We pushed out our final prototype within schedule and with better features than expected, concluding our content production phase on a high note. Our final game implemented a new user interaction type: guessing. We wanted to give back to the viewers and let them do something else with a scene other than indirectly influence it.
Audience members submit a noun, verb, or location at any time throughout the game. A scene is then randomly constructed from all user submitted words by one actor. They act it out indirectly while speaking and improvising, similar to charades, while audience members guess words in chat. If a player submitted a word, they are made aware it is in play and barred from guessing it.
By limiting user submissions to certain types of words, in this case the format of “a NOUN VERBing in LOCATION” we wanted to reduce the stress of interaction. We don’t think this was incredibly successful, and we had a lot of outlier entrants. Verbs were often not in progressive tense, raw locations were hard to improvise on, and so on. While we believe this got us more submissions than a blank text box would’ve, it made it harder on the improvisers and for a repetitive game.
We also chose to have guessing happen in chat instead of on the extension anonymously. This was done to get more conversations, any at all, happening in chat. It isn’t entirely possible to consider this a success since every playtesting group is different, but we did have conversations spring up in chat based on what other audience members were guessing. This will need further analysis and recommendations once we go over our chat logs more thoroughly.
And with all of that, we’ve finished our content production for the semester. Next up is gathering up what we’ve learned to provide a firm base for future researchers, students, and streamers to continue on our work in this intersection.