Creating Meaningful Games through Values-Driven Design Principles


Jerrett Adam Howell Peter Dansey Neil
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

The interactivity present in games makes them useful vehicles for the exploration of various concepts outside of “finding the fun”. Empathy games – games that are developed to educate and encourage empathetic responses from players about a scenario – are one such example. However, the notion of empathy game design overlaps with other tangential design theories like emotional game design, radical game design, and critical game design. These theories often overlap but are difficult to discover because of their different naming conventions. To assist designers, this paper discusses design principles from these and other similar game design frameworks. Using these, it presents a consolidated set of design principles and considerations that can be applied to game projects. These principles are presented to inspire future design work to explore lesser-known experiences, in the hopes of being more inclusive of, and more meaningful to, a diverse player base.

 

“We’re Excited to Chart this Unknown Territory Together”: Storytelling Strategies in Patch Notes Documents


Gursoy Ayse
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

Developers often describe changes to online games in Patch Notes. These documents are for players of the game to learn about changes and revise their understanding of the game. The evolution of Patch Notes Documents (PNDs) as a genre with structural conventions is a story of how adding narrative features helps explain changes to a genre-savvy audience. In this paper, I explore stylistic and structural techniques used in the PNDs to construct a consistent narrative of evolution of the online multiplayer game League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009). Exploring narrativizing as sensemaking suggests that storytelling can supplement existing preservation activities for digital games

 

Toys Traveling through Geocaching: Mobile, Social and Hybrid Values of Play


Ihamäki Pirita Heljakka Katriina
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

This study explores emerging play patterns around the object-based but technologically-enhanced practices of toy tourism. This popular type of toy play featuring game-like elements entails movement across platforms: physical spaces and digital environments. Through a case study that explored toys traveling as Travel Bugs in the context of geocaching, the aim of this paper is to clarify the creative, gameoriented play and perceived value of practitioners of toy tourism. Our study consisted of 66 survey responses from geocachers traveling with Travel Bugs all over the world and enabled us to gain a detailed understanding of the experienced values related to traveling toys in the context of geocaching. As a result, we present a conceptual framework in which the relations between the mobile, social and hybrid dimensions of the play value of toy tourism are modelled.

 

The Internet of Things Game: Revealing the Complexity of the IoT


Akmal Haider Coulton Paul
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a phenomenon wherein everyday objects are capable of interacting together through the Internet; producing complex interdependencies between human and non-human actants. However, much of this complexity is not legible to users of IoT and can produce concerns relating to areas such as privacy and security, when the independent-but-interdependent motivations and perspectives of the actants are incongruent. To address this issue this paper presents The Internet of Things Board Game, which has been designed such that its procedural rhetoric makes legible these independent-but-interdependent relationships; and reveal how they manifest in the management of our security and privacy within IoT. The results of play-testing the game through multiple iterations highlight the valuable contribution games can play in revealing the ever-increasing complexity of relationships between the digital and the physical, and the human and non-human.