Aris Game: Secret Places

For the Aris game assignment, I played Secret Places. It is described on the site as "Find restful and beautiful locations to enjoy in Madison's best places for reflection and rest." In the game, you essentially see a Google map with pins dropped that say someone's name. When you click on the name, you can "Quick Travel" to their location where the person has a blurb about their favorite place in Madison. You can then "Quick Travel" to that place and learn more about it. For example, after clicking on a person named Jim, I was prompted to travel to a bridge on Wingra.

I personally didn't really enjoy the game. While I see the educational value in having players learn more about the surrounding Madison area and I'm pretty sure that the point of the game is to prompt people to travel to these places in real life to "play," as in walk to these places in reality rather than "quick travel" in the game, I don't think that the game was engaging at all. The graphics are sub par, the descriptions of each place were very brief and did not entice me at all to visit them. Overall I was unimpressed and would not go out of my way to play an Aris game ever again.