Minotaur
Minotaur ↗ is a simple game experience that served as my earliest experiment with embedded analytics. For this project, I built a system that records play sessions and sends summary data back to a Clowder server. This work enabled long-term data collection, and the results from over three years and thousands of play sessions are analyzed in this report ↗.
Related Projects
Córdoba Court
Córdoba Court is an innovative social game I designed and developed to foster community building. Modeled after the communal patios of Córdoba, Spain, the game invites players to cultivate a shared virtual environment, expressing their individuality by designing personalized totems from millions of possible combinations. The project serves as a social experiment in digital placemaking and community greening practices. A report is also available, which analyzes player content and observed behaviors.
The Peoples Tree 2
The second iteration of the People's Tree project, an experimental game exploring community building in networked spaces. I created this application to allow participants to design ornaments and leave messages on a communal tree, offering a unique blend of interaction and shared digital space. The project served as a valuable opportunity to develop new technology, establish policy frameworks for user-generated content, and conduct comprehensive analytics on player behavior.
The Peoples Tree
The People's Tree was the first in a series of experimental games I created to explore community building in networked spaces. In this project, players design ornaments and leave messages on a shared tree. It was my first opportunity to build the underlying technology, develop content policies, and run analytics for a live, public-facing application. A key finding from this and subsequent projects was an unexpectedly high player return rate of 15-30%, suggesting that players felt a personal stake in the collectively-designed artifact and returned to observe its evolution.
Where's Home?
An experimental prototype that successfully translated the unshaded, minimalist aesthetic of Rococo into a more complex, architecturally descriptive style. The concept was a sequel to the People's Tree project set in an abstracted Union Station, Chicago. For the prototype, I developed a custom Rhinoceros plugin to optimize and export modular architectural elements, and created a system to randomly place around 100 unique characters and their luggage throughout the scene. While the core technical art was a success, the project was paused to allow for more design iteration on its complex dialogue system.