Aris - Henry Mall History

When visiting the Aris website, I learned that it is a software that the developers had been working on for about 2 years here in Madison, apart of a continued research project of the Games Learning and Society group. I watched the 8-minute Demo that talked about how to actually use the app, which helped to know what to do when I then downloaded it on my iPhone.

Once I allowed the app use my current location, some pretty interesting games came up with in the 1 km radius. I just clicked on the first game, “Greenbush Game,” which was about a Jewish boy living in the Greenbush neighborhood in 1959. After clicking around the map for a bit, I realized the quests and challenges weren’t all that similar to the way the demo presented the game so I decided to try another one - it was almost like the game was half developed.

The next game I tried was called “Henry Mall History,” which had the description “check out the amazing scientific discoveries and stories that happened on UW-Madison’s Henry Mall!” The game’s quest was to earn as many knowledge points as you cant, taking 50 to win. I started by clicked on various pictures of buildings on Henry Mall, such as the Genetics/Biotech Center, Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene, Hoard Memorial, etc. Each time I clicked on one, it would show a picture and give a little description of the history or an interesting fact – then I would receive a knowledge point.

Overall, I thought it was a pretty interesting app to combine games with history and learning. If this game were to be used in a classroom or for educational purposes, I would be concerned with the lack of pictures, graphics, and noises that are normally used to attract interest and keep player engaged. Because the student would most likely have experience playing other games with better graphics and more engaging, it might be hard for this game to compete with that and keep the player interested. Although it has more educational benefits, the student would probably be more likely to play the game if it was interesting. This expectation might be more applicable to the younger generations, but I think this it's a valid concern.

One thing that I thought was interesting was that all of the games within the app that I came across didn’t have any reviews for the game. So I am curious how often games are created and how many times they are actually played.