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Digital Creativity 2006, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 157–162
1462-6268/06/1703-0157$20.00
‘Ere be dragons: heartfelt gaming
Stephen Boyd Davis1, Magnus Moar1, Rachel Jacobs2, Matt Watkins2, Chris Riddoch1 and Karl Cooke1
1 Middlesex University, UK2 Active Ingredient, UK
1 IntroductionThere are three unusual features to ‘Ere be dragons. It is technically unique in combin-ing the use of heart-rate monitoring and the global positioning system in a pervasive game on Pocket PCs. The motivation for its de-velopment is also unusual. Supported by the Wellcome Trust’s SciArt programme, Dragons is art and science; it is a ‘serious game’ in that it has an underlying agenda concerned with public health. Among digital games it is also unusual in affording open play.
2 Innovation for gameplayMany games create pervasive alternative worlds, which extend the digital experience out into the real world using either headsets or handheld displays—some of them as games or artworks (Benford et al. 2005). The innova-tions of Dragons were made to support health objectives, to enhance gameplay and to further our artistic exploration.
The player’s experience of Dragons in its simplest form is as follows. To begin, the player, wearing a heart-rate monitor, inputs his or her age into a PocketPC. On this basis, an optimal heart-rate is calculated and the player proceeds to walk wherever and in whatever way they wish. During the walk, an on-screen landscape is built. If the player does well, adequately exercising their heart, the land-scape flourishes. Insufficient exertion causes the local area of the landscape to become impoverished; over-exertion leads to the growth of dark, forbidding forest. Feedback includes sound, so that looking at the screen is not always essential. At the end of a session
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the player can expand the world by making new journeys or change the existing world by improving their heart rate performance over the same journey.
Dragons benefited from work already done by Hewlett Packard and Bristol University for the Mobile Bristol project (Hull et al. 2004). The Mobile Bristol Toolkit enabled us to author in Macromedia Flash, with access si-multaneously to position data from an attached GPS device together with data from a heart-rate monitor by ScienceScope, a company who had also developed a sensor bus enabling the connection of multiple sensors to pocket computers. A number of innovative projects had already been created within Mobile Bristol (Benford et al. 2005, Cater et al. 2005, Williams et al. 2005), but no previous project involved heart rate monitoring. Elsewhere, projects have integrated bio-sensing with loca-tion data in a game: for example Headon and Curwen (2002) developed a system to drive the game Quake, but this was tied to an indoor location while we needed a system that was free-ranging.
For the most recent version of the game, staff of the Mixed Reality Laboratory at Not-tingham University built a global interface for audiences to view the players live while they go on their journeys, and created a client-serv-er system to send and receive data between the global interface and the players. This altered the game significantly by allowing social aspects absent from the earlier versions. In-dividuals’ maps join and overlap, creating an ever-growing subjective map of a real physical environment.
3 Dragons as a ‘serious game’Part of our motivation was to make a differ-ence to people’s perception of healthy living, but we did not want to make a conventional sports game. We were primarily targeting those who were not interested in sport or health issues. We wondered whether we could engage people with the interior world of their
own bodies—specifically the performance of their heart—and in so doing incite them to behave differently.
Changing computer game play from twitches of the thumbs to moderately vigor-ous walking requires a shift in understanding. Lankoski et al. (2004, p.415) point out that a requirement for physical movement may actually repel hard-core gamers. One of the appeals of videogames is that they translate the slight twitch of a thumb into an elegant and impressive whole-body action such as sprinting up a wall in The Matrix: Path of Neo (Shiny Entertainment 2005), wielding mas-sive swords in God of War (SCEE 2005) or jumping improbable chasms in Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Ubisoft 2005). However much fun, conventional interaction limited as it is to mouse or game-pad presses does little to promote a healthy lifestyle.
Physical inactivity is a well recognised problem which threatens society as a whole through the direct and indirect costs of obesity, and threatens the long-term happiness of the individual. Obesity reduces life expectancy by an average of nine years, and by much more in smokers (Association of Public Health
Figure 1. Two scenes from the landscape of ‘Ere be dragons, showing the differing characters of terrain resulting from the player’s heart-rate performance.
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computing of Babbage and Lovelace. Since programmes are so easily conceived as sets of rules and mechanisms for applying them, there seems a particular tendency when play is offered though digital systems to opt for those forms of play which are already most systema-tised. They favour what Callois termed ludus, the goal-oriented, structured game, over paidia —freeform, exuberant play (Caillois 1958). This tendency appears as staged objectives, such as the levels typical of so many videog-ames, or as the imitation in digital media of games which are already highly systematised. This of course fits all too well with the sys-tematisation of sport discussed above. Typical ludus games among mixed reality projects are Nautilus (Strömberg at al. 2002), and Touch-Space (Cheok at al. 2002), both played in a fixed space with a strong game narrative and clear objectives. The FIASCO project seems at first sight to share our objectives but the goal of their gameplay is
to dominate territory on the map(Chang et al. 2004, p.330)
an aggressive assumption which we do not share.
Perhaps because of our arts-based ap-proach, we are open to players doing what they will with what we’ve made. Dragons is an open work, in the sense Eco uses the term (1979, p.50) to refer to both openness of inter-pretation and the more literal openness made possible by interactivity. This approach has been characterised by Gaver as ludic design in two senses (though Caillois might have called it paidic). It is the design of pleasurable experiences which are motivated by curiosity, exploration and reflection rather than exter-nally-defined tasks. It is itself also an open, perhaps playful, design process that is open to unforeseen possibilities (Gaver et al. 2004).
It is true that in our game there is a clear imperative or rule: for the player to maintain their heart-rate at or close to the optimum level. However this is not an end-goal; rather it is an environmental condition. It is up to
Observatories 2005, p.10). For some health problems, such as coronary heart disease, type-2 diabetes and osteoporosis, activity is far more beneficial as prevention than as cure (Dept. of Health. 2004). Planned government programmes are not expected to achieve the necessary change in behaviour (National Audit Office 2006, p. 49). Alternative strategies are needed.
Huizinga (1949, pp.195–197) traced the varying fortunes of the body in relation to play, from its deprecation in the middle ages and Renaissance through the growth of ball games in the seventeenth century, to the systematisation and regimentation of sport in nineteenth century England (thereby sacrific-ing much of the play-quality). Since Huizin-ga’s time, ‘sport’ has increasingly become an operation of consumer capitalism where play-fulness has even less significance. At the same time, many people are not only uninterested in healthy living but repelled by anything associ-ated with sport. Unfortunately several recent projects have aimed at those already commit-ted to sport and fitness. For example Virku, which connects an exercise bike to a virtual environment, is intended as
a fitness computer game which aims at mak-ing the exercise session more motivating and rich in experiences.(Mokka et al. 2003)
Shadow Boxer (Höysniemi et al. 2004)—which includes heart rate monitoring but does not use it as part of the game—is also aimed at those explicitly interested in increasing their fitness. Our game is intended, through the creative play of building a responsive world, to incite in the player a curiosity about their own body and health, not to concern them with explicit targets, nor the guilt arising from failing to reach them.
4 Open play and explorationComputers are systematic machines—though the question of whether they are inherently limiting has been debated since the proto-
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players to decide how they want to play. In fact, they could increase their heart-rate to dangerous extremes if they wished, or attempt to make the rate fall as low as possible. They can follow the same route on every occasion, or explore new territory every time. The game can be played for any duration. Sessions can be resumed, or a new one can be initiated; in the latest version, players can play on their own or together, collaboratively or competi-tively.
The openness of Dragons is most evident in its emphasis on exploration. Two spaces are explored by the player: the everyday world (re)presented as a game-like landscape, and the interior space of the player’s own body. Our aim was to generate levels of meaning by visualising the player’s personal response to their journey through the landscape, building traces of their action in the environment.
By using GPS, the game environment is tied to the player’s real space, so features in the virtual world are encountered in a fixed re-lation to the real one: a certain location will be seen on screen each time the player passes a particular bus-stop, encouraging the player to see a perhaps mundane walk as an exploration. We drew on the legacy of psychogeography,
effects of the geographical environment, con-sciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals(Debord 1955)
and on contemporary ‘totemic geography’ where artists such as Clifford Possum Tjapalt-jarri and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri work with different scales and geographical orientation within a single painting, treating the land itself as a sign system (Morphy 1998). Most directly, the metaphor of the project derives from explorer’s tales and maps such as the Hereford Mappa Mundi (Mappa Mundi). Mapmakers were reliant on anecdotal informa-tion often further embellished through being second-hand (Berthon and Robinson 1991, pp.47–100). The unknown was a source of fear and therefore populated with dangerous
beings such as dragons. The unknown in our case is as much the body as the world.
We wanted to construct a window on the body, sensitizing the player to their health and bodily processes. Our previous experience (Cherubini et al. 2003) suggested that play-ers would engage with the opportunity to see invisible aspects of their bodily processes. The player’s own bio-data is re-imagined into a virtual space, uniting the physical and symbol-ic in truly embodied interaction. As a record of a personal journey, Dragons maps the physi-cal and psychological states of the individual player along their way, echoing the metaphori-cal journeys of Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan 1678), Don Quixote (Cervantes 1605), or The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien 1954–5) in which geography becomes a surrogate for events in the traveller’s personal development (Moretti 1998, pp. 48–50).
5 Reflectingontheplayer’sexperience
Evaluation of the Dragons project continues: effects on health behaviours will require a long study.
For the Singapore version of the game, us-ing solitary play, players gave a very positive response to the integration of health issues and the awareness of heart rate activity within an engaging game experience. The ‘liveness’ of the heart rate data changing the virtual land-
Figure 2. Dragons as an open game. Some players chose to play com-petitively, others to play alone.
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Stephen Boyd Davis has made and taught digital media since 1984. He runs the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, Mid-dlesex University, a dedicated research and postgraduate teaching centre where Magnus Moar, whose background is in psychology and artificial intelligence, specialises in crea-tive uses of educational technologies. Rachel Jacobs and Matt Watkins (Active Ingredient) come from performance art backgrounds. Their innovative work has included large-scale installations and web-based work. Professor Chris Riddoch, Head of the London Sport Institute at Middlesex University deals with the effects of physical activity on health, and positive interventions, especially with chil-dren. He was the Senior Scientific Editor of the Chief Medical Officer’s 2004 report on Physical activity and health. Karl Cooke runs the university’s Human Performance Lab and researches the interaction between fatigue and sports performance.
