Val Healy, Nolan Essigmann, and Ceri Riley
Questions:
- Could you hear a difference in sound levels/did it make you think anything different about US drought?
- Where/what have you heard about drought in the news? (leading into the idea that this data was averaged/nationwide)
- What questions do you have after playing the game? (about the game or about your role in representing drought)
Feedback:
- It would be nice if each person/notecard represented a region of the US instead of just a percentage of the whole, so everyone could understand how their region was contributing to the whole country (they were confused by what each notecard meant individually)
- Why no “no drought” level?
- Made them ask questions about what factors — human or environmental — impacted the US drought after 2011, and they started talking about climate change vs. industrial water use vs farming (they had read news articles about almonds in CA and remembered stuff about the ice bucket challenge being controversial)
- One of them was from Arizona and was like they’ve been in drought for years, but California is getting all the attention because of the crops, so they weren’t surprised that more of the US was in drought than they expected
- People thought 15 rounds of one action might get tiring, and the people who did stomp for 15 rounds got tired
- They’d be interested to see what it sounds like with more people because even 14 didn’t sound like enough to have a huge audible effect
Changes:
If we had more time to work on this game, we would ideally play with a large group of people and incorporate more specific data into each notecard so that each person is telling their own story (drought across a region or even a single state) in addition to contributing their sounds to the larger game (and story of drought across 15 years in the United States). Moreover, it might be interesting to try and adjust the drought levels/actions to incorporate “no drought” as stomping and D4 as silence. Maybe we could also adjust the frequency of the actions (fast stomping, slow snapping) to try and vary the sound even more between years, like the feedback in class suggested.