“A Really Bad Idea” – Danah Boyd, Microsoft

Blowtooth is a unique game where players must smuggle virtual drugs through REAL airport security. Of course, no actual crimes are committed – the game uses bluetooth to store a list of nearby passengers during the airport check-in process. Later, players are challenged to find those same people in the departure lounges.

The game is available for free for Android devices, on the Google Play store. It only works when you are in a real airport.

There is more information on the project website – www.blowtooth.com

Blowtooth was developed to explore the limits of pervasive gaming in public spaces where the constant surveillance of law-abiding and innocuous behaviour has become the everyday norm.

It challenges passengers to reconsider their position and their relationship with the faceless airport security infrastructure. If you will be treated like a smuggler in the game of security, why not engage with that in your own, playful, way?

Publications

Kirman, Ben and Linehan, Conor and Lawson, Shaun (2012) Blowtooth: a provocative pervasive game for smuggling virtual drugs through real airport security. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 16 (6). pp. 767-775. ISSN 1617-4909

Linehan, Conor and Kirman, Ben and Lawson, Shaun and Doughty, Mark (2010) Blowtooth: pervasive gaming in unique and challenging environments. Proceedings of the 28th of the international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems . pp. 2695-2704

In 2011 I was invited to participate in a Rewired State hack on experimental prototype applications for Honda, as part of the Honda/Guardian “Dream Factory” event.

Along with the Corridor of Dreams, I made GetLostBot, a free service that challenges you to break your routine and explore new places. Once you sign up, GetLostBot will quietly keep an eye on the places you visit. If it feels that you are going to the same places too often, it will send you a challenge. When this happens, you will receive a message with some mysterious walking directions. Follow these to discover a place nearby that you have never been to before!

GetLostBot uses the Foursquare API to track user checkins and examines recent behaviour. If the user has fallen into a routine, it finds a nearby location they haven’t visited and creates a challenge for them. It sends the user a tweet or email with a link to an unmarked map with walking directions to the new place. Importantly, it doesn’t tell the user where they will end up! The user is forced to “venture into the unknown” and follow the directions in an adventurous spirit.

The app is online here – go sign up!

GetLostBot won the Honda Dream Factory prize in the evolution category, and has since been featured in a wide number of press, including New Scientist, Wired, Metro, the Guardian and a bunch of places online.

Publications

Ben Kirman (2012) “get lost, GetLostBot!”: annoying people by offering recommendations when they are not wanted. In Proceedings of the 2012 RecSys workshop on Personalizing the local mobile experience (LocalPeMA ’12). 13 September 2012, Dublin, Ireland (pdf, slides)

Ben Kirman, Conor Linehan, and Shaun Lawson. (2012) Get lost: facilitating serendipitous exploration in location-sharing services. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference extended abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’12) 5-10 May, 2012, Austin, Texas (ACM)

In 2011 I was invited to participate in a Rewired State hack on experimental prototype applications for Honda, as part of the Honda/Guardian “Dream Factory” event.

Gareth Lloyd and I worked on designing a passive digital installation art piece called “the Corridor of Dreams”. It took the form of a lightbox framed in a “thought bubble” that would automatically detect passers-by, and using some clever AI algorithms™ determine their inner hopes and desires, which would instantly be reflected within the display.

Although quite a simple idea the implementation was technically challenging. We used the LEGO NXT brick with ultrasonic sensors to detect movement (in order to trigger the event), a USB webcam to capture the image of the approaching individual, OpenCV to analyse the content of the image and an Arduino-powered “Peggy” display Gareth constructed, in order to create the dream display. This was all plumbed together using Python, and deployed on a concealed Ubuntu Nettop.

FearSquare is a site which connects your Foursquare checkin history to the Police UK crime database to get an accurate picture of crime levels in your daily life. It was constructed by LiSC as a critical application that shows a more honest view of crime statistics. Most uses of crime stats have negative implications (avoid this area, etc) and we wanted to create a more provocative and reflective application (hence the scary theme).

http://www.fearsquare.com

There are high score tables on the site that show the most “dangerous” places in the UK, and users are challenged to gain more points by visiting real world locations that have high levels of crime. By visiting these locations the users are forced to reflect on the meaning of crime statistics and challenge preconceptions about areas they may normally avoid.

Publications

Andy Garbett, Conor Linehan, Ben Kirman, Jamie Wardman and Shaun Lawson (2012) How dangerous is your life? Personalising Government open crime data. In: ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems 2012, 5 – 10 May, 2012, Austin, Texas. (pdf)

Andrew Garbett, Conor Linehan, Ben Kirman, Jamie Wardman and Shaun Lawson (2011) Using Social Media to Drive Public Engagement with Open Data. in proceedings of Digital Engagement Conference 2011 (pdf)

Playtter is a social nutrition application that allows users to upload pictures of food using their mobile phone camera, and then visit the website to get feedback on the quality of their nutritional intake. Web users are free to access Playtter and “tag” random meals with nutritional information, following the UK “Eatwell” healthy diet guidelines.

Nutrition data for meals is generated based on aggregation of social opinion, and Playtter can then build up a profile of a user’s typical diet over the course of their usage. Using this longer term data, it is able to provide personalised recommendations to users based on their actual diet, without the intervention of 3rd party dieticians. This opens dietary feedback to the general population, who may be at high risk of diabetes and other negative health effects based on their diet.

More information about the Playtter project is available on the RewiredState projects pages.

Playtter is an evolution of a previous study into diet at LiSC called Tag-liatelle. As a game designer, I went into Playtter trying to apply game design principles to make food diaries into a playful and light experience for the user. Dietary and other medical interventions can usually be so serious and depressing. I really wanted Playtter to appeal to the curious and playful natures – it is simple to upload photos and there are very few barriers to quickly seeing what people are eating. This for me is the essence of “gamification” – trying to make non-game tasks appeal to playful natures.

There is also something really appealing about the voyeuristic aspect of seeing what other people are eating. The design tries to encourage this by using anonymity, and allowing non-users to contribute tags (the reward being to see more food).

Publications

Conor Linehan, Mark Doughty, Shaun Lawson, Ben Kirman, Patrick Olivier and Paula Moynihan (2010) Tagliatelle: social tagging to encourage healthier eating, Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors (CHI), April 10-15 2010, ACM Press, Atlanta. (pdf)

Feckr is an Android application that allows you to secretly “tag” people with messages. Tags are anonymous, permanent and public – every Feckr player can see all the tags for people around them. Unless they also play Feckr, your victims will never know what you really think of them.

The only problem: Feckr is scattershot – when you create a new tag, it gets applied to everyone nearby, whether you mean it or not.

More information about Feckr is available on the website, www.feckr.me. The application itself is available for free on the Android Marketplace.

Feckr was made to explore mischief with technology for playful experiences. The concept explores the idea of using mobile phones as a co-conspirator in naughty fun at the expense of strangers, who remain unaware of the existence of the game. It aims to challenge the assumption that HCI should be always study noble and positive applications – and that mischief as an important social force is equally important.

As a game it builds on my interest in social mischief (see my presentation at FROG in 2009). I’m really interested in the way games provide looser social rules that allow people to play around with social acceptability. I like that Feckr offers this slight “veneer” of gameyness that gives players permission to be rude about real people, in ways that they would never do to their face.

It’s also cool they way tags are publicly shared between players. There’s a secret club of Feckr players sniping strangers all around you. This works particularly well in social events like conferences – you get to bitch about people for every ridiculous reason, and share the fun with an anonymous cabal of other conference goers.

Publications

I introducted Feckr at MobileHCI 2010 in Lisbon, Portugal.

The workshop paper is freely available:

Kirman, Ben and Linehan, Conor (2010) Call for capers: naughtiness and mischief in mobile play. In: Please Enjoy!? Workshop at MobileHCI 2010, 7-10 Sept 2010, Lisbon, Portugal

The accompanying presentation about Feckr is available online:

In collaboration with the University of Lincoln Animal Behaviour, Cognition and Welfare Research Centre, we created Tagpuss, a web project that aims to investigate how people interpret the emotions of cats. Users are invited to contribute by tagging cat photographs. Each picture tagged supports the research into anthropomorphism and anyone can help as there is no need for any special skills. The website is free, easy to use, and is currently available to everyone.

The first aim of the Tagpuss study is to investigate the feasibility of using “citizen science” to study the field of animal behaviour. Secondly, we wish to investigate the feasibility of studying the field of attribution of emotions to animals and develop hypotheses to drive further research in the field.

To date, the study has been incredibly successful with over 66000 tags submitted to our repository of 1603 cat photographs from over 6000 active users. We recently introduced the capability for users of the site to enter their own tags for any image and also to upload their own cat photographs which will be available for tagging in the near future.

Tagpuss was created by the irrepressible Derek Foster, with collaborations from myself and the rest of LiSC.

What I really like about Tagpuss is the interaction flow. The users don’t need to register, and are immediately up and running generating data for the study. Also, one of the strongest findings is that it is compelling. Cat pictures areintrinsically rewarding for many people. We don’t need to dress it up with points and high-scores (e.g. like The ESP Game), it is already a playful activity.

A lot of our inspiration for Tagpuss is from sites like KittenWar andRateMyKitten, taking the streamlined cat-based feedback loop and adding a crowdsourcing twist.

Publications

Derek Foster, Ben Kirman, Conor Linehan, Shaun Lawson, Daniel Mills, Sarah Ellis and Helen Zulch (2011) “I Can Haz Emoshuns?”: understanding anthropomorphosis of cats among internet users. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), Oct 9-11, MIT, Boston. (pdf)

PASION Fruit is a social game about virtual fruit gardens. Each player, upon registering to play the game, is asked to choose a real location for his or her garden, which will be important when it comes to paying for transport costs to send fruit to other players.

The game is centred upon the concept of gifting. The objective of players is to collect a diverse variety of fruit, and the only way to gain new fruit is through gifts from fellow players. When registering to play the game, players are assigned one “native” type of fruit based on their home location. The types of fruit available differ based on country, so, for in-stance, while players in the UK may grow Apples, Pears and Strawberries, players in Italy will be capable of growing Lemons, Grapes and Olives. Over time, all fruit trees will generate fruit that can be sent to other players as gifts. When sending a fruit, a player must pay a negative cost in terms of CO2 emissions that are calculated as a function of distance it costs more points to send a fruit great distance than to local co-players. E.g. it will cost considerably more to send an exotic fruit to somewhere far away than it will to send a fruit to someone in a nearby location.

The formal goal of the game is to gain points based on the diversity of fruit types within your garden, however this is balanced against the environmental cost of trans- porting fruits long distances. Since each country only grows a certain subset of fruits natively, in order to be successful players are forced to transport more exotic fruit from other locations.

PASION Fruit was developed as part of the PASION project (Psychologically Augmented Social Interaction Over Networks), a major European project involving 17 partner organisations from all over europe, funded through the EU FP6 scheme.

Publications

Ben Kirman, Francesco Collovà, Fabrizio Davide, Eva Ferrari, Jonathan Freeman, Shaun Lawson, Conor Linehan and Niklas Ravaja (2011) Social Architecture and the Emergence of Power Laws in Online Social Games, Proceedings of “Think. Design. Play.”, the 5th DiGRA conference on games and play, Utrecht (pdf)

Familiars 2 is based around the concept of each player owning a companion animal – a virtual sprite or creature similar in concept to Pullmans dæmons, which take an animal form that represents the personality of the owner. The pattern of a players interactions and behaviour in the social network of the game and Facebook itself is used to directly decide what animal form a player’s familiar should take. For example, a player who has many friends and is very active in the social environment of Facebook, the familiar may choose to take the form of a highly social animal (e.g. a rabbit) to reflect this aspect of their personality. Similarly a relatively less socially active player’s familiar may choose to be a solitary creature such as a Bear.

Familiars can be considered a self-presentation tool. The key difference is that the player has very little direct impact on the form the familiar will choose, since analysing the actual behaviour of the owner makes this decision. For example, allowed to define their own identity, players may choose to represent themselves as highly social. However, in Familiars 2, by analysing the observed social activity of the player, this may not prove to be an accurate representation. The application was developed on the “Facebook Developers Platform” and made available to all Facebook users to install on their profile. By agreeing to install the application, a small box would appear on their profile page showing the current animal form of the familiar and a link to show more details. Within the application itself, users can see the current familiar (and the reasons why it has chosen this form), the social status of any groups the player is a part of, and may also suggest the familiar runs facial expression recognition on specific photographs in order to learn more about their owner.

Publications

Ben Kirman, Eva Ferrari, Shaun Lawson, Jonathan Freeman, Jane Lessiter and Conor Linehan (2009) Familiars: Representing Facebook Users’ Social Behaviour through a Reflective Playful Experience, Proceedings of Advances in Computer Entertainment 2009, ACM Press, Athens. (pdf)

Magpies is a game of collection. In many cultures, Magpies are birds associated with the activity of collecting small shiny trinkets with which they decorate their nests. Players in the game work individually and create collections or stashes around a theme determined through free text entry. Other players are invited to contribute items that match the theme, in the form of text, images and/or locations. The stash then builds up over time as a list of curiosities that match this theme. Players can rate one another’s stashes and compete to build the most popular collections. Players are also able to create and join arbitrary groups within the system. Groups are ranked against each other based on the status of the players within, to add a socially competitive angle to an otherwise individually driven game. Magpies was tested internally through a series of usability evaluations and focus groups in order to fine tune the game design and interface, before being released officially on the Facebook platform and being made open to the public.

In Magpies, as an addition to the main game, users were exposed to a variety of measures based on a selection of standard Social Network Analysis (SNA) indices. These were split into group and individual indices. The Group Indices included Group Cen- tralisation, Group Reciprocity and Group Density. The Individual Indices included Degree Centrality, In-Degree Centrality, Out-Degree Centrality and Reciprocity. By showing these measures to some players and not others, we built up a picture of how social feedback effects engagement in social games.

Magpies was developed as part of the PASION project (Psychologically Augmented Social Interaction Over Networks), a major European project involving 17 partner organisations from all over europe, funded through the EU FP6 scheme.

Publications

Ben Kirman, Shaun Lawson, Conor Linehan, Francesco Martino, Luciano Gamberini & Andrea Gaggioli (2010) Improving Social Game Engagement on Facebook through Enhanced Socio-Contextual Information, Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors (CHI), April 10-15 2010, Atlanta, ACM Press (Nominated for Best Paper/Honourable Mention) (pdf)