So if you read/looked at the initial pitch post for this game you saw the red carpet event sensor game/experience. The basic premise was obviously to make you feel like you are experiencing an outbreak with the slightly lighter side aspects of the experience being that ushers could take you off to quarantine, to get vaccinated you need to go to the bar, and to be treated you need to go get popcorn etc. The payoff potential being that it makes it seem a little more real to the audience and that the data visualization that could be displayed when exiting, extrapolating how it may have spread and killed members of the audience while they watched the movie from just a couple of infected viewers, could have one last reality punch.
Well, one of the individuals representing the potential client loved this idea and wanted to go bigger with it. We were more than happy to go along for the ride. The idea – What about a sporting event? We loved it. So we went back to the drawing board and expanded the game idea to happen at a baseball game. It was the perfect venue as it is slow paced and people do a lot of walking around. We claim no affiliation to the team or stadium used in our pitch. I will say that surprisingly the willingness of a team to go along was not the reason this didn’t end up happening. It would have been awesome in my opinion.
I will let slideshare tell the story – again I promise at some point to put narration to it for the talking points but hope you can easily fill in the blanks yourself. One note is the infected slide was a blinking red led and dead is solid (not sure slideshare could handle that).
Some of my favorite ideas in this one were:
a) The idea that instead of turning in your drunk neighbor you would text in to quarantine someone who is not participating and is infecting your section. The response is then a guy in an outbreak outfit coming in with a short range transmitter to quarantine his badge,
b) that there would be even more reason to boo someone from the other team when they did something positive or cheer your team for positive play.
We went so far as to have manufacturing ready to go on the hardware. Stationary beacons for the set locations, roaming beacons for the outbreaks due to player action or time, and of course the individual badges. As much as we would have loved to chase the opportunity, without the movie name backing we would never have gotten this through – again more on the business narrative in a later post including a whole other option for where and how this game could be repurposed that we think would be great.
Stay tuned there is still another design layer that was added as well as the business musings to come.