Compassion for a Lonely City
I disappeared from the city Into the woods
Away from it all, I decided that I can take control of my life
Forced it out and did what I thought was opposite from where I was
In a stuffy room, head stuck in the screens, allergic to everything.
To a tent in the woods, head sweating it out pounding trees in the ground, breathing in everything.
Allergies non-existent I drank more water
Ate all the food
Worked as hard as my body allowed
Socialized with faces instead of screens
Sung, danced, spoke, drew, loved it all together with those faces happy and caring and angry and sad alongside
From my notes Dec 13, 2019, 12:16 PM
What is a stranger to you? What is that space, experience and moment that brings you to interconnect beyond being strangers?
Introduction
Built over a period of my last two semesters in Emily Carr University of Art the “Compassion for a Lonely City” research project centers around the theme of isolation and disconnection in the city of Vancouver. This project aims to bring awareness and inspiration by designing an experience that connects people with other people using gameplay as a way to create critical conversations around Vancouver’s loneliness cultures and it’s lack of interconnectivity.
While “Compassion for a Lonely City” may not “solve” loneliness, the project aims to get those who feel lonely to recognize that it’s the city, not them, and that feeling more connected with others can help create stronger communities that grow the mental well-being of themselves and the city. Ultimately, it will aim to empathize with anyone who feels this disconnection and help to cultivate a new connection to their meaning of community and compassion for others.
What is it?
The project “Compassion for a Lonely City” encompasses two realizations (conceptualizations) of the gaming experience called “Into the Void”. The first, an online game with an “In-Real-World” aspect and the second being a physical installation intended for a public/gallery space.
The first implementation of “Into the Void” is a two-part game that connects you with others and allows you to search, investigate, and learn about each other, your surroundings and perhaps create compassion to guide you out of your loneliness if you so choose. The first part is “Into the Void”, a co-operative two-player online game where the players would need to successfully collaborate to complete it (this drew inspiration from the game Journey which is an award-winning and beautiful example of a two-player experience).
Once completed this online game offers the optional ability to exchange contacts between players and award information that leads offline to an in-reality game part. This part would explore Vancouver city and its naturally beautiful environment and potentially revitalize the player’s connection with where they live and make new connections with others. Think of it as a mix of Geocache scavenger hunting and escape rooms with an emphasis on the analog systems to reduce the phone as a tool. Within this in-reality game there are objects that act like artifacts in escape rooms and containers in Geocache. Here is an example of ceramic tokens that can hide a puzzle or clue.
You would have the ability to play this on your own or get together with a group. I would want the culture around the game to evolve naturally as it did with Pokemon Go however have prompts to interact with strangers and/or friends rather than just fabricated objects within the digital or physical world. This can be played briefly, picking up a portion of a puzzle and doing one “level” of solving, or it can be lengthened, playing with a group and taking one or more difficult missions with multiple levels.
The second implementation of “Into the Void” was intended as an interactive arcade game set as an exhibition piece experimenting and challenging alternative ways to engage in co-op play, and gathering further data for the overall project. The controls were purposely built to make it difficult to play without others. With one hand each player has one button function whether it be up, down, left or right but in order for these functions to work they will then need to physically touch each other’s available hand in the center to connect the loop of electricity. The game focuses on collaboration and builds natural connections between players through an odd but shared experience. However, during the last term of this project, the Covid-19 pandemic struck and took away the opportunity to build and exhibit this piece (it didn’t meet social distancing standards anyways). The game was transferred online and now prompts two players to play on the same keyboard to move their single character.
Problem Finding
As social beings, there is an inherent need for community and connection. However, it’s increasingly difficult to cultivate healthy communities the larger an urban environment becomes, specifically Vancouver City in British Columbia; although it is acclaimed to be one of the “world’s most liveable cities” there is something about it that doesn’t make it feel entirely so: Loneliness. Through various polls conducted throughout the city it claims that
“one in four Vancouver residents have grappled with social isolation” (Kassam) and according to the Vancouver Foundation’s Connections and Engagement report, released in December, 2017 young adults “…are among those least likely to feel a sense of social connection (46% of 18–24 year olds, 50% of 25–34 year olds)…”(Lubik and Kosatsky).
What is it about Vancouver that dissipates the general camaraderie of its urban outdoors? The sheer density pushing us together mere inches on transit, in bustling restaurants, bars, marketplaces and boundaries such as headphones and our phones arise to allow ourselves to turn off and have our space, pushing us further apart. Interactions with anyone outside of who we know, strangers, people that aren’t a part of your social energies are more often than not closed off. Though the behaviors towards our strangers may vary, there is a distinct harshness present in Vancouver, an air of isolated lives being led and ready to react against strange interactions that are predetermined as unwelcome; why is that?
Digging online It doesn’t take me too long to find some issues that contribute to causing feelings of loneliness. Such issues include unaffordability of living expenses and the state of transience that it causes, language and sometimes cultural barriers, poor climate that can bring about seasonal depression (SAD), “busy” culture, and even the systems cities are built upon and the kinds of architecture we are surrounded in.
There are far more possibilities that can contribute but within these issues, I am drawn towards the state of transience. Data gathered from the Vancouver Foundation finds that “Half of those under 35 who responded to the survey said that they did not feel a strong sense of belonging in their neighborhoods. More than half said they were unsure whether they would still be in the same neighborhood next year.” (Wilson) and “People who rent or own a home are lonelier than those with a mortgage, perhaps because cities with lots of renters” like Vancouver “have greater transience and potentially lower community engagement.” (Kassam) And with that effect, online communities are rising as physical communities dissipate and ultimately creating a ghost of what community can really be in the real.
Being alone is different from feeling lonely. Knowing how to be alone can strengthen your sense of self, whereas feelings of loneliness can do the very opposite. “…sociologist Eric Klinenberg, author of Going Solo, says…
“Research shows that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interactions that best predicts loneliness. What matters is not whether we live alone, but whether we feel alone.” (Kassam)
Social isolation is uncomfortable, and this can prompt a need for comfort and habit. Like that habit of picking up our cell phones, opening our screens and turning ourselves off from opportunities of real-time connection. This doesn’t mean we don’t find connections or even compassion through the use of our phones (or any connected screen for that matter), but the over-use, like anything else outside of moderation, may become problematic and detrimental to create meaningful connections.
What is the opportunity space?
It made sense to bring in gameplay as a tool to address these aforementioned issues as it can act as a point of entry and reach the affected demographic through online communities (I can’t reach people outside of the screen if their gaze is focused on the screen). Gameplay also has the ability to transition experiences into the physical space which could help mediate a balance between our online communities and physical communities. Additionally, I want to challenge the irony of video games since they can be naturally isolating experiences. Overall, there is a need for more intriguing opportunities in creating human interconnections in alternative and evocative ways, and a need to re-evaluate our relationship with our strangers. This is where I came up with the project “Compassion for a Lonely City”.
My Process
In the process of realizing “Compassion for a lonely City” I used UX design methods, such as exploration and observation to conversation making and user testing, in combination with my artistic practice. This was at times challenging but ultimately rewarding and lead to unexpected outcomes.
Since “Compassion for a Lonely City” deals with human emotion, a much more qualitative data, I felt that the best way to drive my decisions of the project was to engage my topic with anyone I interacted with through an informal approach. Social isolation can be a tender topic so I wouldn’t always bring up a direct question such as “What makes you lonely?” or “Could you share a moment of social isolation?” right off the bat. These conversations would typically preface with a question that referred away from the individual first, like “Why does Vancouver city feel so disconnected?”, to see what that would inspire.
Through conversation, I learned that the sliding scale of personality types from introverts to extroverts have different ways of dealing with loneliness and that the outreach for meaningful human connections doesn’t need to be physical or face to face. Although our screens might create a physical barrier it can be used for the better, despite the negative effects that an online life can have.
Within user testing, I conducted multiple paper prototype tests and a video prototype test to inform the aesthetic of the online two-player game.
From this point forward I shifted my focus to open-ended testing on what gameplay can do to connect players. This is where the Makey Makey controller was introduced. Makey Makey allows you to turn everyday objects into touchpads and combines them with the internet.
Makey Makey was a simple way to re-open the possibilities of testing my project idea. Through its playful abilities, I was able to create various testing scenarios within alternative co-operative gameplay. Throughout these tests, I received a lot of positive feedback on the interactions with the controller and made me realize that this prioritizes the experience over the visual of the game.
Seeing that the visual of the game was not the priority anymore and my game developing skills were limited I decided to prototype the demo on Scratch, an online community site that allows you to program your own interactive stories, games, and animations. This is where I decided to only carry over the illustrated visuals from the video prototype and focus on the controller experience.
Outcome
Insight: A tension between the artistic and traditional UX approach
When designing and testing for something as ephemeral as loneliness the impact on the user is sometimes not obvious or immediate, it almost requires multiple experiences of the game to truly test out the requirements of the game.
There’s no easy way to test an experience because “…we cannot create experiences directly…” everyone has their own subjective views and trying to gather this qualitative data is difficult because the “Game enables the experience, but it is not the experience.”(Schell)
User testing a game like this would require a deeply participatory process which needs multiple testing methods of various iterations over a long period of time. (When Dr. Dimeji Onafuwa spoke at his lecture about “What inclusion really means: a pluriversal approach to user experience”. I remember when he spoke about deleting expertise: remove the hierarchy and everyone chimes in and the problem can be resolved which allows it to be a “deeply participatory process”.)
So to comprehensively analyze the impact of the game we would require a long term testing system with multiple intervals. Like a book, it takes time to permeate, and the game acts as a catalyst to start looking at your life in a more mindful way and develop newer perspectives on the theme at hand.
Future Steps
At this point in the project, I have a few thoughts on how it could be refined and pushed further. The following are just a shortlist of concepts that reflect my current mindset. The Scratch prototype could be improved by testing an online multiplayer ability. It could also improve on an explorative aspect like introducing puzzles solve and keys to collect for players to reach another side of a “portal”. Including some running text at the bottom, like a quote, that can evoke the storyline and extra tidbits where players can leave a mark, like the first three characters of their name, or have a ghost mode so that you can see who has played the game before you.
As a longer-term goal I would like to see the online to in-real world game fully realized. Within that, there is also a potential space that the two parts can be combined into one cohesive experience. Although my technical abilities are not currently adequate at this stage the experience could use augmented reality to weave its story between the physical and real world. This approach would develop the game towards a larger city-scale and act as a collection tool for player data around isolation and loneliness to reflect back meaningful information to the user as well as an aggregated emotional sentiment on a larger scale.
From the very beginning of this experiential design project the concept has oscillated between an individual to a collective exploration. Although we’ve seen a huge trend in multi-player online games, their experiences are predominantly individual, this project represents a departure from this common approach and helps us as humans see our underlying interconnectedness.
…
The tree can’t live in a vacuum void of all connection
The tree needs to live in the forest
You are like the tree
…
Works Cited
Baluja, Tamara and Wilson, Jennifer. “You’re Not Alone: Vancouverites Share Their Stories of Loneliness | CBC News.” CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, 20 Nov. 2018, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/you-re-not-alone-vancouverites-share-their-stories-of-loneliness-1.4913290.
Kassam, Ashifa. “Is Vancouver Lonelier than Most Cities or Just Better about Addressing It?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 4 Apr. 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/vancouver-loneliness-engaged-city-taskforce-canada.
Onafuwa, Dimeji. “What Inclusion Really Means | A Pluriversal Approach to User Experience.” Lecture. 6 Feb. 2020, Vancouver, Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
Lubik, Amy and Kosatsky, Tom. “Is Mitigating Social Isolation a Planning Priority for British Columbia (Canada) Municipalities?” PDF. BC Center for Disease Control, September 2019
Schell, Jesse. “The Art of Game Design: 3rd edition” AK Peters/CRC Press, July 2019
Wilson, Jennifer. “Pretty Lonely: Meet the Vancouverites on the Frontlines of Social Isolation | CBC News.” CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, 19 Nov. 2018, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/lonely-in-vancouver-frontlines-1.4909870?fbclid=IwAR0sJapKaOPwbDoPneuEzsMgk_gh3VJKiieMidowyHs_STumGU_YF36wL-8.
…
Nothing is stranger
Than treating a stranger like they are lesser or more than you
Look at them and know that they are human and they are here too
…
This project is an open space to continue brainstorming and creating around this topic of loneliness. So, any and all constructive feedback on this project and the subject matter is welcome! What are your stories? Your ideas? What are you're thoughts on loneliness and isolation now with the effect of COVID-19? What do your stories of loneliness look like before and after COVID?
