Just over 3 years ago (autumn of 2001) Marc Eisenstadt met a couple of a couple of awesome games programmers and graphics designers: Jason Reeve and Chris Kiveal, from a games/animation company called Arereal Ltd. By the end of December 2001 we put together a fantastic (IMHO) little concept document while searching for some funding. We’ve all gone on to other things, but I figure that it’s pointless to have this thing gathering dust. What with semantic web crawlers, FOAF, and co-depiction photographs populating certain corners of the blogosphere and research worlds, someone may well want to latch onto this and run with it (or, for that matter work with us on it). If so, please get in touch.

Roving Friends – concept document, December 2001

by Marc Eisenstadt, Jason Reeve, and Chris Kiveal

Game concept headline: Artificial Life meets rare collectible cards in the form of autonomous, net-roving, data-collecting bots scriptable by schoolchildren.

Research issues headline: Can we create a motivating and challenging set of cooperative games built on asynchronous technologies, while still offering the appeal of the competitive/synchronous games that are so popular today? [We think our scriptable bots may be the 'missing link'.]

Fig 1: Rare holiday snapshot of two remote bots, emailed back to child as proof of ’sighting’. This concept artwork was created as a prototype for this bid, based on existing Arereal animated characters.

‘Roving Friends’ is intended to be both a new gaming genre and an experimental testbed: with it, children will be able to create their own autonomous net-roving ‘bots’, designing both physical appearance and behaviour. The bots will be ’sent out into the world’ to traverse a child-friendly sub-part of the net via ’safe islands’, and will meet other bots, interact with them, and report back to their owners (via ordinary email) with status updates, news stories, travel logs, and ‘holiday snapshot postcard attachments’ that will include evidence of having encountered other bots (see Fig. 1). The Roving Friends ‘apparent network topology’ will mimic physical geography, so bots can be encouraged to travel to remote locations and foreign lands and report back with their findings. Children will be able to update their own bots remotely via emailed attachments containing ‘repairs’. Bot-bot interactions will promote cultural diversity and ethical trading, while the Roving Friends main website will publish league tables (e.g. most popular bots, most active bots, classrooms with most children taking part, schools with most classes involved, etc.) and ‘rare bot sightings’. Children will be able to undertake simple geophysical experiments by logging bot-supplied data, and even social psychological and anthropological experiments by logging bot-bot interactions.

Children and schools will also be able to design their own local (school-based) ‘Botrium’, where the bots can reside temporarily and interact with each other. bots will be able to leave their Botrium and search for other Botriums on the Internet around the world. When they arrive at these Botriums they will interact with other bots and collect information, such as pictures of the school, information about the school and the town in which it is located, and elementary geophysical data. This information will be emailed back to the bot’s owner, along with ‘photographs’ of the owner’s bot with its new bot friends. bots will also be able to play trading games with other bots (like card collecting games), and they will also collect addresses of Botriums they have visited — ‘train spotting’ style (some sites will be more difficult to locate than others). Bots may share addresses with bots they especially get on with.

At any time, the child will be able to log on to the Internet and follow the activities of his or her bot. Each Botrium will be registered on our own server to prevent unofficial Botriums turning up. Bot owners will design the behaviour of their bots through a simple scripting language that will allow children as young as 8 to begin programming their bots, yet will allow more advanced users to develop ever more complicated behaviour algorithms. Bot-scripting in this way is a strong and significant differentiator from superficially similar concepts such as NeoPets, Creatures, The Sims, KiPulKai, ToonTown, Roamer and a variety of comparable A-Life, virtual world and Logo turtle navigation environments we have studied in detail. The scriptable algorithms will dictate how bots interact with other bots, how they navigate the Internet in search of Botriums and how well they will play games with other bots such as ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ or card trading games. Plugins and ’skins’ will ensure modularity, updateability, and scaleability of the Roving Friends worlds.

Competition and live interaction: two key elements of Roving Friends are (a) asynchronous contact with remote bots via email, which minimizes the amount of obsessive interaction that can occur in many action games, yet maintains a high level of interest, and (b) the friendly/cooperative nature of the bot-bot interactions, wherein collecting photo postcards, receiving travelog stories, and sighting ‘rare’ bots can be quite motivating in its own right. Nevertheless, we’re aware that in the case of (a) a certain amount of restricted ‘live interaction / remote control’ of a given bot may be desirable to increase the sense of engagement, and in the case of (b) some more competetive bot-bot interactions may also prove to be an essential feature for certain children. We would like to turn this potential design dilemma on its head by making it an object of study: we believe that it will be not only possible, but indeed essential to have, in the case of (a), both asynchronous and synchronous modes of owner-bot communication and control, and in the case of (b), both cooperative and highly competitive interactions among the bots themselves. Table 1 describes these two dimensions, with the cells containing illustrative examples of the kinds of Roving Friends interactions that would be possible:

Table 1: Example interactions along asynchronous/synchronous and cooperative/competetive dimensions

We want to push Roving Friends as far into the asynchronous+cooperative realm as possible, but are aware that we also need to understand how far we can push things in this direction, and also to which audiences this will appeal. Roving Friends offers both a new gaming genre and a unique experimental platform for studying all of the cells shown in Table 1. An added benefit of this approach is that we can scale and schedule the synchronous activities, e.g. by limiting each bot to (say) 5 minutes of real-time interaction with its owner daily, in order to keep the children interested in the asynchronous side of things, and also avoid the dilemma of endless hours of obsessive online interaction to which players of very strong multiplayer games such as Asheron’s Call are prone. Even asynchronous activities can be time limited (1 email per day from a bot, or 1 10-line instruction to a bot, for example).

The stereotypical ‘video-game-junkie synchronous+competetive shoot-em-up player’, in our opinion, can be encouraged to migrate into the equally challenging world of asynchronous+cooperative activities involving highly motivating rare collectibles and difficult yet satisfying tasks. The very premise of Roving Friends relies upon this, but we must realistically study the tradeoffs, and that is something we believe resonates strongly with the goals and aims of [potential funding agency].

Subjects

Creativity: Users will design and create their own bots and Botriums. Children will need to think how best to design their Botrium to attract foreign bots and provide fun information.

Thinking Skills: Users will design their own behaviour through simple scripting languages and tools.
Citizenship: Bots will interact with other bots and report back to their users with information about other schools and owners from around the world.

Geography: Because we will have the apparent network topology mimic actual geography, the scripting of the net traversal algorithm will inevitably depend upon some understanding of geography. Children will have to know their maps in order to track down those rare bot sightings! Another element we want to explore is the use of actual Geography outside of the ‘Botrium’ connections, e.g. bot 1 can meet bot 2 on top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, do some exploring, and send back information, stories, and a postcard from there.

Language/Writing: The bots will send back ‘news stories’ based on pre-supplied editable templates. Creation of new templates will encourage strong writing/journalism skills. Advanced users will be able to program their bots with dialogue capabilities, and bots will then communicate with one another in ways that extend their language capabilities.

Computer Science/Maths: Children will quickly begin to understand the principles of computer programming by using the script language programming tools.

Learning Objectives

Roving Friends will be designed to encourage good citizenship, inquisitiveness, and appreciation of cultural diversity. A subordinate goal will be the introduction of logical thinking, programming, and debugging skills through the ‘back door’ of FAMILY: Friends Agent Markup Language (more fully: Friends Agent Mark-up Internet Language for Youths). National curriculum targets related to citizenship, culture, language/writing skills, geography and ICT skills will be directly expressible in terms of specific Roving Friends activities and outcomes.

Target Audiences/users

Roving friends will be carefully designed to appeal to ages 8 and up. Initially intended for schools and colleges, Roving friends will also become available for home users.

Potential ultimate markets

Roving friends will be developed to have international appeal, allowing schools and children around the world to learn about others.

[The original concept document went on to discuss costings and technicalities, but the document thus far will give you the flavour of what was envisaged. Want to run with this idea? Please contact Marc Eisenstadt, or attribute accordingly.]

Technorati Tags: multiplayer, game, games, scripting, bots, schoolchildren, educational, software, asynchronous

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