Introduction

Our task was to create a game that involves memory.

Play the game by watching this video once, and answering the questions below.

 

Questions:

What color shirt is JC wearing?

1.    Blue
2.    Black
3.    Brown
4.    Green

What does the advertisement on the bus say?

1.    New York City Triathlon
2.    New York Fundraiser
3.    New York Ballet
4.    New York Marathon

How many wigs are in the shop window?

1.    3
2.    4
3.    7
4.    9

    How many times did we cross the street?

1.    None
2.    1
3.    2
4.    3

    How many pigeons are in the park?

1.    None
2.    2
3.    3
4.    4

 

[Check out answers in bottom of page]

 

When testing this out to people around the school, we recorded their results and created a small Response Video:

 

Inspiration

We came up with the idea to base our game on Psychological studies on Memory which have been conducted to test the accuracy of Memory when it comes to Eyewitness Testimonies in court. In particular, we based it on the study of Loftus & Palmer.

Basically, in this study, participants were all presented a video of a car crash, and then they were asked to determine the speed of the cars. However, they were separated into five groups, and depending on what group they were in, they were asked the question in a different way. For instance, Group 1 was asked “How fast was the car going when it SMASHED the other car?”, whilst Group 2 was asked “How fast was the car going when it BUMPED the other car?”.

As you can see in the table and graph above, the way in which the question was asked affected the speed estimates of the participants, even though they had all seen the same video. This is called Memory Distortion, which happens as a result of the way the Leading Questions were asked.

We found this very interesting; even though this study was initially conducted to test the reliability of Memory for Eyewitness Testimonies in court, we just wanted to use these concepts in our Memory Game, just to test out and see how memory would work in the game.

We wanted to use multiple-choice questions so that it could confuse the people playing the game; making them possibly doubt their memory- for example, in the “shirt” question, even though it’s a fairly simple question, the multiple answer options made people in the Response Video doubt their memory and start to think like “Hmm, maybe the shirt was green?”. This causes reconstructive memory to be formed, when you think you’ve seen something but you actually never did.

 

Procedure: Filming Footage

We proceed to film the footage for our video using various resources such as our iPhones and a Camera. We got various types of formats that helped us achieve what we wanted. The iPhone has to option to add Time Lapse videos with added the main feel for our video, most of the videos are filmed using this effect so it looks faster.

We walked through the 5th ave and various other streets that surrounded this zone to get different surroundings and images to distract people and get the footage that we wanted.    

Editing the video:

After we got all the footages, we watched all of them and organized which fit in and which not. We had lots of different footages, however, we wanted to make a cohesive video after all. We spent over an hour to try different ones and move around the videos. We also added a filter to give it a special effect. Since some videos were faster, some were slower, we also speeded up or slowed down some clips. The background music we used for the video is on top by flume because we thought it went with the flow of the video.

 

Editing the response video:

After we finished the video, we found some people in UC and showed them the video and asked the questions. These responses came out really different but also funny. We certainly can see that people remembered and paid attention to different things. We combined all the responses for each question. The background music is Mirror Maru by cashmere cat.

 

Challenges

We encounter some issues while we were working on our memory game, some of the issues changed the meaning and effect of our video.

During the filming section of our project, we had a hard time starting the video we did not know where to start because of  the many distractions New York City holds, we filmed random situations and view and from there the theme became clearer.

When we gathered all of our recording we were unsure what type of sound we should use to make the whole thing come to life because sound is a big part when it comes t0 video, At the end, we decided that music would be the best option because it added an extra distraction to the game.

 

 

ANSWERS:

What color shirt is JC wearing?

1.    Blue
2.    Black
3.    Brown
4.    Green

What does the advertisement on the bus say?

1.    New York City Triathlon
2.    New York Fundraiser
3.    New York Ballet
4.    New York Marathon

How many wigs are in the shop window?

1.    3
2.    4
3.    7
4.    9

    How many times did we cross the street?

1.    None
2.    1
3.    2
4.    3

    How many pigeons are in the park?

1.    None
2.    2
3.    3
4.    4