 So, I want to talk to you about this project that I've been working on for the past two years, and it ultimately took the form of a text adventure game. Before I start, who knows what a text adventure game is? Okay, great. I don't have to explain that. So, I thought I'd be really mad to give my presentation in the form of a text adventure game. So, let's just start off right here. So, it's, okay, there you go. I'm part of an arts collective called Redoc. We're based in Manchester in Liverpool, and about two years ago, we were asked by this organization called FACT in Liverpool to pitch for the first digital commission, the first commission for a project called Network Narratives, and it was about young people in libraries in Wigan, Berlin Hall, and it was, and we decided, okay, we're going to get paid to pitch for it, so let's do it. And this is actually online, so you can go through the games if you want. You can just do that if you don't want to. So, this was the aim of the whole project. It's how do you get young people to work with art and technology in three towns that are very deprived? And we've done a lot of stuff in libraries before. There's some past projects that we've done that you can look at, but we always want to push ourselves, so, all right, so what can we do? This is, by the way, this is how we first start brainstorming for any project. Can we do a swan wave? No? Okay, what else can we do? All right, so I want to kind of do this interactive thing with you, so there's three choices. You are in charge, where should we go? So these are the three ideas, well, okay, this is not really an idea, but these are the two choices we had, B, okay, but actually we don't want to do this because there's already code clubs, there's lots of makers who do stuff like this, and lots of libraries have computers and people who don't know how to use them, and you don't really need to do that. I thought that there were also a lot of existing groups who were doing this, and I was really getting sick of trying to get everyone to program as well, so that's a bad idea. So we're going to go back to this one, and that's what, so the main idea that I thought was, we really wanted to use the idea that we're in a library, and even, we've been involved in library projects for a really long time, and they were all about digital making. It was learn Photoshop, learn Arduino or stop motion, make a movie, and you kind of forgot like the reason libraries exist is so you can read books, borrow books, and have time to contemplate being solitary and this kind of stuff. So I thought, okay, let's make a book, let's write a story between these three towns and the young people who live there, and that sounded like really hard to do, and also what if it was a shit book that they made? That's like ultimately, I want this to be a good project, so okay, let's try to get rid of, let's try to make it as easy as possible, and get them to write a text adventure game. And I was, so yeah, okay, let's do that. They can do something that they've never heard of, or know about, okay, so. So part of my inspiration for this was the idea of connecting the three towns together, and this was, and I really like the tile map of the Northern network in Victoria Station in Manchester. I thought, okay, this is going to be my starting off point to get the kids to think about how the north is connected to, okay, yeah, so I'm not from here. So the north, it has its own identity, and I really wanted to know what the kids who lived there, who've gone up there all their lives, thought about it, and really it was for them to tell me what the north is about. Why is this happening in the kind of midst of the austerity cuts, and a lot of libraries were, they had their budgets cut, and part of the reason that this project was funded was because we were working in these three towns that were very deprived. You know, you need to bring culture to these areas according to the Arts Council. So on top of making this one game, I also wanted to make tangible things, and if you've played these games before, you know about the feelies, right, so they really bring the fictional world to life, so I also wanted them to think about that when they were making the game. So okay, that's what we're going to do, I'll also let you say, okay, so that's the idea, let's pitch it, should we do A or B, okay, so yay, we got it, it was one of the most terrifying pitches I've ever done because it was to the actual young people, and even though I do a lot of stuff with young people, I still find them like a bit of an alien species, so you'll notice that I've always bolded the young people and they're always capitalized as well, because they are a bit of their own kind of thing, so alright, so this is how we were going to do it, we're going to have a summit to decide the genre that everyone is going to work in, because it had to be one story and they all had to make it at least coherent, if not a good good story, so alright, okay, and then we decided, okay, how are we going to get them to write this story, and the way to do that was to break down the steps of creating a narrative, so we were going to do a mapping project so that the kids can see where they live in a different way, the writing, okay, so that's it, so now we have to go to the first summit, which was in Hull, and these, okay, yeah, so I know one of the hardest things about this project was that, even though I had a year to do it, logistically it was a nightmare because it's, the North is not very well connected, do you know, and Hull is like really far away from everywhere else, that the consensus had to be done online, mostly, so I did a lot of Google Forms, and so I sent out a survey in advance, and kind of predictably, because most of them are teenagers, the young people, they wanted to do a dystopian future, a sci-fi, that's the genre they're really into at the moment, so there's our, yeah, yeah, we do that, so and then I did a questionnaire after they've chosen the genre to kind of get it down to some base grounds, because you can't have aliens and zombies at the same time, well you could, but it would just be crap story, and again that was my main concern with the overall project that was going to be a really bad story, so you can actually go and look at the questionnaire, so it had stuff like how far in the future do you want it to be, what kind of things that you do you want to do, yeah, oh yeah, sure, so it was kind of like this, and these scenarios that I made up based on what the kids were saying that they were interested in, and also what sort of technology they wanted to think about sort of cultural social aspects, so that's how we came up with these ground rules, so they wanted to be set 50 in the future, I thought it was interesting that they wanted to explore a world that they would still be alive in, and also I was a little bit surprised that none of them thought about climate change, so those are the ground rules that everyone agreed to, and then from that on you could do whatever you want as long as you follow these, okay, so then we went to, now it's on to the first workshop, now I wanted everyone to, so part of the project you also had to teach them some skills and workshop, and I wanted to bring in as many people as possible to do the best people that I knew to do the specific strands of the workshops, so for the very first one I wanted to do a kind of mapping exercise, and I let somebody else do it, so let's just see how the one in, where do you want to go, should we go, see the first, Burnley, so the DIY mapping workshop was a GoPro on a giant helium balloon, and this allowed the kids to kind of lead where, where was mapped for them to get an idea that where they live could be interesting, and to show us where they'd like to go and what sort of areas that they hang out in, and also to think about, because they already knew they were gonna create a world that was 50 years in the future, what would this place look like 50 years from now, and yeah, and also it is as the first workshop it was fun, it was like an active thing, it's not something you think you could do in a library, and I forgot to mention, like when we did the summit, every time we introduced ourselves, I sort of had this thing where you, I gave you name tags, but you didn't write your name, you wrote a fictional character, so you had an alter ego for that day, it was kind of to get them to the mindset of thinking about a fictional world, so you could see, I don't, I mean I changed all the time, I think I was Henry Higgins in this one, and it depended on like what was going on, and I believe I was Phineas Fogg when I was doing this one, and then I'll just show you, so that's an image from the camera on the top, so it was really nice for the kids to kind of start thinking about an alternative version of reality, and then we went to Hall, it all went well until Hall, this is the balloon, we're still waiting, I was hoping, like I did ask Hall Radio if they could put out an announcement to see if anyone found the balloon, but it might be between the seas here and the Netherlands, anyway, so they've done this bit, and all these workshops were about a month apart, because they had to be repeated three times, and the map making, so this is starting to crystallize what you've done, okay, where should we go? Okay, I heard Wigan first, we're gonna Wigan, so we take, so Neil did this bit, so he took some of the footage and we started creating an alternative map, giant and points of interest based on where they've been and what kind of new landmarks they would like, and this is the point when they started thinking as a group, okay, I think this place should be like this, or I'm interested in looking at kind of the stuff like that, so this is where Burnley decided that they were gonna be overrun by robots, and that humans, I mean the story kind of evolved after a while, but they were really interested in this idea that robots had taken over Burnley and there was an underground human resistance trying to overthrow the robot overlords, so you can see sort of the process of what's going on, wait, this is oh, alright, Burnley, sorry, the other one was Wigan, oh, just by the way, before, okay, sorry, and this is Hall, just a thing about Wigan, so even though we laid the ground rules and I said everyone has to stick to this, okay, and I had a wiki that everyone could look at and said you have to follow these rules, Wigan didn't want to follow the rules, so they decided to drop a nuclear bomb in the city, they really wanted to do a Mad Max-type world where there were lots of weapons, but you know the young people are leading it so we kind of incorporated it to it, so, but I was actually, and while I was doing this, the thing that surprised me most was even though we started off in the same ground rules, the three cities and they're all in the north and they're all deprived, Hall wasn't as deprived as Burnley or Wigan, and I think this is because before we started this project, I think a year or two years before they were nominated as the city of culture, so there was a lot more investment going on, and Hall had kind of the younger groups, like Lower End, so I think like 13 was the youngest group, so I think they've not seen, they've just seen a lot of investment in their city, so I think like yeah, it's pretty well, it's gone pretty well, so why wouldn't it continue that way 50 years in the future, so nothing kind of plastic has happened in Hall and actually it's really thriving and their dystopia was mainly around the evil corporations who are doing experiments on humans and the school system where everyone had to go, I have to say most of the stories were kind of creeped from the hunger games, Game of Thrones, and the hunger games, especially in Hall, but maybe not as violent, okay, so we did that, then the next month we did the writing bit, and this was kind of exciting, because this is where you actually started seeing bits of the story crystallizing, some characters coming up, some plots being made, and all the kids had to work together to do it, and it was like a lot of negotiation, so honestly a lot for a lot of the workshop leaders, it was a case of just being kind of a chaperot or a guy and making sure their voices were heard, and they actually did stuff, like write stuff down, so what happens to Wigan, you can see from some of the writings, the Wigan lot were a little bit problematic, because of a lot of circumstances, the library partners weren't able to support us as much as they thought they would be when this bit was originally written, and it had a lot of has to do with the cut, so we just couldn't get enough kids to come to the library, when we're trying to recruit kids to take part of this, there weren't any in the Wigan library, so we had to go to the youth zone, and that's very different, there was just a different type of kids who go to the youth zone, then the kids who would sign up to work on a project that's initiated from the library, the ones who come from the libraries, like Burnley and Hall, they were all really bookish, they liked actually reading, and some of them liked writing, they wanted to, they thought of writing as maybe a career option, whereas the Wigan kids weren't like that, so I think that's why they wanted to bomb the city, it was really to get lots of insights into how the kids are thinking about where they live, by giving them the space safe of fiction to explore their current circumstances, so we did that, and then, and the other thing that we did was we tried to kind of create a system that, or like strand their bits of stories together into a coherent thing, so that it would make sense, so like, I keep going back to Wigan, but one of the things, they're just like, nothing's available anymore, there's been fallout, so how are you going to communicate, what do the people who are left, how do they do stuff, and we kind of gave them hints, or kind of tried to help them along, so the solution for how people communicate in Wigan, because there's a lot of technology dead zones, was the tried and tested method of teletext, and you'll see some of that later. So after that, you got the story, now it's on to the actual building bit, and there was one tool that we were looking at from the beginning, which is twine, this is how I made this presentation in, and it's a really powerful tool for interactive fiction, if you're thinking not in the classic XORC type of games, you can't actually type in words, it's more hypertext, it's kind of like surfing Wikipedia, but as a story, but it's really good for mapping out stories and making a good way for the kids, especially. So this one was from Glenn and Ross, who was going to help with all the feelies or what I termed artifacts. So let's go hold this time. So now the thing with, I don't know if you work with young people, but one of the things is, aside from being delightful, is that they're really unpredictable, you can't count on them to do anything. And that's fine, so you work within those confines. But one of the things is they don't do any homework. You can't, and obviously they're not going to be graded on this, so they're not going to do it if they don't want to. So even though we said, what kind of objects do you want to make? This is your world already created. They actually had some ideas, but not really. So I have lots of, because I was working with so many artists, I had an artist who was taking, who saw everything and decided to come up with some prototypes to show that maybe the kids could use it starting jumping off point. And one of them, I think, was this emoji glove. This is how people communicate in the future. It's just a glove with a bell crown on it, and you get a pocket full of emoji parts, and then you can create them. But there's a whole reason for this. It's because you can't, the human resources needs to find a way to communicate without the robots knowing what they're talking about. So this is one form of thing. And I find, yeah, and also the kids already communicate through emojis, so it seemed like natural that they would use this as an evolution of language. What is this? That's whole. Okay. Yes. Oh, and also we also played some text adventure games, and this is when I realized a lot, the penny dropped for a lot of them, because I don't think they knew what we were doing until this point when they played Merlin's Castle. Also for the partners and the companions. A lot of them, when I said text adventure games, a lot of them thought it had to do with mobile phones. So that's all the workshops finished. So what do we do now? We'll have another summit where all the kids can meet again, because when you were doing all the workshops in isolation, naturally the kids were only thinking about what's happening in their city, what kind of social changes there are, what kind of food they have, what they eat for dinner. They weren't really thinking about how the stories can connect, so we really needed to have an opportunity for them to see each other and also see how to link the projects, but also to meet the other young people. They've only seen each other through the wiki. And also tie up all the loose ends to the stories. And this was really, really difficult, because some of the kids were more inclined to making stuff. Others were like really liked writing and they just wouldn't start up. But also to have links and crossovers, and I really wanted them to think about what it's like, how the North can have an identity and why one person from Hull might visit Wigan, or why someone from Burnley would try to seek communication with somewhere with Wigan or Hull. And I think it worked, it went well. I mean no one died. Yeah, and then, yeah, so this is like six or seven months from the project starting. And then Glenn finished writing the master twine file. Ross made all the artifacts. And a nice thing for this project that I thought, besides having the game online so anyone could play this, there was also a touring exhibition of the artifacts that would go through all the libraries. And it's currently showing now. And like nobody knew what to call this game either. We're just calling it text adventure time, which is what I was calling the project. Partly so the kids would like it. I don't know if you watch adventure time. So while we came over the name in the end, it's called Northern Powerhouse, last town standing. And there's a there's a map of the game. A lot of them did have maps. I have loads of brochures so you can pick them up later. So you can see there's a timeline of critical events that explains what happened up to the year 2065. I'm just gonna tell you just a highlight is in 2025, the singularity happened and Iris, which is kind of like Siri but backwards, becomes sentient and takes over all forms of electronic communication. Then 10 years later, there's a nuclear explosion in Wigan. In 2042, a laser fence is erected around Burnley and it's re-Christian robot Burnley. And there are vats where humans are grown. You can either be from alpha, beta, or omega vat. And you have to wear a badge to say which vat you were grown in. In Hall, Hall was pretty nice. There's a big company called Future Gen that run the town basically. They are in charge of the AI industry and the biotech industry. They also have evil headquarters under the Humber. And all the kids go to, if you're lucky or privileged, you have to go to the education center where you learn not to ask about the book. And actually this is a school badge. This is one of the school badges. The logo is a hybrid of a goat and a spider. If you know your bioengineering legends, this was one of the first spliced animals. They put spider proteins with goats. Anyway, that's their school mascot. So, yeah, it all came together and then we had to launch in Burnley. Oh my god, this project took so long. So obviously, yeah, I was very happy to do this. Yes. And, yeah, so after Burnley went to Hall, another library in Hall, that was in Leeds two months ago. It's in Akrinton now. It's going to Eccleson and say Helen's next and then beginning next year, I'll come back to Liverpool where it will be finished. So you can go see it. Please do. So that's how I made the know-the-powerhouse, a reality ahead of George Osborne. So you might be asking or not, but you have two choices. So what have I done after this project and why I did text adventure games? So I'm just going to say A or B. So, yeah, so doing this, what have I done? Yeah, so I've done interactive fiction. Obviously, the next step is interactive non-fiction. And I really like the idea of exploring. So when we do this project, I did get what I wanted from the project. But I don't know if it's not a shit story, but I don't know if, okay, no, let me refade. I don't know if it's a good story, but I know it's not a shit story. So I'm happy with that one. And I really liked working with some of the artists, Ross and Glenn in particular. So we really liked the idea of using interactive fiction to explore other ideas and concepts. Kind of similar to the way I was able to find out what the kids thought about where they live and where they'd like to be by using design fiction in a way. So, yes, we created a little band called Domestic Science that we're going to use. And we've done a project in a International Trust property, Ray Castleup, in the Lake District, to explore radio communication and freshwater biology through text adventure games. So you can see that there. And I ran a workshop for librarians in an arts and libraries conference. And I was really surprised that there weren't more arts collectives or people running workshops and libraries that had to do with writing or books or reading. Like, everyone's, I know every, like, I love makers. I'm a maker myself, but I don't think everyone has to be a maker. You can't force kids to all be makers the same way you shouldn't force all kids to be programmers. So, yeah, and again I used this format to talk to the librarians there. I did a murder mystery and I'm here now. Okay, so do you want to know why I'm doing this? Okay, so like I said, not everyone has to be a programmer and I just, because I've been, I have been dealing with a lot of young people and I just see a lot of pressure from school, from parents or peers that you need to learn how to code, you need to learn how to program in order to be a valuable member of society or at least make some money. And I just don't think that's true. And there's such a skills barrier, there's such a barrier to entry if you're running these kind of workshops only in libraries or schools or whatever and reading and writing is such a basic skill, like you don't really need that much to be able to start making a text adventure game. And it's really, so it was really, it was really great for me to see the kids just start thinking about things and just go it, going at it, which like coding, even with scratch, I know scratch is really, but there's still the barrier and this just like eliminates a lot of that. It's still digital as well, I think there's other skills that were imparted to the young people while we're doing this, that aren't necessarily digital skills or technical skills, like negotiating, brainstorming, like coming up with ideas as a group, which doesn't, I don't think that happens a lot especially if you know that you have to work towards one goal of creating a coherent narrative. What else? Oh yeah, I also like twine a lot, so it's, yeah, and if you haven't found, if you've never come across this I really encourage you to look into it and there's loads and loads of stories and I think the other thing about interactive fiction or text adventure games is that because of this, because of twine, it's such a low barrier of entry, there's a lot of non-traditional people making games, like exploring things that are not about killing zombies. So there's this really lovely one called Depression Quest which is also built on twine that looks into what it's like to have to live with depression in a way that you would get from so much more than just reading something about it. So you start to really empathize it and narrative is so powerful in doing that. So yeah, please take one of these if you want and I'll give you the URL so you can play this game and explore all the other dead ends if you'd like later. Okay, thanks.