Maida Vale Game Evaluation

Through this task i figured i could learn about areas, places and structures - through questioning their concept, why they were there and what they were used for. I learnt this through performing our project and coming up with questions or clues that would help someone understand, or find a place.

Individually, to this task i contributed mainly through helping come up with ideas for clues and questions. There were a few places in particular that i had to assign a task to or a clue to get there. Upon creating these questions, i was thinking about what the players could learn from figuring them out.

One idea i brought into play was that we should not let anyone know where the places are, instead to make them find them through clues. I felt this idea was good because the players would be keeping their eyes open more and trusting their own instincts, and perhaps this would make the players appreciate the area more, rather than just going from place to place, performing a task and leaving. However coming up with clues proved difficult for me in the sense that i couldnt really tell the players about the area as in its history and its culture, i found all i could really do was make the players appreciate the places architecture and artifacts and spaces as they walked around.

I did this in different ways. One way was to lead the players somewhere, by directing them using peices of architecture or artifacts they could see around them. An example of this was the question to 'Count the faces on the buidlings down randolph avenue and follow them to get to the next location' By doing this i felt the players could atleast appreciate the architecture of Maida Vale. However, by simply counting the the buildings to reach a certain number, i felt the question lacked in teaching them anything relevant. If i had to do this again i would probably involve them getting a book out on this architecture, finding a relevant page to these buildings and then performing the task, so they learnt something too.

Another question used that i felt would make the players appreciate the art in Maida Vale was the question that got them to 'Look at the lamps in the tube station' and to later on look out for 'simularly styled lamps to those in the tube station' so they could work out where they were in the area. By getting them to acknowledge something and use it later, this meant we were getting them to compare the artefacts in Maida Vale and analyse them, by doing this they appreciate the style of the artefact mroe and probably realise how its style is repeated makes it a style relevant to a certain era, thus they learn something too.