Practicum 6 - Lauren

Since my last post I haven’t been able to make much progress in terms of figuring why my network connection works so intermittently with ARIS so I decided to play with one of the “additional games” on the app that doesn’t require you physically moving around. I was able to explore this game by connecting to the internet in my apartment… so that was nice! This game is called “sing along”. Sing Along is a game where users can upload videos of themselves or a group of people singing a song. You can also use the map to view other videos that people had uploaded. I tried using the map feature to see what kinds of videos people had uploaded before attempting my own … but (not) to my surprise, no one has uploaded anything yet. I think this speaks a lot to the popularity of ARIS thus far. I don’t think there is much purpose to this sing along game so I can’t see why anyone would randomly upload a video of themselves or their friends singing a song. I don’t see the point of the game and to avoid my own embarrassment (not that I think anyone is really looking at ARIS) I have decided to refrain from uploading my own video. It would be cool though if YouTube had this kind of feature and the game does present possibilities to something like YouTube. Imagine if you saw a YouTube video you liked and you could use the GPS feature to find the location/ origin of the user that uploaded the video. That would be very interesting, but I’m sure it would also present a few safety and privacy issues. I wish I could speak more about my experience with Sing Along on ARIS, but like my past experiences thus far, there has been little activity with other users on the game and I am starting to hit a road block in terms of how much more I can explore. I plan to continue researching ARIS on the Internet because that seems to be where I have been finding most of my information about the game.

http://arisgames.org/ has been most helpful in keeping me updated on new additions to the application with its newsfeed and the site itself does a fair job of explaining the already instituted games. I wish there were a few more sites and forums about the application but as of now arisgames.org will have to suffice.