1. Intro

 

2. Related research

 

3. Methodologies

 

4. Discussions

 

 

 

4.2 With regard to the cooperation in this project (and the outlook).

 

As mentioned in previous assignments, my current life parallels full-time internship and full-time study, which takes up almost all of my life. Occasionally this can be a bit of a burden yes, and can be exhausting, but as my internship company has VR projects, it has provided many ideas and learning opportunities for the design and implementation of the projects in my current course.

 

In the previous months, I had been trying to come up with some proposals in sync with the company of my own VR urban wayfinding project, but due to the difference in objectives between the project the company was working on and the project I was hoping to achieve, it was not possible to implement it into an actual project in a few months time. however, I gained a new mentor during my internship experience: Director Deng, who is our animation and VR director and has come up with many new ideas for exclusive ways of expression only for VR, and has invited me to join an ongoing research on VR camera languages. We had a lot of meetings and workshops, but during a recent company project, I learnt that many of the executive leaders would give instructions and requests for implementation, which were occasionally very out of context, but also gave me a lot of skills in communicating with people and presenting reasonable needs.

 

It was very satisfying to meet so many students with different study and discussion habits during the course. Because the internship takes up my time, I think it would have been better for me to work with my classmates with more in-class discussions and presentations rather than collaborating on assignments outside of class, which would have been easier for them and me. Personally, I would describe myself as a more talkative person, and I tend to say more when debriefing with my classmates, but that doesn’t mean that our contributions are any different. Although someone must have dominated the discussion when communicating, we did so by communicating and presenting our respective needs, and in the final balance, came to a mutually agreeable conclusion, which was output by the more articulate person.

 

After the semester, the biggest thing I discovered was that there is a fundamental difference between discussions at school and in the workplace. Discussions at school are more speak-your-mind, egalitarian, and inquiry-based, but discussions in the workplace sometimes contain more power-play and interest-weighing than purely academical or inquiry. Nevertheless, regardless of where and in what form, different collaborative experiences are a source of learning and thus progress.

 

 

WK6

 

Presentation 2 transcript (with some amendments)

 

 

 

In my last assignment I explored why Alipay is so magical for Chinese people, but I was more interested in how Alipay collects data from its users through such activities to understand them better, than the publicity it gives to the company. So, can we be less evil than what capital/big company is doing and use this as inspiration to move ‘learning about human behaviour’ to a more academic purpose? Of course, academics have to eat too, not to mention my project includes a proposed collaboration with an actual company, so there is some potential for profit.

 

The overall idea of this project is to design an interactive VR venue to explore whether VR can train human skills, by operating a prototype project that relate to urban wayfinding and graphical memory, what we aim at is to find a way which is exploratory but also profitable way that sufficient to support academic research. The planned test run of the project prototype consists of several pilots, to take a more practical approach for ease of illustration, this test run would be near my workplace: Sanlitun (Beijing). We will set up three physical sites in different locations and provide VR equipment for the testers to use. At the backend of the data collection, we will divide the whole Sanlitun area into different sections and observe whether the learning testers can reach the other physical site from their starting site, after they have toured and checked in at some of the sections in the VR-built Sanlitun.

 

The idea didn’t come about on a whim either. Apart from being inspired by my research on Alipay in assignment 1, I also looked up reports of projects that combined online and offline urban mobility through mobile media and learnt that there are some companies had already sold this type of training program as a formal business to a variety of industries, mainly in the sports training. For example, The U.S. Ski Team worked with STRIVR, a new team using VR for athlete training, to capture actual racecourses using 4K cameras to create 360-degree VR scenes for athletes to ski on, allowing them to experience and familiarise themselves with the course they will be competing on. Other than STRIVR there are some other companies like TRACKMAN working in the VR training as well. The past experience has taught us that the greatest benefit of using VR to train people is the great security for human life in terms of adequate safety measures and non-physical interaction. At the same time, the advantage over using flat 3d graphics is that VR training is more immersive because the person is physically integrated into the situation. More importantly from a learning research perspective, because VR is a data-based experience, human behaviour can be recorded and there is more quantifiable data that can be learned and reviewed, which is a very useful and convenient sample for research.

 

In the next stage of my learning and exploration, I will be working with my partner company, China Focus co Ltd,, to explore the feasibility of the project proposal, while at the same time using online library’s information and papers to make the process more informed and reliable.

 

Word count： 588

Alipay’s fortune cards-How  a mobile payment application turning Chinese cities into playgrounds

 

 

-What is playful and what play has become these days.

 

The definition of playful can be very flexible in the sense of mobile media placemaking. ‘Play’ in the age of information explosion is very fragmented, according to Labbrand, Chinese consumers spend 3.9 hours on smartphones just for entertainment, while the analysis showing applications with high usage are not traditionally considered as mobile games, but lifestyle applications (Labbrand 2017). Being inspired by Silva & Hjorth, it can be said that the requirement of lifestyle and entertaining can be combined by the ceaseless movement and interaction of people, letting everyday life takes on the dimension of playful living space (Silva & Hjorth 2019). The games have been merged in the physical world people dealing with, the boundary of play and living become somewhat blurry. (Salen & Zimmerman 2003) As the definition of modern playful spaces is settled, to add other features or rewards to the process shall not compromise its essence of it still being playful— In using one of Alipay’s fortune card campaign as an example, the new feature of this addition is that people can be rewarded with electronic cash by using their app to assist in playing the city.

 

-Alipay’s ‘fortune card collection’ event: what is it, how does it gets  so popular?

 

No one would have imagined that PayPal would host such an event and be rewarded with electronic for taking part in a city play, but Alipay seized a perfect opportunity to start its layout: it combined this play with the Chinese New Year, the major and the most important traditional festival shared by all Chinese. This goes beyond the traditional rituals and festivities; what will be observed in recent year’s Spring festival is that people are holding phones, ‘scanning’ a specific type of target, which is the fortune mark, at every corner in the city, at any time of the day.

 

The fortune mark used to be a simple and traditional Chinese New Year’s decoration, and almost every house in China would put a new fortune mark decoration on their front door, irrespective of religious beliefs or political stance. Shopping malls, restaurants, cafes and, office spaces, even cars would have Fortune characters stuck on their windows, plus many New Year’s celebratory items that are everywhere during the festive season. They can be found everywhere in cities and villages, which provide the perfect natural venue for Alipay’s fortune card collection event.

 

Alipay first launched this event called “Collecting Five Fortunes” during the Chinese Spring Festival time of 2016. The principle is to scan fortune characters in various corners around the city through smartphone cameras based on image recognition technology. Once the fortune mark has been recognised, the Alipay app will grant the user a fortune card blind box, in total there are five types of fortune card Alipay ask the users to collect, complete collecting all five types of fortune cards will result in a prize drawing chance during the Chinese New Year Gala. The big prize might be electronic cash (which can reach $20k or more) or maybe free all the loans of last year you borrowed from Alipay.

 

Tempting, isn’t it? For 1.24 billion Alipay users (Statista 2022), this event should also be enough to drive them to take part in the city play during the New Year festival time. Hence there’s the aforementioned spectacle. During the New Year, even during the epidemic of the last two years, people are seen everywhere on the streets, in shopping malls, in communities, raising their hands, taking out their phones to scan the fortune mark when they see them.

 

-What does it shows

 

The Alipay example can fit the four components of the game proposed by Huizinga. Firstly, the boundary between play and ordinary life is whether users see the fortune mark everywhere during the Chinese New Year as a form of access to the playful urban space; if they are not motivated by the game’s design, they will not use the scanning function to trigger the game, and Alipay will remain an ordinary lifestyle app for such users. Secondly, in the other case, when users are engaged in the searching & scanning for fortune marks activity, they cannot help but notice people like themselves playing the game – it is straightforward to recognise similar behaviour between them. By actually participating in the game, people share it with others around them, thus drawing them into the process and creating a stronger sense of immersion from the environment. Thirdly, due to the long history, broad scope and acceptance of this traditional celebration of Chinese New Year, fortune marks can be found everywhere in China, and is an almost permanent installation, with the area, time and scope of the event being very free. Lastly, the rules of play and the rewards are publicised, and users are sure to get the corresponding rewards for playing according to the rules.

 

Hence yes, it’s not only in play but also more motivating to play profitably.

Besides, as Alipay itself is a payment-lifestyle application, this kind of entertainment has also become part of the Chinese New Year routine since 2016 among Chinese mobile phone users who, at this particular time of the year, spontaneously go out on the streets or at home to find the fortune marks that they can interact with, turning participation in this activity into a subconscious instinct. This closed-loop of spontaneous participation-sharing has brought more urban players to Alipay, making the game sustainable and repeatable, getting better each year, with more people getting to know it and more people participating.

 

In conclusion, the main findings of this study is focused on how Alipay transformed from a payment application to a media, where the software and the company spontaneously transformed into a comprehensive media, trying to get into every corner of the user’s life – thus, the user gets the experience of playing in the city, and Alipay gets many data that brings a value that will be far higher than the electronic-RMB it gives out to users for free each year through this urban interaction. As we can see from the Alipay example, sometimes it is possible to build a playful urban space without even investing in special, playable interactive installations upfront, at a lower cost and with a better sense of immersion (because the interaction is already achieved by borrowing objects that already exist in the city), engaging audiences and publics in alternative and playful ways, tie the everyday lives of China’s smartphone users to their city plays.

 

 

-Reference list:

 

Chris Wallbridge and Benjamin Noyes. 2017. “Fragmented Time: How Chinese Spend 3.9 Hours on Smartphones Every Day” Labbrand, accessed March 17, 2022. https://www.labbrand.com/brandsource/fragmented-time-how-chinese-spend-39-hours-on-smartphones-every-day

 

de Souza e Silva, Adriana and Larissa Hjorth. 2009 “Playful Urban Spaces: A Historical Approach to Mobile Games.” Simulation & gaming 40, no. 5 (2009): 602–625.

 

Salen, K., and Zimmerman, E. 2003. Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press.

 

Statista. 2022. “Number of users of Alipay and WeChat Pay in China in 2020, with forecasts from 2021 to 2025”, accessed March 18, 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1271130/mobile-wallet-user-forecast-in-china/

Interviewer: YIN, Tongyu

Interviewee: Li, Simiao

 

Reflection:

 

The interviewee is one of my old friend whom I had known her for about 5 to 6 years, Simiao. She graduated from tertiary education in 2019, when the COVID-19 outbreak stroke China, when all the companies were laying off staff, which made her road to finding a job even more difficult.

 

She didn’t give up. Her family’s expectations and her own desire for independence led her to her first job, making outsourced webcomics. However, layers and layers of work are outsourced, with Simiao doing the bottom end – and performance pay is deducted cleanly for such reasons. Ultimately, the money all goes into the pockets of the big companies at the very top. She went off to the second job working with parcels, where this job just got discontinued since she injured her leg and hand at work and recently needed to recuperate.

 

I wonder if anyone noticed her laugh through the whole interview. The complete interview session last about 40 minutes, and in every topic that is not very much cheering, she laughs, and even it is in Chinese — it is easy to tell her tone keeps going up and down, which is very contrary. I think it might have something to do with the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee: strange or familiar? As a friend, she would have shared her life with me in a more relaxed way, while every topic ends with a sigh. Such a delightful-depressing tone cycle continued throughout the whole interview.

 

I was grateful for the opportunity to do this interview, we hadn’t talked like this for a long time, and she was very open with me as the interviewee. It was the first time I had such a close look at the employment difficulties of recent graduates who graduated during the epidemic. I sincerely felt the power of the interview and the media to spread the word, hoping that someone would notice this group of people in the same situation as her. Interview could help to provoke some sense of social responsibility.

1. Turn the camera off at the request of the participant (Rachel Boynton, DOC NYC, 2016).

2. Show the participant the finished film before the public (Rachel Boynton, DOC NYC, 2016).

3. Love the people that you film. (Rachel Boynton, DOC NYC, 2016)

4. (still figuring out what to write about here…)

DOC NYC PRO: Casting Case Studies 2016, streaming video, DOC NYC, New York, viewed 09 AUG 2021, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bndwq27kkjc>.