Marling: Game of Spectators
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Vimeo / haque d+r – via Iframely Osman Haque first showed his mass-participation interactive spectacle on a public square in Eindhoven, Netherlands. As described on its official Youtube post, “Your voice creates the space around you, reverberates in many ways long after you have stopped speaking. In Marling the voices of citizens are given form through spectacular effects that hang in the air above the crowd, forming a delicate, intricate ceiling of animated color. People become players on the urban stage, together bringing the space to life through their actions and sounds, and building a shared public memory of collaboration that, hopefully, will last long after the event. “ With watching the movie, you can see people trying to develop sounds with different paces, volumn and rhythm via different medium (footstep, shout, sing etc.) Haze machine enables moving image to be shown in the air – people can see how shapes and forms interact with their own sound. More and more people gathered, they keep testing different sounds and the visual transformation they got as reward. They keep doing experiment with it, making other pass-bys involved as well. The video doesn’t really show how this spectator work begins, so we cannot make sure how the first group of people get engaged into this kind of public art piece. Since it is a show, the first group of people should be organized or informed to go there. However, we could predict that even if there is no sign, just this beautiful floating ceiling hanged in air, people will finally gather at that public place. ## Involving people There is a very famous psychological experiment, or say, tricky game, that people love to play again and again. Imagine you and some of your friends are on the way to campus. You guys decided to try treat other passing buys. You all stopped, standing and looking at somewhere into the sky. Keep doing this for several minutes, people who passed by will quickly join in your group, looking into the sky. Sometimes one of them may ask: So what on earth do you guys looking for? While “honest” people would say:”well, I don’t know either”, there must be another smart guy:”Oh, they said they just saw UFO.” Even if there is nothing happened, people are willing to spend time watching or waiting as the previous people. A group of people creates reliable and valuable atmosphere that makes passing-bys believe there is something deserve a try. ## Gaming or Learning How do people find this moving image follows sound? Answer is obvious: They show interactive responses. Though the video is not really in high resolution and a little bit shaky, we can see that moving image varies its wave and shape in order to show that they were performing different kind of sound and different frequency of sound. One important role in gaming is actually learning. People seldom realize that gaming is actually following some basic principles in “good learning”. They can be separated into 4 parts: ### Trigger Trigger is very important in both learning and gaming. Without trigger, people have less intention into going out the first step. Make something cool or weird that people would like to stop by is half success of game or education. In this case, A huge colorful ribbon-like virtual image is pretty weird in such a public place. People stopped by, then game begins. ## Context This is important because gaming really needs a good environment. We can list a lot of good and unforgettable games that are actually using the same simple mechanism, but brings very different experience. Think about Puzzle Bobble and Candy Crush. They are both finding objects that share same color and are affiliated to each other, and then remove them. If you finished the goal, you can go to next stage. If not, you should stay here, retry of fail the game. They share so many similar ideas, but the huge difference is environment – in this case, the user experience of two games. Candy Crush creates a sweet, slow and sugaring feeling, while actually your time of loss in it would be far more than in Puzzle Bobble. When coming into large scale, Marling, the sound game, also has some implications in it. What if this happened in a country that was just suffering in disease, poverty or war? Will people still think this kind of digital color and uncertain wave still amusing and intended to play with? Context is actually the base of how we see and understand the outside world. One of the cognitive process is from top to bottom. Only if you has some experience before, or hold a good expectation on it could you feel it’s a game. Else, it could be scarful as well. ### Feedback, repeat and reward In gaming, it has the same idea. Every game has repeated elements, process and actions going on, which helps you build fundamental knowledge of this gaming world. Repeat makes things reliable. You have a prediction or expectation on something. You do it, and then you get the feedback. You do it again, and you get the same feedback. Thus, you know that you are doing the right thing that fits the mechanism or either the study process or the game. You would be willing to continuously do it. What if there is no feedback, or always give feedback in variable way? People will easily be frustrated and then leave off. The way people trying to structure a mechanism is fragile; failure at first time annoyed them a lot as well. This also makes sense why interactive installation in public area of has wider access to cause change or trigger the game starts. People might feel more embarrassed in public than in museum or gallery that nobody really looks at them. Consider those who take selfies with masterpieces – they really enjoy themselves! However they would not be willing to do stupid things in very outside public space, while there are many people around. Easy and positive feedback gives confidence to spectators in this case. No matter what kind of sound it is, you see significant change in the shape and color. Actually, we cannot say that the change of moving image is EXACTLY due to sound created by someone – First, it looks too huge, and kind of random in style anyway. Besides, there is a lot of noise as well as people trying to create sounds around you. See how people be satisfied by fake reality – you told them that all beautiful spectacle is created by them, and show them a random change. They will believe in that, and quickly get involved in. ### Spectator of Spectators Nobody would like to play this sound – moving image game alone forever. If there is nobody else, people may carelessly try something, get feedback, and try again, and feedback again. And, well, pretty cool, and then go home. Things becomes different when there are other people watching. Watching has a very significant effect in both gaming and education. Research shows that students do have better performance in library – not due to the quiet environment. There are many “other students” in the space so that student may have pressure, and then push them into focused studying instead of randomly going to social network or day dreaming. There are also many sports and games that greatly encourage people to be audiance – well, let’s say, nearly all of them do this. Watching could not always be positive to participants – it may cause pressure. Sometimes it is overwhelm so that people got bad influence from watching. They become annoyed and wish to go away, especially when they do not get good feedback or reward from previous action. Interactive art in public place has some differences from watched games or study. There is no distinguish line between participants and spectators: everyone joins in, and everyone watches other people. This doubled the effects: people try exploring some different sounds, get feedback, while watching other peoples action and see what are theirs’ feedback. This kind of changing role in interactive public art help broader the possibility of game. People learn faster about what it would probably be when he makes a certain action. The other factor is our big Egos. There is no deny that people are born self-centric. A humorous saying is that: no matter how much does a person say that he/she care others that much, show him a group photo, and you could quickly figure out that he is trying to find himself first. We enjoy being the center of world from very beginning of like, and watching, especially watched by other people with admiration and expectation, makes people excited. This kind of emotional priming keeps spectators stayed in the game for very long time, get really involved, and, just like Usman Haque said, “0building a shared public memory of collaboration that, hopefully, will last long after the event. “ |