Feedback was fairly positive to our progress so far, but did point out the apparent bias in the materials we had playtested with so far (i.e. the materials strongly support the struggles of the Downwinders community vs. the IR/justification perspective) as well as the problem of moderating 40+ players at a time. Overall the ETC community as a whole appreciated the deep research we had done so far and looked forward to playtesting a more fleshed out implementation of our ideas.
Besides Halves, the team was able to meet with 2 creative professionals: Mike Brett from Archer’s Mark and Ananya Malhotra from Princeton/Oxford. Both were very excited and intrigued by the project. Mike answered several questions regarding how to tell a fictional story based on real testimony or real events. He recommended that we lean into fiction in order to distill feelings. Given our initial hesitance to misrepresent true experiences, we would likely avoid doing anything offensive. Ostensibly, playtesting would also catch inappropriate representations as well. Ananya had similar enthusiasm, particularly with how quickly the project had appeared to progress compared to academic papers/publications. She also offered to connect us with her research contacts with the Department of Parks and the Downwinders society. One observation from the team was if we had contacted these experts sooner, we might have benefitted from their expert advice sooner. Consequently, this would mean we would have been able to show our experts more concrete materials by this point in the semester (rather than merely introduce the project/talk in broad strokes).
Besides Halves, programming added Text-input fields and forms to the build as well as connected the web GL builds to the Google Forms API. While shoestring/hackneyed, the Google Forms API was relatively simple to setup/use. It won’t allow us to do Client to client networking (e.g. if we wanted clients to see the cursors of other users), so we’re paying close attention to player feedback that would require us to shift to a more complicated networking framework.
Next week, we plan to make progress towards a digital MVP and shifting gears from research/pre-production to production. We also plan to start gathering playtesters to evaluate the digital MVP.
