Bleed-in, Bleed-out A Design Case in Board Game Therapy

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Eladhari Mirjam Palosaari
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

The table-top play situation offers unique opportunities for approaching real-world personal problems in ways where the structures inherent in the problems can be deconstructed, examined, and understood. This paper presents design considerations from the ongoing development of a therapy board-game; how every-day issues can bleed in and out from framed play sessions, and how game rules in this context can benefit from being malleable. The paper also offers a tentative avenue towards how play sessions, in a combination of stances for the design of game mechanics with approaches to game mastering, can be constructed as safe-spaces, affording players to draw near deeply personal issues and find ways to support each other.

 

Combining Speech Intervention and Cooperative Game Design for Children with ASD

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Lyon Natalie Leitman David I. Zhu Jichen
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

The design of the digital game Feeling Factory explores how to combine systematic Autism intervention structures with play-centric game design in the area of prosodic speech therapy. The goal of the game is to improve emotional and grammatical, productive and receptive prosody in high-functioning children with ASD. Feeling Factory uses a two-player cooperative game that allows children with ASD to practice prosody with another person mediated by a game. This structure motivates practice of speech skills within the context of a live conversation partner, a key challenge for Autism intervention, and combines interventionist exercise with digitally mediated gameplay. A user study was conducted consisting of semi-structured interviews with a panel of seven experts and five children with ASD to help determine the potential benefits of this design model. The study resulted in a high recommendation from both groups, especially regarding the two-player cooperative game mechanics.

 

The Sightlence Game: Designing a Haptic Computer Game Interface

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Nordvall Mathias
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

The haptic modality is currently underutilized and poorly understood as a design material in game design. There are few computer games to draw on for inspiration during design explorations. This design case study explores how to use the haptic modality as a design material for computer game interfaces that requires neither graphics nor audio. The idea behind the case study is that a better understanding of haptic computer game interfaces can increase interface innovation and accessibility by giving game designers a third modality to work with together with graphics and audio. The design problem was approached through design explorations, development of an interface translation method, iterative game development of a haptic translation of Pong, and playtests with 34 people comprised of game design students and professors, adults with and without deafblindness, and children with deafblindness and congenital cognitive disabilities. The results show that computer games can be designed with haptic interfaces that only require standard gamepad¬s rather than expensive or custom-made hardware. This also holds for computer games with time-critical features and complex interfaces with concurrent haptic signals.

 

The End of the Rainbow: In search of crossing points between organizations and play

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Van Bree Jeroen
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

This research report covers an ongoing project that explores the crossing points between organization & management theory and the study of games & playfulness.