Now that this practicum project is winding down, I figured I'd give a final rundown of ARIS. I've spent a lot of time complaining about it, but I guess there is at least some room for it to grow in the future.
Positives:
-Takes advantage of iPhone's technology: The Maps feature is the focus of the game, and it typically works well in detecting where you are and keeping the games going.
-Links gamespace with real-life community: This is perhaps the only thing ARIS has going for it that other games don't. All of these games are based on Madison life, and you need to be in Madison to play them (though you can download cheat codes to trick your phone into thinking you're in Madison when you're really not, which is kind of interesting).
-Play at your own pace: With its simple step-by-step style of gameplay, you really can play ARIS at your own pace. You can choose to spend a few hours going from place to place (quest to quest), or spread it over a few weeks.
Negatives:
-Doesn't feel like a "game": It's not fun. It's not entertaining. It's educational, but just in a "Oh, that's interesting" sort of way. It'll show you a little picture of the place you're at, tell you a fact if you're doing the UW Campus Tour or force some element of storytelling on you.
-No different gameplay modes: Walk, watch, walk. That's all you do in ARIS, as it doesn't even really get you thinking. I understand location-based games are different in that you're immersed in the real world as well, but some form of traditional video game gameplay needs to be adopted to make ARIS more fun.
-It doesn't always work: When it crashes so frequently when doing certain things in the app that you know it's about to crash before it actually does, that's bad. Something like that prevents people from trying to get used to ARIS becuase they know doing one specific thing will make it crash. For me, it was accessing the map from the bottom menu bar. That's probably the most important thing in the game, and if the whole thing crashes on me when I try to use it, what does that say about the app?
That's too bad. I thought ARIS sounded like a really interesting idea.
ReplyDeleteIt might've been neat if they had added some sort of augmented reality stuff using the camera on your phone. Maybe like, you walk around a certain area looking for some sort of item, you see it by looking through your cell phone's camera, move in and tap on it to collect it. It wouldn't be terribly entertaining, but it's a start.
Right now it sounds mainly like an automated tour mixed with mineral gathering for some reason.