Ephemera, Chapter Four:
Researching and Testing During What Felt Like Pre-Pandemic Times
Each chapter of Living Digital Media includes behind-the-materials that I made or saved while composing this project and the chapter. Journal entries, audio outtakes, snippets of code, conversations—I call these ephemera because they’re materials that are often discarded or abandoned when I move closer to a final publication. Living Digital Media’s "Ephemera” sections, however, work against my tendencies to discard project materials over time. Waste not. Some materials were made in anticipation of this section, while others simply surfaced when I was composing. Nevertheless, I hope it’s useful for anyone who does or is interested in this doing digital work.
Chapter Four and this “Ephemera” section of Living Digital Media came together in a strange but timely way. I admit that at first I was stuck on the concept of circulation because I had covered some of the ideas in Chapters Two and Three. However, after attending the 2022 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, I came back to my desk with new energy for this chapter. A new section emerged, as did new ideas about what circulation means for developers and for creators of digital media. Overall, attending GDC was a space for adding more layers to Chapter Four.
Testing My Project in Person and Through VR
One of the joys of attending GDC was playing many games and talking with creators. In a previous section of this chapter, I thought through how writing studies might adapt the arcade-like experience of GDC at conferences like Computers and Writing. What I omitted from that section was a discussion of my rudimentary testing of Living Digital Media through in-person conversations and virtual reality, a simulacrum of what we might do as scholars presenting webtexts. The following video is an excerpt from a review session in virtual reality, experienced through my headset as I speak with Dr. Beth Caravella and our research assistant Stefan Blacha on the platform Bigscreen VR. For the main chapter, I omitted this discussion and video because it feels like a model of reviewing that is difficult to replicate en masse at a (virtual) conference. Nevertheless, it is an experiment my colleague and I are conducting and writing about for future publications.
Figure 31
An Example of Reviewing in Bigscreen VR
Video: Three avatars in virtual reality are reviewing a big screen of text on a webpage.
Sound (Beth Caravella speaking): Show us your stuff, Rich.
Sound (Rich Shivener speaking): This is an audio absstract and somebody said to me, "if it's an audio abstract, I immediately think it needs to be an audio file and not something like this, because my expectation is that it will be a video. What I'm doing now is converting these into videos, just short clips. Was that your impression, Beth, when you looked at it? You expected a video?
Sound (Beth Caravella speaking): I liked this more than just having a regular ... small audio gray box. I liked this because it showed the waves, the actual voice. But I would say that if you were going to keep it this way, I would rather it be just the small rectangle around the waves and voice lines itself. If it is taking up the video space, I would want if not a full video then some movement, whether you're having things fade in and out or making it small so that it's just the audio waves.
Highlight Video: Encountering Technical Challenges and Epiphanies
This highlight video features some technical challenges that I encountered in the final stages of preparing the book for second review. For example, in late summer 2022, I decided to make each chapter a single webpage instead of a series of pages organized by section. That decision gave way to coding "Chapter Navigation" bars on such pages. CCDP editor Tim Lockridge was a big help when I ran into some technical challenges with the navigation bars.
Figure 32
A Video on Technical Challenges
Video: The author is on camera and displaying a page from Living Digital Media.
Sound (Rich Shivener speaking): So here is the kind of breakthrough that I had now. I'm indebted to a colleague of mine, Tim Lockridge, who helped me out with this. If you look at the introduction page, what I've been able to do is add this sort of thing called "Simple Scroll Spy", which when you go to a chapter, for example, like this one, you know, you start at the top, go to the introduction, it gives you the page navigation, right? It shows you that. And so when you scroll and you start, it shows you where you are, it'll say introduction. And then as you scroll down, and you get to the next section, as you get there, it signals that you're on the next one. So this will be really good for place holding for folks, especially if they're kind of looking at it as they go. Yeah, I mean, as you can sort of see here, like there's a little tag so you can scroll down and see, you know, this section, and then you can see the next one, and you can see the last one here. So that was super cool for me. I'm just really happy that it worked out because, you know, this stuff is difficult to do. And so Tim helped me work through that and get some ideas. Now, the one thing that I'm thinking about, and I'm not quite sure how to do this, I'm gonna have to think through it kind of carefully, is how to add media on the right. So ideally what I'd like to do is use this white space creatively, and I think I can probably figure it out eventually.
Interview Excerpts with Two Developers: Zayna Sheikh and David Vicker
Like Chapter Two’s “Ephemera” section, this chapter closes with an interview with two game developers, Zayna Sheikh and David Vicker, the creators behind the game Plinko Burger (2022). In this interview, which has been edited down to a few minutes, the game devs discuss the game’s concept to final delivery, including how they handled the demonstration of the game amid the pandemic.
Zayna Sheikh: I think our strategy going in was to have a little bit of stuff to make our space feel connected to the game and exciting to wonder what's up with the picnic table over there and contribute to this overall theatrical performance aspect of showcasing. So, we can thank David for the awesome aprons, and we ended up custom laser cutting stamps to stamp the hats, the diner hats that we had, and we went as high on production value with as low a budget as we had to make stuff, which was really fun. So, I think buying in to the bit, buying into the fast-food side of this experience and what the game is kind of bringing to its players and experience of being there was important for us, because not only does it make you stand out a little bit more, but it also is much more fun and whimsical as a player to be like, "Oh, there's lots going on here," and I think the receipt printer and the outfits and everything really contributed to people's positive experience with the game, separate of actually even playing the game.
Rich Shivener: Right. Yeah. I know this is on your itch.io website. Did you see any, I guess more, traffic towards that after you started putting out receipts and giving them to people? It was such a tiny receipt. I remember it for that reason. I was like, "Oh, this is a unique one. I'm going to go check this out later."
Zayna Sheikh: Yeah. I think our highest today was probably 30 extra hits on the itch website, because you can see some of the statistics in the back end for how many hits and where people are coming from and stuff. I think we actually did get a number of people traveling to the website from there. I think it was enticing, both because of the form factor of the receipt, it was easy to have, it was easy to tuck into a flyer or whatever you had with you from the conference, and it was charming because it's a small, little receipt, but it's this fake receipt.
Rich Shivener: Yeah. Ah, so many layers and all that stuff. Interesting. I just have a couple more questions about GDC and then I wanted to back-pedal a little bit on just the origins of the game.
Zayna Sheikh: Sure.
Rich Shivener: When you were presenting at GDC, almost everybody, I think, were masked at the time. How'd you feel about demonstrating a game with a headset and that physical alternative controllers? I don't know. It was very intriguing. I forgot that Alt.Ctrl is even a thing. At least I'm coming from Canada; there are a lot of safety protocols still and stuff like that. So, I guess just how did you generally feel about that, hundreds of people touching your game and stuff like that?
Zayna Sheikh: Yeah. Yeah. I think there were two main aspects to the game-related side of that, and you can add anything you feel like I forget, David, but one of it was the masks and having the whole experience be masked. Honestly, there were a lot of people and a lot of influx of people into this space, so I felt better that it was masked, though the game we presented has a vocal input side to it and that was definitely a concern. Surprisingly though, the only part that we had to have people do anything different about was just trying to speak louder. I think the microphone did a surprisingly good job of picking up people even through the mask. The most problematic moments were when you had someone who was really quiet and they were muffled because of the coverage of the mask in between the microphone and them, so that was definitely one side of it. But people weren't afraid of speaking louder if you prompted them to and explained you're going to need to talk a little bit louder because of the masks and such. And then the other side of that was a physical controller that a bunch of people were touching, and honestly, one benefit to having squeezy bottles as the controller for your game is that they're really easy to wipe down with a wet wipe.
Rich Shivener: I gotcha.
Zayna Sheikh: So, we had a couple people request that and we had a jar of them at one of the CU booths. So, I would just run over there every now and again and wipe them down.
Rich Shivener: So, what kind of parts did you divide and conquer, because this seems like such an amazing collaboration. Cause I was looking around but I'm also just such a noob at this stuff. I'm very interested in it, but who did what basically, if you had to break it down that way, to get this all done in a short amount of time?
David Vicker: I'd say Zayna was the brains and the brawn behind this. She was really the driving force. I was there as the support guy. I'd do whatever she needed me to do, whether that was making the bottles or coming up with basically the menu, all the different burger items that we were going to have, and some random stuff like that, but Zayna was definitely...
Zayna Sheikh: [You did all] the audio in the game.
David Vicker: Oh yeah. I forgot about that. I did the audio recordings.
Zayna Sheikh: Are you forgetting all of your major contributions, David?
David Vicker: I know, but it's just cause I'm so impressed by what she was able to do because it was just way out of my realm. I hadn't done much like it, so every time that I'm playing the game, I'm always paying attention to, wow, I can't believe she got this to work and this to work and I kind of forget what I did, but I did do the audio. So, we have people pulling up to the window, or the fake window, and ordering a couple different burgers, and I recorded a bunch of my friends or just random people in my classes and was like, "Hey, here's the menu. I made a game. Will you guys order some burgers? Pretend you're at a drive through window," and everybody was always like, "What? Yeah, I guess I can do that. What do you want me to say?" And I was like, "I don't know. Just pick whichever burger sounds good and pretend like you're ordering it from McDonald's or something," and that was pretty cool.
Zayna Sheikh: We had almost a hundred-plus unique orders between the two batches of orders, so that was a huge portion of, well, we made this burger joint, but if there aren't any people ordering burgers, what's the point? So, a lot of content development on that side.