, Pokémon Go, Mahjong, Bubble Bobble, That Dragon Cancer, Puzzle and Dragons, the Final Fantasy series, Magic the Gathering, Garry’s Mod, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and DOTA 2.

We focused specifically on the differences in appearances, abilities, narrative elements, and cultural aspects that constitute dragons in games. This led to interesting discussions on what actually makes a ‘dragon’ a ‘dragon’ as a fictional or mythical construct. As well as how these representations are culturally enforced, gendered, stereotyped, but also somewhat unfixed throughout games. During this part of the seminar we also noted down keywords of the discussion that we used during the second activity.

Due to a lack of a meeting room, we decided that the second part of the seminar should take place in alignment with true Hong Kong trends: a Karaoke Box. It soon turned out that the echoed microphones and (lack of) singing skills among people in the adjacent rooms added an unforeseen extra dimension to our seminar.

We started with a brainstorming exercise that involved an adaptation of the popular Cards Against Humanity game. In our version, called Dragons Against the Humanities, we used the titles of last years’ DiGRA Conference Proceedings and the keywords we created in the morning to generate new paper titles. This activity led to 7 abstract titles we wanted to explore further:

  • Design Guidelines for Personifications of Dragons
  • Exploring Draconic Identity Experiences in Videogames
  • How Effective are Anthropomorphic Dragons in Simulating the Existential Crisis of Being both a Fairy and a Dragon?
  • Towards a History of Dragons as Valuable Resources
  • The Short Term Dynamics of Meeting a Dragon
  • Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of Dragon Ownership
  • Methods for the Estimation of Degrees of Dragonness

As you can imagine, these titles were quite amusing to us. However, at the same time, it sparked our imagination and gave us new ideas about dragon representations. We decided to divide the titles among participants and start writing abstracts that match those titles. To remove ownership of the work, we chose to work for 7 minutes on each abstract, and then rotate our computers 7 times among all participants. So that every one of us contributed to all abstracts. This must have been one of the most serious Karaoke Box uses ever.  

Photo 04-10-2017, 15 25 45 

Afterwards, we went to Victoria Park to enjoy some daylight and fresh air, and we presented the abstracts to each other. To conclude the fruitful and inspiring seminar day, we all played a local dragon-themed escape room, that we did not manage to solve in time. Perhaps because, as game scholars, we were highly overthinking the puzzles.

Thanks to all participants for engaging with us in a productive day of dragon-game-talk. We are currently considering our options to rewrite the abstracts into conference papers.

 

Co-Designing with Dogs – Open University UK

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The Open University’s Animal Computer Interaction (ACI) lab organized a workshop on the 12th and 13th of April 2013 on Co-Designing with Dogs. This workshop is part of the More-Than-Human Participatory research project, led by the University of Edinburgh. This project has the aim to “explore how a broader account of community – one that recognises the active participation of non-humans – might challenge understandings of how research can be co-designed and co-produced“.

The objective of ACI research is described on the ACI Blog by Clara Mancini, Research Fellow and head of the Animal-Computer Interaction Lab at The Open University:

“One of the aims – perhaps the most important aim – of Animal-Computer Interaction as a research discipline is to develop a user-centred approach to the design of technology intended for animals. Not only does this mean developing technology which is informed by the best available knowledge of animals’ needs and preferences. Crucially it also means involving animal users in the development process as legitimate stakeholders, design contributors and research participants“.

This workshop focused on assistant dog training and specifically aimed to explore how animals can contribute to ACI research and interaction design processes. The ACI lab is planning to design “a series of plug-on, dog-friendly computing interfaces for various domestic appliances to support assistance dogs in their tasks, thus improving their welfare and professional life”. This includes, for example, dog friendly interfaces for washing machines, light switches, and door handles: devices that are currently not informed by the perspective of the dog.

The video that summarizes this workshop can be watched below. The ACI lab follows a meaningful approach that, besides the play-element, is very much in line with the research I am pursuing. I am convinced that it will give a valuable understanding of the needs and preferences of assistance dogs. Furthermore the other workshops of the More-Than-Human Participatory research project could show new examples of participatory design with animals as the intended users.

How dogs watch TV

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In contrast to other dogs, my dogs are not very interested in watching TV. However, with the development of new technologies this might change in the future.

According to Ernst Otto Ropstad, an associate professor at the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science, with the development of newer TV’s with a higher resolution and more frames per second, dogs might be able to actually perceive TV as film instead of a set of flickering images.

Where we as humans need about 16 to 20 frames per second to perceive images as moving film, according to this article, dogs need about 70 frames per second. Still, dogs perceive the content in a different way than humans, because dogs see different colours. They perceive colours with only two cones (retina receptors) where humans have three. In his book, The Truth About Dogs, Steven Budiansky shows the image below, visualising how dogs perceive colours based on a research by Neitz, Geist, and Jacobs. The left size represents the image how humans would observe it and the right side shows the perception of dogs. Due to this difference in visual capabilities, dogs also generally see less detail than humans.

According to Ropstad, not all dogs can see equally well or show as much interest in watching TV as others. There might be a difference in dog breeds and/or an individual difference that has not been researched yet.

The activity of TV watching dogs has already been recognized by Dog TV channel startups that create content specifically for dogs. Besides some ear movements, my dogs were not too enthusiastic about the videos shown for example on the website of DOGTV, but perhaps a better frame rate, bigger screens, and less lazy dogs might give more interesting results.

dog colors

Biotic Video Games

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Ingmar Riedel-Kruse, a physicist at Stanford University, is doing research towards the development of ‘biotic’ games.

According to this article on the Stanford News website the research group developed a video game in which a player’s actions influence the behaviour of living micro organisms (such as paramecia) in real time – while the game is being played.

The goal of this project is to show the biological processes of these organisms and have fun at the same time.

Riedel-Kruse emphasized that these single-celled organisms do not have a brain or the capacity to feel pain. “We are talking about microbiology with these games, very primitive life forms”. However, these type of games could be a tool to stimulate philosophical discussions about where one could draw this line.

The full article can be found here.

Human-Animal Interaction Through the Internet

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This video on the CNN website shows how the website visitors of a Californian animal shelter can remotely interact with kittens through the internet. The application allows its users to remotely move objects in the kittens’ shelter and real-time video is provided so that the human being can see how the kittens respond to their actions. What is great about this project is that Best Friend Animal Society reported that the cat adoptions HAVE MORE THAN DOUBLED after setting up this technology.

Another, slightly older research that focused on remote human-animal interaction includes the Poultry Internet – Mixed Reality Lab project carried out in Singapore. This study proposes and tests a cybernetics system that uses mobile and internet technology to allow human-animal interaction including both visualization and tactile sensation of real objects. The chicken in this video is wearing a hap-tic jacket, and the human is able to interact with the animal by touching a pet-doll object containing sensors, which are transferred to the hap-tic jacket in the form of vibrations. In other words: if the human touches the pet-doll object, the animal feels vibrations through the jacket. Interesting to me in this case is that the tested chickens in a preference experiments chose the room in which the vibrations were activated in 73% of the cases over a room without the activated jacket.

Next to these two examples, there are other technological artefacts that allow for remote human-animal interaction, such as dog GPS tracking products, webcam streams for a variety of wildlife, or the Pig Chase project also referred to in another post on this blog.

The most remarkable thing to me in this case is that all the examples mentioned above allow for human-animal interaction that is initially activated, stimulated, and operated solely by the human being. This results in a type of one-way communication in which the human-being is in control and decides when and how the interaction takes place. However, the results of both projects in the videos above (higher adoption rate and positive preference studies) seem promising for both the human being and the animal.

(Image by Eva Touloupidou)

Fish “Play” Video Games?

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Virtual reality and simulations created for animals could help scientists in studying animal behaviour using new research methods. Even though researchers can never be sure on how animals perceive the world, the environment, and therefore also the simulation of it, a virtual environment provides a certain amount of control and the possibility to exclude (potentially) influential variables.

An example of how virtual reality helps in animal behaviour research is recently published in the Science journal. At Princeton University, researchers have developed a digital application projected into a fish tank that simulates prey for the bluegill sunfish.

In this so called “game” the red dots (representing prey) moved in different ways and it was found that they were less likely attacked by the bluegill sunfish if they moved in group formation. This experiment provided the researchers with more control over the parameters and the coding enabled random formation and movement of the dots. New plans include the development of a 3D environment.

Other examples of digital simulations for studying animal behaviour include cockroaches moving in simulated forests, male moths tempted by virtual female olfactory cues, mice navigating in a virtual maze, and zebrafish chasing virtual objects.

The use of virtual reality and digital simulations for animal behaviour research brings up two main questions for me:

– How do these animals perceive their environment and is this somehow comparable with their perception of reality?

– And is there any reason for the connection of this experience for the animal with ‘play’ or (video) ‘games’ as exemplified in this BBC message or questioned in this article?

I think we should be very careful in connecting concepts such as ‘reality’ or ‘play’ to these experiments, since drawing conclusions based on superficial anthropomorphic statements, such as fish playing video games, could prevent us from actually acquiring a closer understanding of the animal.

(Image by Charles&Clint)

TOUCH project

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image by zachstern

One of the first projects I came across during my graduation research is the TOUCH project: ‘Bringing new Technology to Orangutans for Understanding and Communicating cross-species for greater Harmony‘. This project, carried through by School of Design of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University by Dr. Hanna Wirman, researches the possibilities for facilitating in cross-species interaction and enrichment for orangutans through digital games.

The focus of this project is centered around both human and orangutan and the potential for interaction between these two species. The researchers are aiming for the development of digital games in which humans might be defeated by orangutans through for example visual or short term memory games.

The blog that evolved around the TOUCH project, LUDUS ANIMALIS provides insights and updates on the research as well as an interesting collection of sources on animals, play and a few other animal computer interaction projects.

(Image by zachstern)

Welcome

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I created this blog to provide you, the (hopefully) interested reader, with more insights on the research project I’m working on in the area of technologically mediated animal interaction. More information about me, Michelle Westerlaken, as well as more information about the research topic that captured my interest can be found in the menu on top of this page.

On this blog I’d like to share existing projects, theories, and any other relevant or inspiring information and thereby create a collection of interesting material that is, according to me, worth sharing.

My purpose is to continue research in the area of digitally mediated animal interaction. If you have any advice, contacts, or opportunities that could be interesting for me, please contact me via email or follow me on Twitter (@colombinary).