ARIS: Life Becoming a Game (or an Audio tour)

While most of these ARIS games seem to simply be audio tours, they are presented in quite creative and game like ways. Most of the games involve you using your GPS to get to a certain location, and then playing an audio track that is accompanied by that location (that is only meant to play when you are actually there). While most of the games are along the lines of things one would see on a tourist or campus tour, the efforts to sort of "gamify" these real world activities definitely makes it more interesting. Despite the actual content of these games being easily accessible on any tourist or UW-Madison website, I actually really enjoyed the concept and variety of these games. There are various tours of different parts of campus, some large sweeping tours of the whole campus, others more specific areas such as lake shore or picnic point.

In my opinion, the concept of these games is very interesting and shows a lot of potential, though the content can be a bit lacking in the games that are featured. That being said I could see how one could make an interesting game through this system, perhaps crafting a narrative through various audio clips that you are meant to find in certain locations in certain orders. The possibilities for this are actually quite large given the slightly limited choices in creation. 

I think this app has an interesting concept, and perhaps if they take out the option of quick travel. in which you can just play an audio track from any location, it could see success. If these quests are possibly given more game like functionality (items, encounters, win/lose conditions, hi-scores,ect.), I could see success in this. Regardless, what is currently there has interested me enough, and I could see myself possibly trying to make one of these around campus. There are a lot of interesting locations one could use around here, State St, Picnic Point, Humanities, the possibilities for Madison or anywhere for that matter are vast.