Ubiquitous Ambient Gaming - Evaluation of the game Growl Patrol

From EQUIS Lab Wiki

April 26-27th, 2010

An informal evaluation on the fun of the game has been done. Several persons read the rules of the game and gave us feedback on whether they thought this game would be fun. They were asked to give their opinion on the game, what they liked, what they disliked, what they would change.

User 1

• Ability to see/hear the animals, even if they can’t be caught yet :
  • Showing (by audio and visual) the animals the player can’t catch remembers him that he can catch other animals that are probably worth more, it can make them want to catch these animals
  • Regarding the risk of having too much different sounds right away, the user could only see a few specimens of a species he can’t catch, to remember their existence.

• He didn’t like the mix between animal and money, makes him feel like a poacher. He would prefer a system of points, maybe at one point the zoo managers could thank the player by giving him a new tool.

• Presentation of the rules :
  • Give the price of each type of animal in the rules, so the player can already think about which animals are best catching.
  • The rules could not say explicitly that the tigers will eat the animals a player has caught if it goes too close. It would just say that the tigers like to eat animals when they are close to them, and let the player discover by himself what happens when he comes too close from a tiger.

• Animals he would see himself catching :
  • monkey, elephant, lion, snake, wolf, goat
  • birds would be interesting because the player could only catch them when they land
  • using animals that go underground so they stop making noise when they are underground

User 2

• About the cages :
  • She wondered how she would find the cages : would they make noises? ...
  • She also wondered how she would know which cage corresponds to which type of animal (she didn’t want to risk putting a cat in the tigers’ cage)

• She spotlighted the “How weird I look” factor for this game : ‘what will people think when they see me running all over town, stopping, going the other way?’ This factor might actually stop several persons from playing the game.

• Animals he would see himself catching : monkeys, elephants, alligators (make a snarly sound...). She said she was more thinking about African animals.

User 3

• He had no comments on the game, except that it doesn’t think it’s the kind of game he is into it.
• He wondered if there was some competition, between two players for example.

• Animals he would see himself catching : monkeys, giraffes (though he doesn’t know what sound it does), elephant, ostrich