Fairy Trails as a Lens: A Tale of Classroom Surprise

Regular readers will remember that last Spring, my immersive learning team—Guy Falls Down Studio—collaborated with Minnetrista to release Fairy Trails. Fairy Trails was a notable project for its unconventional design. It is a geolocative game based on Minnetrista's campus, what I have sometimes called "hyperlocal" because you can only play it at these specific places in Muncie, Indiana. It is driven by an Android or iOS app, but the gameplay happens in the physical world outside the app. This is done in part by designing the app for facilitators, those who bring others to Minnetrista and are focused on these others' enjoyment. This design decision was made in consultation with Minnetrista, who use a local modification of Falk and Dierking's taxonomy of museum visitors to describe who comes to their site.

This semester, I am teaching my Serious Game Design colloquium through the Ball State Honors College. I posted about the course design a few months ago. I am continuing my partnership with Minnetrista, and so one of the major outcomes of the colloquium should be that each student produces an original game design based on our partner's themes. I have also peppered references to Minnetrista through the exercises in the first half of the semester. This semester's students had to play Fairy Trails in the first week of classes. A later assignment involved writing a critical analysis of a game they had played, and I was surprised how many chose to write about Fairy Trails. In almost all of these essays, the students made claims about (1) what, in their mind, the game was supposed to teach, and (2) about how it failed to do so. When I pushed back on these claims in my comments on Google Docs, none responded.

The assignment due yesterday involved the students' reading a chapter and a short summary about taxonomies of players and fun, and then to propose new fairy encounters for Fairy Trails, drawing explicitly upon the taxonomies in the reading. Here's the surprise hinted at in the title of the post: some of their designs were really good. Let me share with you a few of the more memorable ones:

• Several designs involved the herb garden, in which the players have to try different herbs and then are encouraged to gather a few for home cooking.
• At the wishing well, the players each make a wish. The fairy asks them to categorize each wish as love, fame, or fortune; they are then rewarded with an excerpt from a classic fairy tale based on the same theme.
• A fairy wants to get from the Oakhurst mansion to the E.B. Ball Center, but she has to stay in the shade. The players have to take paths through the Oakhurst Gardens rather than taking the direct route along the road.
• A few students involved the nature area in reflective exercises, including one that involved finding different particular sites or species on the trails. 
• A fairy explains that the Ball family had an enormous collection of fairy tales because Elizabeth Ball's love for them, and then asks each to share their favorite book.
• A fairy encourages players to engage in a game of hide-and-seek in the Oakhurst garden.
• A color fairy in the backyard garden invites the players to find and share colorful discoveries with their friends.

To me, the most fascinating part of this list is how different it is from anything we discussed in the production of Fairy Trails and how different these are from the kinds of prototypes built by last Spring's class. The crucial difference between last year and this year is, of course, the creation of Fairy Trails itself. I suspect that having this game available changes the lens through which students can consider the creative challenge of incorporating Minnetrista's themes into a game.

After their presentations, I asked the students to reflect on how these ideas came to them. In particular, I wondered if these were ideas they had from before playing Fairy Trails, immediately after playing it, or in response to the aforementioned readings that they had successfully incorporated into their presentations. Many of them responded that they felt the original Fairy Trails fell flat for them: they had assumed before playing it, based in part on my explanation of the course, that it should have more explicitly informative and educational material about Minnetrista. Those who have played the game know that it does not: it contains three fairy adventures that are designed to be fun for groups to play, especially family groups, and it is not at all didactic. Many of this semester's fairy designs then were informed by this idea, such as including reference to the Balls' fairy tale collection and the fact that you can sample and collect herbs from the garden. The student who designed the scenario to roam the nature area wanted something "less childish" than the current game. The hide-and-seek designer noted that Fairy Trails does nothing competitive, and so he was inspired to create something that would appeal to player types not currently served by the app; he used the readings to inspire him along an angle that he wanted to include. Only one student said that the readings directly influenced her design: she had noticed earlier in the semester that no existing fairy used the herb garden, but had not dwelt on this. When she read about "sensation" as a kind of fun, it brought this to mind and she realized that she could use taste in her fairy encounter.

We discussed briefly the fact that several people had chosen the herb garden (and one, the community garden) as locations, while the Fairy Trails production team never considered these. I wondered at this for a few moments until I remembered that we designed the game in the winter! Although last Spring's studio team could see where the herb garden and community garden would be, we could not actually see it functioning. I think this gave that team a blind spot that this group, who visited in the peak of herb and vegetable season, was able to see and take as inspiration.

Several of these fairy encounters are very exciting to me, but I don't currently have a team who can put them into the existing version of Fairy Trails. It's still a toss-up as to whether we will expand on the existing app in the Spring or whether we will pursue a different direction. In any case, I wanted to capture some of these experiences here on the blog. Even if we do not come back to them as inspirational fairy encounters for Fairy Trails 2, I think it's quite interesting how having a working version of the game changed students' ability to conceive of interactive, Minnetrista-themed activities.