Exploretum

An exploration-based alternate reality game located in the Washington Park Arboretum, aiming to teach players about the environment and sustainability.

△ Project Type: Game App

△ My Role: Researcher, Narrative Writer, UI/UX Designer

△ Status: Done

PROBLEM SPACE

Exploretum started off as a pivot from Scaventure, a project that I had previously worked on. The basis of Scaventure is going on sustainable living-related quests. Exploretum has grown from a quest based app to a full-on exploration-driven alternate reality game. My team and I built a relationship with the Washington Park Arboretum to develop a game that allows players to explore the park space while learning about the various flora and fauna. Within the problem space of environmental awareness, my team and I wanted to develop a fun way to get players in an immersive experience that will allow learning opportunities and a chance to really get into nature.

QUESTION

During the initial stages of my team's pivot, we were facing the question of what constitutes a fun game. Since we wanted to move away from a general lifestyle app, we began researching and risk analysis into the fun factor of games. Loose narrative-driven games were found to be effective for immersing players yet allowing them to do their own thing. We have been inspired by Pokemon GO's approach. The idea of working with the Arboretum arose, which fit with my team's inclination to work within the field of environmental awareness. With the space of the Arboretum in mind, and the fun findings behind our fun research, my team and I decided that we were going to build a game app that would be driven by various narratives, including Arboretum-related characters and their respective stories.

SOLUTION PROPOSAL

Exploretum is an exploration game based in the Washington Park Arboretum. Players have the choice of playing through three different narrative threads, each headed by a specific character who will lead the player through their respective story within the Arboretum. With GPS positioning, players can track where they should be headed. The character will accompany the player and give clues. After finding the correct corresponding plant, the character will reward the player with additional quests and applicable sustainability-related advice. All of the flora and fauna related quests are based on real nature occurrences within the Aboretum. Players can engage with nature in the park and learn a thing or two along the way.

INSPIRATIONS AND RESEARCH

Aesthetic and conceptual inspiration for this project came from a variety of sources. A trip to the Arboretum, for anyone, would be inspiring. For my team and I, going to the Arboretum provided lots of design inspiration. The vast variety of flora in itself was beautiful.

In order to get more solid inspiration for in-game color schemes, typography, character style, and general flow, we created a moodboard and conducted research in the form of a questionnaire. Questions included whether the user found the images scientific, evocative of adventure, and evocative of mixed realities. We asked ten college students, who make up a part of our audience at the Arboretum.

Gameplay inspiration came from Pokemon GO. Alternate reality exploration came from the player seeing the in-game plant and character in real life as they found each one. The familiar characters and wide world exploration inspired our need to include characters and give players the motive to explore the space.

IDEATION AND ITERATION

Before being set to work with the Arboretum, my team and I had considered multiple game ideas. These included:

Seattle Sustainable Quests

This game would have given players sustainable-living tasks all around the city of Seattle. We considered placing QR codes in multiple spots around the city that players would scan and gain information about sustainable living and also about their next location to go to. Players would earn virtual badges for ever QR code scanned

Arboretum Photo Quests

This game would also take place in the Arboretum and give players quests to go on. To document their accomplishments, players would take a selfie and use a geo filter to show that they would have been in the correct area.

These idea iterations and our risk analysis led to our final game version, Exploretum.

Early project wireframing and early UI screens shown above.

Updated wireframes shown above.

After evaluating our findings from the moodboard questionnaire, the design-focused members of the team redid the game's UI screens and came up with a 3D typography effect to evoke a sense of immersion for the player. Screens of the game's three narrative threads shown below:

PROTOTYPING AND TESTING

Working with the Washington Park Arboretum allowed my team and I to identify our target audience, broadly, visitors of the Arboretum. We learned that elementary school aged children frequently visited the Arboretum through field trips, and observations throughout the park informed my team and I that joggers, dog walkers, families, couples, and singles all could be found in the park very often. With this broad demographic in mind, we wanted to make our app accessible and enjoyable for the average visitor of the Arboretum.

I worked closely with the development side of our team to ensure features of the app were going to be testable within our timeline of testing. I led half of my team in the user testing step, through creating pre-test screening questions, task scenarios, and post-test evaluations.

We conducted user testing with potential players within our target demographic. This included people between the ages of 10-65, who were smartphone users, could walk over a mile, and had a general interest in nature. While doing our user testing, we had the main objectives of finding out whether users felt in control, understood the game objectives, felt engaged, and were concurrently incentivized to visit the Arboretum to further their learning. We utilized concurrent probing and concurrent think aloud strategies to collect feedback from users while they were playing the game and doing the task scenarios.

We had 9 testers at the Arboretum and 1 tester on the UW Bothell campus. Our results showed us that the majority of our players felt that our game was easy to understand, the characters and narrative were engaging to their experience, and that they learned about the Arboretum space.

REFLECTION

Working on Exploretum from January - June 2018 with my four person group was a great experience. I learned the importance of pivoting early and having solid ideas even during the conceptualization phase. I'm glad I got to establish a relationship with the Washington Park Arboretum as a stakeholder, and throughout the months of working on this game my team and I learned more effective communication skills with each other and with our stakeholder.

A large area that Exploretum could grow in is the extensibility of the game itself. The concept of engaging with plants and nature along a path can be applied to the entire Arboretum space, and ultimately to many other locations as well. Another large part of growth lies in adding more game elements throughout the experience, such as having a collection or badge system, and adding multiplayer options to encourage community play.