Aotea Project of Things – Weeks 1 & 2

Week One – Speed dating and Personality Post-its

In the speed-dating idea pitches, I quickly found an idea I liked, and stuck with it for the majority of the exercise. The post-its I had were “spontaneous art” and “pushing buttons”, which I combined into the idea of an interactive screen, where you could press buttons (placed around the screen) to add cubes or splashes of colour to it.

A quick sketch I did to illustrate my idea. On the right hand side is a modification to the idea – using mounted paintball guns pointed at a canvas (with some wiggle room to aim), for a messier result.

The post-it notes were as follows:

• Purple – our preferred game aesthetic – Fantasy, with Narrative as a close second and Discovery as my third
• Blue – our position on the Bartle player type chart – Explorer, although I am also somewhat an Achiever
• Orange – Starter or Finisher, Creator or Connector – Starter and Creator
• Pink – our character alignment – True Neutral, although I play a Chaotic Neutral half-Elf Bard
• Green – our Meyers-Briggs personality type – INFP according to 16personalities.com, which surprised me as I first thought I’d be a Thinker not a Feeler.

 

Week 2 – Group Assemble! and Aotea Analysis

Our group has six members (including myself), and we have begun discussion about our project. Of the suggested ‘extras’ for the project, the only one that seems to have caught much attention is the idea of using augmented reality – the collaboration with One Fat Sheep and/or Plattar. One idea that was thrown around that caught my attention was a AR murder mystery, where players would walk around Aotea Square to find clues. So far, all of the apps and games that I have seen using AR have used it to put something into a real-life setting, and have had a minimal amount of focus on narrative (my main experience with AR has been Pokemon Go). I think it would be very cool to tie a narratively-focused story to a real-life place like Aotea Square, in a way that doesn’t just put the game into the space, but makes that space a part of the game – using markers that exist only in the Square (probably in the form of stickers placed around the area) could be a way to tie it to that space. I plan to do more research on this topic.

The northern side, viewed from the Centre

A new art installation?

The grass area

Art on wall, underground parking entrance

Coming soon? Also, Metrolanes signs point to a “no entry” door, oops?

School kids walking past the Waharoa – lunch or a school trip?

The northern side, where all the cafes and restaurants are

The lower entrance to the Aotea Centre, and the pathway to the back entrance

Post office and PO boxes

Closer view of the lower entrance to the Centre

The Box cafe and bar

Main entrance

The paved area, southern side

The middle of the paved area, looking towards Queen Street

I took lots of photos of the Square, although at the time it was rather empty, something that surprised me as it was around lunch time (midday), so I would have expected more people to be at least walking through. (It may be that more people have later lunches, around 12:30 or 1 o’clock)

Many of my observations were ones echoed by my group members. I made a table that shows these under three headings:

• Place – which part of the Square it relates to
• Actions – what the people are doing, how they are acting
• Reasons – the theories we had for why people acted how they did, where they did

I decided to look at the area through these five lenses:

• Where the people mostly walk through
• Where they mostly crowd
• Where the food areas are
• Where seating areas are
• Places of interest – for example, theatres, the library.

All lenses

Crowds and paths

Paths

Crowds

Seating areas

Food areas

Places of interest – top left: Aotea Centre, including the ASB Theatre and Herald Theatre; top middle: Sky World Entertainment Centre, includes Event Cinemas, food court and more; top right: Auckland Library; bottom: Town Hall including Town Hall Concert Chamber, Q Theatre and The Basement.