Forced focus
Forced focus is a project about the commonly heard complaint of modern distraction. More and more technologies are able to call for our attention and thereby disrupt other activities. Because of the cursory and needy nature of technologies such as our smartphone, many people say our attention span is decreasing and people have trouble concentrating on some more traditional activities, such as reading a long text. In this project we wanted to investigate whether an alternative technology could provide a solution to this by providing the motivation and concentration for reading a difficult and long book.
Taking part
In Forced Focus, you can take part in a game that consists of a reading a book. This game is in a closed room, but before you enter to play the game, you will see the highscores of other players outside of the room. When you enter the room to play, you sit down in a chair with a button and a slat that closes the chair. When you are ready, you press the button to start. You will then see the words of the book projected on the screen one by one. Sometimes, however, you will see a word or sentence that does not fit. In that case you have to very quickly press the button. If you don't do this in time, you will lose one of your three lives. When you have lost all lives, you are game over. Another way to lose the game is simply to get up; when you open the slat to get up, you will also lose. When you are game over, you can enter your name and your name with the number of words you have read will be registered as a highscore, and be displayed for visitors outside of the room to see. When you have the highest score in the current book (each book is played by about twenty participants), you win the book! The books that have been won so far are: Oliver Twist, Tom Sawyer, Emma and Ulysses.
Reading technology
For the project we programmed a reading method that is similar to some existing technologies such as Spritz and Spreeder. We chose to use this reading method in the project for several reasons. Firstly, it allowed for more gamification that just reading a wall of text. Secondly, we thought this reading method suited our project subject nicely, because it has partly been developed as a solution to difficulties in reading long texts. Because you see only one word at a time, you have to keep looking and by this you can more or less 'force' yourself to read something.
Reflection
During the exhibition, we noticed some interesting things about how participants reacted to the project. The highscore screen was a big motivation for participants to try out the game. However, this did not necessarily mean they were interested in the book. Some of the highest-scoring participants liked the text, but some said they didn't care about it and just tried to get the highest score. Ironically, the participants who said they very much liked the text sometimes wished it had not had the gamification elements, which are of course a distraction in their own right. We found this an interesting insight in gamification. Nevertheless, the gamification elements afforded a great attraction to participants, making it an effective way to bring something to their attention they would otherwise maybe not bother to try, such as reading Ulysses.