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participant

Sandpit 13: The Following

(Continuing from my earlier post, introducing Sandpit 13)

The Premise

It’s a familiar part of many films: one character is attempting to follow another. They must avoid detection, as the followed, should they become aware of the tail, will attempt to elude them. It seems like it would make a fun game, but it’s not at all clear how you might do that. But regular Sandpit contributor group Coney seem to be very, very close to having solved this challenge.

Two teams: the Following, and the Followed. Increasingly useful clues to find the ‘Basekeeper’ are texted to the leader of the Followed at set intervals; the leader of the Following receives these texts 5 minutes later. The game would end a precise 42 minutes after the start, at which point the Followed team would receive one point for each of their 11 members that found the Basekeeper, while the Following team would receive two points for each of theirs.

Under these conditions, the game of following and being followed emerges.

My Experience

The rules were explained, in a little more detail than my précis above, but not as lucidly as would have been ideal. The act of following was assumed and talked around as if it was in some way what we were ‘supposed’ to do, rather than as a naturally emergent strategy given the rules, which in retrospect feels like a clearer way to understand the game.

Additional key points not mentioned above:

  • A secondary goal would be to find one of the organisers at a ‘mid point’, each team scoring one point for each of their number that discovered him
  • The Following (my team) applied orange stickers to themselves prominently; the Followed did the same with yellow. In this way, despite being strangers, we could quickly identify one another.
  • Team captains were chosen based on texting ability and handset usability, and all 10 team members provided the captain with their own numbers so that he could fan out the clues as he received them, as well as guide the team’s overall strategy.
  • The game would end at 20:12.
  • We were each supplied with a map to indicate the playing zone (scanned below)

The playing area
The playing area

Before the rules had time to sink in, before we could get to know our own team beyond the colour-coded stickers (“if you could all now get to know each other in a few seconds”), and before we could exchange more than a handful of ideas about what a good strategy might be (“if all else fails, shall we meet at the top of those stairs?”), we were formed up into two lines, and at eight second intervals, alternating members of each team were instructed to “Go”, starting with the captains, who each immediately ran to what they perceived to be strategic locations.

Despite a feeling that we should ponder and discuss strategy first, an urgency and expected behaviour had been conveyed, so each member of the Followed would take off at a run as soon as they were allowed, and eight seconds later the corresponding member of my team, the Following, would run after them. It seemed as if eight seconds was indeed an ideal head start, being just enough time to get out of sight.

By the time it came to my turn (I think I was about 8th) I still couldn’t convince myself that a one-to-one pairing of Followed with Following was the best strategy. Sixteen short seconds earlier my friend, Clare, had set off in pursuit of a Followed (whom I shall call Eve, for convenience), so I opted to join them. I realised in doing this that I was denying my implicitly assigned opposite number the pleasure (at least in the initial stages of the game) of being pursued, but I hoped she might instead fear that I was so stealthy in my following she could not spot me.

(After the game was over, she asked whether I had been following her at all and I had to come clean. Her disappointment was palpable, and salutary).

As I caught up with Clare, the power of the game’s rules to create interesting situations became apparent. Eve had slowed down and was trying to spot if Clare was following her – but did not know about me.

At this point I should explain a little about the location. This particular part of the South Bank is a highly connected maze of multi-level concrete walkways and bridges, so the potential for both eluding a pursuer and following someone unnoticed is incredible.

I opted to veer off and take a higher level, from which I could view both Clare and Eve. Moments later I was in a postition to see that Eve was doubling back, out of Clare’s sight. I had seconds to give Clare a warning, but realised abruptly that if I shouted I would give away my presence. I waved my arms madly, but within moments Clare disappeared from my sight behind a parked lorry – running straight into Eve. I had failed, and even though the stakes were low, I felt surprisingly tense as I waited for one or other of them to emerge.

As it turned out, they came out together, talking and walking side by side, heading back the way we had come. The illusion of danger was broken. I headed to the notional rendezvous point at the top of the stairs alone.

I arrived to find our captain and an alarmingly large number of other Following team members, all of whom had been eluded by their respective Followed. By this time our first clue had come in – ‘outside rather than inside’, which didn’t narrow things down much. Presumably the Followed team had received the next instruction by now, but they were nowhere in sight. There was only one thing to do.

We split up.

I ran in the direction that seemed most interesting (towards Queen Elizabeth Hall), scanning the hordes of bystanders for day-glow yellow stickers or suspicious behaviour. Then the next text message arrived – “2nd clue: basekeeper can see the river”. That cut things down nicely, just as things were starting to seem hopeless.

I bumped into some other team members and told them my idea: if the basekeeper is near the river, I reasoned, perhaps that means the secondary goal – the ‘mid point’ – is away from it. While the others checked along the riverbank, I would run to the Imax and check around that area.

The Imax occupies a strange space. It’s a large circular building surrounded by a raised roundabout, reachable only through underground tunnels that curve away in every direction, baffling your sense of direction. I couldn’t see the mid-point man, but I could see two people behaving very strangely. They were moving around a thick pillar, scrupulously avoiding one another’s gaze, holding either mobile phones or cameras – I don’t particularly recall.

They were players, I presumed, but not players of this game. I interrupted their strange dance to ask if they had seen a middle-aged man in a blue shirt with a graze on his nose (realising I was solving another challenge as I did so – describe someone you have met only briefly and didn’t particularly study). It was a strange interaction, talking to two people that were determined to ignore one another’s existence. In any case, they hadn’t seen him, and time was moving on – I checked my watch and saw 19:58, meaning just 14 minutes remained. I took the exit that leads to Waterloo bridge at a run, since that would at least offer a raised vantage point.

I saw someone with an orange sticker – a fellow Follower. They told me the mid-point had been found, and was in fact in the bus stop just 10 meters further along the bridge. I ran and gave him the code phrase – “The Following have found you” – and he duly noted me down. I realised that if we couldn’t succeed in finding the basekeeper, we could at least get as many of our number to the mid-point as possible. I phoned Clare and gave her directions.

At 20:04 a text message arrived – “3rd clue was bonus station waiting for bus north on Waterloo bridge. Regroup point has moved in front of national theatre.” I scanned the area, and suddenly spotted Clare and another Following at the bus station on the opposite side of the bridge, across four lanes of traffic and perhaps 60 meters away – the Northeast side of the bridge, when in fact the correct location was the Southwest. Could I shout loud enough? Should I run closer first and then try to draw their attention? No – I simply reached for my mobile once again, and leveraged billions of pounds of infrastructure and technology to help me make eye contact.

As the prophesied end time of 20:12 drew near, things seemed to accelerate – just as Clare and two other Following arrived, we received the 20:06 text message “4th clue: basekeeper east of Waterloo bridge. Mike can you go north of Thames in case?“. Clare and the others made contact with the mid-point (by now I think at least 6 of us had done so), and we then crossed to the East side of the bridge. Already another text – “5th clue. Basekeeper can be seen from stone circle between giant furniture and river. That is the regroup point”.

We paused to survey the view from that side of the bridge – we could see the circle and giant furniture, just below. Surely that should mean we could spot the basekeeper… just then we spotted the captain of the Followed, perhaps just a sixty-second sprint away, down the stairs from the bridge, across a pedestrianised area, up some stairs and striding across the open cafe area set above the giant furniture.

The final dilemma
The final dilemma

“That’s him!” I cried, “That”s the captain! He must know where the base is! Get him!” We launched in pursuit – and then I paused, realising that observing is potentially more powerful than following. “You guys get over there, I’ll keep an eye on him”.

I checked my watch. We had perhaps three minutes – but was my watch fast or slow? We had never synchronised watches. Another movie trope suddenly made sense.

The captain of the Followed was talking with a random woman sat at a table overlooking the stone circle. Was he asking her if she had seen anyone suspicious? Was she actually another team member? Or could she actually be the Basekeeper? I realised I had been assuming from the start that the other organiser would take the role – what if I was wrong? I ran down the stairs.

When I reached the balcony level, I found the other Followers, but the Followed captain was nowhere to be seen. There couldn’t be much more than one minute to go. “Have you seen the basekeeper?” “No, where did the captain go?” “No idea – I saw him talking to that woman, but she couldn’t be the basekeeper, right..?”

I approached the stranger as the others held back. She seemed like a normal cafe customer, nonchalantly talking to someone on a mobile phone and apparently reading a book at the same time.

“Er, hello… the, um, Following have found you?”

She smiled and apologised to the person on the phone. “Yes.” She withdrew a piece of paper from her book. Automatically, by some instinct I have never felt before, I raised both my arms as I turned to the rest of the Following. “This is it!!”.

After a final scramble to get team members together, this was the last text I received from our captain: “Final: The Followed score 11 and The Following score 23 – victory beer at the spirit level”.

Conclusions

Just as we had been told at the start, The Following is indeed a game coming to the end of the development cycle. Here’s what I think could still potentially be improved:

  • The instructions at the start are critical. These should be carefully scripted in advance, and as someone pointed out on the day, it’s much easier to get your head around if you are told if you are a Following or a Followed before hearing how the game works.
  • More time to strategise and get to know one another would help a lot.
  • Although it’s obvious in retrospect, and felt like a fun twist at the time, I think it should be emphasised that the Basekeeper could be anyone.
  • Given how many Followed eluded the Following in the first part of the game, I wonder if 7 seconds might be a better lead time – but this will vary hugely depending on the layout of the initial location.
  • As a Following, the game felt impossible in the first 15 minutes – a smaller play area on the map, or some earlier clues, would help here.

That’s all I can think of, but do note that all of these are minor quibbles – in the end the game played out in a very satisfying fashion, and I am very keen to play it again.

At the time of writing, the next game of The Following will take place as part of the 2009 Hide and Seek Festival, again at the Southbank Centre, on Saturday 1st August 2009. (Also note that I did check with Coney, and subsequent games will use different locations and clues to those described here).

-metatim

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Categories
participant

Experimental pervasive games at Sandpit 13

Note: the title is not actually a random collection of words.

Whats going on here? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
What's going on here? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

On Wednesday 24th June 2009 I attended Sandpit 13, one of the many events organised by Hide & Seek. It was incredibly varied, persistently fascinating, and a bunch of fun.

The Sandpit is a monthly ‘pervasive gaming’ night in London. To use Hide & Seek’s own words, “Pervasive games transform the city into a playground, make your heart race, change the way you see the world, [and] get you playing nicely with others”.

I think these types of games are a product of recent technological advances in two senses. In the most direct sense, they frequently assume that mobile  phones and digital cameras are sufficiently ubiquitous that almost everyone will have one, and they also make full use of the latest tools and services (from GPS aware mobiles to feedback via Twitter hashtags). In the less direct sense, the games are very often being developed following the ‘Release Early, Release Often‘ philosophy, with the players providing feedback or becoming full collaborators in future refinements of the game.

I got to experience three very different games at Sandpit 13: ‘The Following’, ‘The Postman’, and ‘Free London’s Monsters!‘. In the next few posts I’m going to try to convey my experience of these games, and in the spirit of collaboration offer my own conclusions about their gameplay.

(A chalkboard at the event invited feedback to be submitted using the Twitter hashtag #sandpit – my currently directionless Twitter account can be found @metatim, and that shall serve as a synapse between this post and the requested hashtag).

Introduction

It all began at the Spirit Level, a somewhat hidden part of  the Royal Festival Hall. We arrived 20 minutes after the start time and were immediately confronted by a fascinating kind of chaos – over a hundred people, interacting in strange ways with unusual items, surrounded by foam furniture, instructions of all kinds taped to the walls or the floor, or on blackboards or whiteboards, several games evidently in progress, and many more evidently forthcoming. Random pieces of card throughout the room advised anyone that cared to read them to “watch out for the whistling postman”. More on that later.

Thanks to an unusually high density of whiteboards, signs, leaflets, and people that looked as if they knew what was going on, we identified and approached the registration desk. Moments later we were drawn into our first game of the evening.

First game: The Following

Second game and Third games: The Postman, Free London’s Monsters

– metatim

Categories
experiment

The Celebrations Experiment: The Results

In the previous post I described my experiment regarding the distribution and popularity of the different chocolates found within a Celebrations tub. After several months of rumination, cogitation, and procrastination, I am ready to publish my findings.

(Incidentally, this is fully the intended publishing style for this blog – posts appearing infrequently, but with a fair amount of thought and effort behind them, which is the style I prefer to find myself when browsing through the RSS feeds I subscribe to).

I should note that I have since discovered some prior work in the field: popular newspaper The Sun reported on the unfair distribution of Celebrations chocolates way back in 2006, although their methods were not so rigorous. In response to claims of ‘scrooge tactics’, Masterfoods responded “The mix is made up of different quantities of various brands. Research shows that’s what people prefer.” We shall see how that statement holds up against a more scientific examination of the facts.

The results of the auctions were, sadly, inconclusive. Only three of the tubs sold (the Mars, Maltesers ‘teasers’, and Galaxy tubs), all for the starting bid. I had thought I could at least use the number of views of each auction as a simple proxy for popularity, but on closer examination this seemed to have been biased by the order in which the listings appeared, with the first and last listed gaining a disproportionate number of views.

(I am currently auctioning off the remaining tubs, still well within their use-by date, in time for Easter and with free postage. The auctions end April 5th 2009 and can be found here.)

Fortunately I discovered an alternative measure of chocolate popularity: The Chocolate Review, where different chocolates are scored out of 10, with most chocolates receiving over 50 votes. With this information in hand, I was able to plot out the relationship between the average number found in a tub and the popularity of a given chocolate.

Plot of chocolate distribution vs popularity.
My worst fears confirmed: more delicious chocolates are rarer.

First conclusion: the more delicious a chocolate is, the rarer it tends to be.

The correlation is clear but not perfect, and it should also be noted that the scores are for the full-size purchase versions of these chocolates, which differ somewhat from the Celebrations size – particularly the Maltesers ‘teasers’. Also note that the Galaxy Truffle is not scored on the Chocolate Review, although I strongly suspect that this would follow the correlation.

One natural explanation for this apparent injustice would be that more delicious chocolates cost more to make per gram, and as such the cost of a Celebrations tub is kept down by skewing the distribution towards cheaper varieties. Checking the details of the chocolates in their standard form on Tesco’s site, I was able to estimate the cost-per-gram of each type, with the following result:

Plot of chocolate price vs popularity.
You get what you pay for.

(I have added the pricing and popularity data to the original results Google docs spreadsheet).

Second conclusion: more delicious chocolates are more expensive, pretty much. Such is life.

This brings us to the final and crucial question: is the distribution of Celebrations chocolates in a tub mercilessly determined by the average cost per gram alone?

Celebrations: price vs distribution.
Price dictates distribution – but what of the teasers?.

The Maltesers ‘teasers’ location is clearly an outlier. This is almost certainly due to the fact that these ‘teasers’ are significantly different to regular Maltesers, so the cost-per-gram used here is incorrect. Checking with two local shops I found the cost-per-gram of Maltesers to be the same, so the Tesco pricing was not an anomaly. Disregarding this datapoint, we can be fairly certain of the final and most damning deduction, which stands in marked contrast to Masterfoods’ disingenuous statement.

Third conclusion: chocolate distribution is determined by price, not deliciousness.

There is one beacon of hope visible from these apparently bleak results. Anecdotally (read: in my opinion), and as suggested by the successful sale of such a tub, Maltesers ‘teasers’ are in fact quite notably delicious, arguably more so than regular Maltesers – yet the results strongly suggest that they are far cheaper to produce. If we examine a cross-section of the two types, the differences become clear:

The difference between Maltesers and 'teasers'.
The difference between Maltesers and ‘Teasers’

So we reach our final and most optimistic conclusion:

Fourth conclusion: Maltesers ‘teasers’ may well be more delicious than their cost would suggest, and could potentially be developed into their own independent product line.

Further research is needed in this area, but I think for now I shall move on to other areas of research.

-metatim

Edit (07/04/2009): On the bottom of the tub, the ‘teasers’ have the following description: “Everybody’s favourite, grab ’em before they’re all gone!”. It seems Mars (formerly Masterfoods) have indeed done some research, and it endorses my final conclusion.

Second Edit (14/04/2009): A figure that was conspicuously absent from this analysis: given the standard distributions and cost-per-gram of each chocolate, a natural question to ask is: what is value of the standard tub contents? Assuming truffles cost the same as galaxies and that teasers actually do fit the distribution/cost trend, my estimate is £7.69. Since the standard price of a tub seems to be about £5, this means that these tubs are actually a very efficient way to buy chocolate. This data has been added to the Google Docs spreadsheet.

Third Edit (17/07/2013): Much has changed in the ~4.5 years since this research was originally conducted. For one thing, the amount of chocolate in the tubs was reduced. Mini Twixes have now been added to the mix, (based on a couple of tubs, these appear to have largely substituted Mars/Snickers, so evening the distribution a little). Finally and most importantly, Mars did indeed launch a stand-alone ‘Teasers’ offering. Hooray!

Fourth Edit (11/09/2015): These days there are only 750g of Celebrations in a tub, the truffles are out, Twixes are in. You can find out what the distribution looks like over on Mental Floss.

Categories
experiment

The Celebrations Experiment

Around this time of year, everyone’s minds turn to the mathematics of random distribution and Bayesian inference, although these terms are not normally used.

This is all due to those tins or tubs or boxes of assorted chocolates, along with the fact that people have preferences among the chocolates on offer, and the problem that these preferences often overlap.

Two questions inevitably emerge:

1) Why don’t they sell tins of each type of chocolate, and

2) Since they don’t, are the chocolates at least fairly distributed between tins?

In this experiment, I set out to answer these questions. I would simply buy a large number of tins of a particular kind, find the average chocolate distribution, then sort them into tubs of each type and sell these tubs on eBay with all proceeds going to charity in order to establish their value.

Here in the UK there are a handful of big names that sell you a few delicious chocolates among a big tin of much less pleasant ones: Cadbury’s Roses, Cadbury’s Heroes, Nestlé’s Quality Street, and Mars’ Celebrations.

Of these, the Roses seem to cause the fewest arguments. Heroes are a bit boring and odd. Quality Street cause the most trouble with just a few delicious options among a terrible array of toffee-based disappointments.

This is literally how biased the Quality Street range is. Almost.
This is literally how biased the Quality Street range is. Almost.

Unfortunately there are twelve different chocolates in a tin of Quality Street, only two of which seem to be widely appreciated. I would probably have had to buy at least 13 tins, and I would be left with 10 very unpopular sweets to sell on eBay.

Celebrations were the most promising. There are just 8 types, all of which are quite acceptable, but some of which are nonetheless noticeably more delicious.

So over the course of a week I bought 9 tubs of Celebrations from three different supermarkets, the idea being I would have good odds of being able to make up 8 tubs of each type.

I cleaned out three containers, donned a pair of brand new rubber gloves for hygiene (even though the chocolates are individually sealed), and began sorting and counting.

My sorting and counting system.
My sorting and counting system.

This process took approximately 90 minutes, although would have been a good deal faster if I hadn’t been carefully counting as I went along, and hadn’t been distracted by Robert Llewellyn telling me how buildings are demolished.

It rapidly became apparent that I had made a critical mistake.

It turns out that the distribution of Celebrations is extremely consistent but very far from fair, and I would need an additional tub in order to make up a nice round number of single-type tubs. Over 10 tubs, I obtained the following totals:

213 Mars
202 Snickers
160 Milky Way
140 Bounty
131 Maltesers ‘teasers’
76  Galaxy Caramel
72  Galaxy Truffle
70  Galaxy

You can see the complete results in this Google docs spreadsheet.

Visually, that means a typical tub would look like this:

Typical contents of a Celebrations tub
Typical contents of a Celebrations tub

This presented a problem. In order to run a fair test on eBay, I needed each tub to have an equal number of chocolates, at least the same as the standard amount (which is, on average, 106.3).

The solution I settled on was that since (presumably) the Galaxy chocolates have a similar appeal, and there were so few of each type, I would bundle them together. In this way I was able to make up 9 tubs of 100 of a particular type, with a random additional 10 of the leftovers added so that there were more than the usual amount of chocolates, and also to make the end result look a bit more like some kind of hilariously improbable random sorting.

As I write this, I am about to put said tubs on eBay. These are the tubs I was able to put together, with links to the individual auctions:

[1] 100 Mars + 10 leftovers
[2] 100 Mars + 10 leftovers 2
[3] 100 Snickers + 10 leftovers
[4] 100 Snickers + 10 leftovers 2
[5] 100 Milky Way  + 10 leftovers
[6] 100 Maltesers ‘teasers’ + 10 leftovers
[7] 100 Bounty  + 10 leftovers
[8] 33 Galaxy Caramel + 33 Galaxy + 34 Galaxy Truffle + 10 leftovers
[9] 33 Galaxy Caramel + 33 Galaxy + 34 Galaxy Truffle + 10 leftovers 2
(Auctions long since ended – links kept for posterity only)

Of course, I can only put up one tub of each type for it to be a fair test. I will auction the remaining tubs at a later date.

I will give the results of the auctions in the next post.

-metatim