connecting ARIS game to another ARIS game/s?

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michae...@gmail.com

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Oct 11, 2016, 12:36:20 PM10/11/16
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Might be a stupid question, but I am wondering if we have the capability to link one ARIS game to another and maintain player/world statuses consistent to both? I should try this and see, but am interested how would folks recommend trying this?

I am asking because we are building quite a large citywide scavenger hunt experience, and I'm getting interest from other groups who want to build on new sites or modules to the whole. This is awesome and we want to engage them (some are teachers and students, others are various nonprofits), but am concerned about immediately inviting in new developers to our game's sandbox, so to speak, even though we do want them to contribute new content and gameplay. It would be more ideal to have them build their own little fiefdoms and then tether these as separate games after they've been built and tested, because it would decentralize the possibility of errors (for example, as a student learns the ropes in ARIS they may need time to learn locks, etc., and I want to facilitate their learning but also am conscious of our interest in a stable product that is consistent in its public face)...So that if someone is working on one module, that work does not bring the whole enchilada offline. Currently, I've been managing our different sites as different scenes and I basically am the ultimate gatekeeper on the design and back-end, and that works well for now even if it makes the overall game more massive. But if we truly expand this, this organization is going to hinder the ability for smaller teams to add on new scenes.

If we could isolate Scenes as separate games, for example, I wonder if this would create the firewalls that would facilitate a still-seamless but more decentralized and stable situation. Has anybody done this successfully?

I'll have time Thursday to play around with this and plan to make some dummy game modules to link to our own, but am open to the group's ideas and insights.

Cheers,

Michael Timm

Christopher Holden

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Oct 11, 2016, 3:30:29 PM10/11/16
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Right now, I don't know that there's any way to do this inside ARIS or that would involve less work on the players' part than using the game picker for most scenarios. If you're using the museum login code, and don't need to stay logged into a player account, you could log the player out and have them scan another QR code maybe. 

I wonder what scenarios would most require multiple games as opposed to multiple scenes or even divides that would only seem apparent to the player, not the author. Can authors help me think through what this might look like?

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michae...@gmail.com

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Oct 12, 2016, 12:55:53 PM10/12/16
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Can you tell me more about the museum login code? Are you referring to the QR code you can have someone scan to immediately enter a game?

Speaking for our case, we're building a citywide game. If a university wants to create their own minigame to append to ours, it would be advantageous from the design-side if those were separate games that connected rather than opening up our game to have them add a new scene. That could work if we were administratively unified, but we would be talking about various independent entities who would all be designing on a common theme, not all under one jurisdiction. Ideally, however, the player would experience minimum hurdles moving from the hypothetical university's experience and the citywide one. If they're earning points in each, for example, it would be nice not to have to set up some kind of currency exchanges at the borders and instead have some common "currency" of points throughout the theme-unified experience. For us, water.

I could see co-branding independent games as one inelegant way to unify them without having them as within one ARIS game, but the "currency" issues might apply, as would the hurdle of a player inside one game not becoming aware that another game is within their geographic or thematic range.

These are all hypotheticals for now, but I imagine they could easily become large practical hurdles for expanding our effort within a year or so. Other than through a player's intentional checking of the Nearby Games list, I'm not sure there is a way to trigger the awareness of another nearby ARIS game while within another ARIS game?


On Tuesday, October 11, 2016 at 2:30:29 PM UTC-5, Chris Holden wrote:
Right now, I don't know that there's any way to do this inside ARIS or that would involve less work on the players' part than using the game picker for most scenarios. If you're using the museum login code, and don't need to stay logged into a player account, you could log the player out and have them scan another QR code maybe. 

I wonder what scenarios would most require multiple games as opposed to multiple scenes or even divides that would only seem apparent to the player, not the author. Can authors help me think through what this might look like?
On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 10:36 AM, <michae...@gmail.com> wrote:
Might be a stupid question, but I am wondering if we have the capability to link one ARIS game to another and maintain player/world statuses consistent to both? I should try this and see, but am interested how would folks recommend trying this?

I am asking because we are building quite a large citywide scavenger hunt experience, and I'm getting interest from other groups who want to build on new sites or modules to the whole. This is awesome and we want to engage them (some are teachers and students, others are various nonprofits), but am concerned about immediately inviting in new developers to our game's sandbox, so to speak, even though we do want them to contribute new content and gameplay. It would be more ideal to have them build their own little fiefdoms and then tether these as separate games after they've been built and tested, because it would decentralize the possibility of errors (for example, as a student learns the ropes in ARIS they may need time to learn locks, etc., and I want to facilitate their learning but also am conscious of our interest in a stable product that is consistent in its public face)...So that if someone is working on one module, that work does not bring the whole enchilada offline. Currently, I've been managing our different sites as different scenes and I basically am the ultimate gatekeeper on the design and back-end, and that works well for now even if it makes the overall game more massive. But if we truly expand this, this organization is going to hinder the ability for smaller teams to add on new scenes.

If we could isolate Scenes as separate games, for example, I wonder if this would create the firewalls that would facilitate a still-seamless but more decentralized and stable situation. Has anybody done this successfully?

I'll have time Thursday to play around with this and plan to make some dummy game modules to link to our own, but am open to the group's ideas and insights.

Cheers,

Michael Timm

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Christopher Holden

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Oct 12, 2016, 12:59:43 PM10/12/16
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What seems most likely simple and possible, and which would have many other benefits, is to resurrect the game url. It used to be that you could use the url: ARIS://game/game_id or something like that to tell the iOS device to open ARIS and go to that game. It does not currently work, but I think it's just one of those things that got dropped in the transition to 2.0 for lack of time. I don't think there's anything really broken. 

If you had a url that would take the user to a game, you could put it essentially anywhere: inside another game, on a website, poster—even as a QR code, without the devs needing to lift another finger.

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Michael Timm

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Oct 12, 2016, 1:01:02 PM10/12/16
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Yes, that would seem an easy way to do this. Thanks for de-coding what I apparently meant to ask!
 
Michael Timm
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From: Christopher Holden <chris.l...@gmail.com>
To: "aris...@googlegroups.com" <aris...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2016 11:59 AM
Subject: Re: [ARISGAMES] connecting ARIS game to another ARIS game/s?


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