Play and Objects
Brainstorm and create a game within 24hrs that explores play through interactivity
with objects.
This week, as a group we collectively generated a mindmap from words we associate with both play and objects. This was a good starting point in sparking ways to expore play moving forward. A couple of words that I took away from this in particular was commitment, interactive, experimenting, fun, conversation, purpose, movement, function and touch.
I really wanted to commit to “play” for a certain amount of time, to see what could be generated through imagination, freedom and experimentation, in order to create something that could be fun, social and interactive through the player using objects, in order to generate the play. This led me down a pathway of tabletop games and exploring the field of Game Design for this project.
“Play means doing something for fun, rather than for practical reasons. The beauty of this definition is that there’s no one way to play. Play doesn’t mean just building with blocks or playing with cars. Play is versatile and can be different things to different people.” (Hughes, 2002)
Through exploring the idea and theme of objects and how we interact with them, multiple theories of play begin to arise. Creative play through testing new ideas, imagination and altering the ideas to strenghten the agency of the player. Social play where communication is generated and interactivity is formed, providing an expectation to follow a set of rules and Object play, in which we begin to create movement and are encouraged to pick something up, allowing us to touch, explore function and create purpose.
Board games allow us to engage in play and assist in helping us to build up our cognitive skills, decision making and problem solving. Through play, we are able to stimulate brain function in a fun and sometimes challenging environment.
Thinking about the purpose of board games, how the user interacts with the objects within these and combining the different areas of play within this environment, I wanted to explore a game concept that harnessed all these thoughts alongside digital interactivity and the blend between physical and digital using audio, in order to create a more fun and immsersive narrative to the experience . In order to achieve this, it would require commitment to play from myself, in order to explore the imagination and create something unique and fun for others to then play through the application of objects.
Players:
2-5
Goal:
Be the first to escape Dr. Stitchenstein’s lab of horrors
Setup:
Start on the grey square in corner of board game and work your way around to the rainbow exit on the other side, taking it in turns one by one - following any instructions along the way
Rules:
There are so many different ways in which objects can be epxlored through play. In fact, so many I began to overthink the theme and was a little slow in getting started as a result. I decided to combat this theme, I would walk around my house and find an interesting object and begin brainstorming ways in which I could utilise that object within a game environment to generate play. To elevate this response further I challenged myself to really commit to the ‘play’ and challenged myself to come up with a response within 24hrs, which would hopefully stop me from overthinking it for too long and allowing myself to really play and loosen up in order to explore the creativity and purpose of objects through play - essentially creating my own little game jam in my study over the weekend.
I found some candle melts in the shape of brains, which led to some brainstorming around asylums, science labs and zombies. From here, I began to map out some ideas around the idea of a crazy scientist running a testing lab (reflective of APD being one big testing lab in itself) and combining a mix of ideas around science experiments and old school horror humour. I wanted the game to feel creepy and horrible, but in a fun way for adults to socialise and not walk away with nightmares (although creepy clowns are just a given regardless right?). This involved combining the idea of sound effects to represent each of the key locations within the science lab, using a Makey Makey for the first time. It felt like a fun way to learn how to use this (something I have had in storage for a long time, but never opened!). In-between tinkering with the makey makey and running through a few beginner tutorials, I was also brainstorming game mechanics and ways in which I could bring these key locations into the narrative and physical play, rather than there only being sound effects. I also brainstormed a map a little bit to the game, however I actually improvised a lot with this and felt like it wasn’t something I could really plan out too much, until I had the physical objects in hand to understand the scale and where they could be placed in order to structure the map better. So I spent time ‘winging’ it and tinkering with a bunch of different materials to create the little key locations on the board. As a result of organic play and making it up as I went along, the prototype turned out a lot better than expected and reflected the experience of play visually in order to tell the narrative.
I setup the board game with all the different elements and began hooking up the makey makey, only to discover my moving piece (the brain) didn’t initially work! This was slightly confusing and not being someone who has played with this type of interactivity, I couldn’t work out why I was no longer conducting electricity through the object to react to the keypads - only to discover looking back at initial tests, my fingers were still somewhat slightly touching the alfoil as I was placing my object onto the keypad! So then I was on a manhunt for copper foil to wrap around my little brains in order for them to work, so that was a quick little stem learning experience for me. I ended up recording the voice over for the brain extraction cell “I’m gonna rip your brains out” and using a voice generator to change this to sound like a crazy scientist and spend no more than 5 mins compiling different free sound effects to work with each of the kepypads.
With all the elements sitting together and a game completed in 24hrs, I organised two friends to come around and playtest it, so see 1. How the gameplay works in action and 2. Whether it was engaging through it’s interactivity and narrative design in order to create ‘fun’ throughout the play experience - even though the gameplay itself is designed to become frustrating.
The first run through didn’t go entirely as planned, due to myself forgetting one of my most essential rules (which was pretty funny), but we all sat down and discussed the reasons around why it wasn’t feeling as though there wasn’t as much agency for the player as intended and it was partly due to this rule I forgot to mention and also the chance to increase the opportunities to land on the game cards - a pill card or needle card. Essentially the narrative is driven through these cards, so it was essential to ensure the players were encounting these a little more than they were. The second run through was a lot more fun and interactive as initially intended just from making a couple of tweaks, which was great to see. We then tweaked rules around the ending of the game and implementing the need to score the exact amount on dice to land on final spot and by the third run, we had a very engaging, frustrating, funny and playful experience.
One thing I didn’t consider throughout the process was the fact we were using play collectively to then further enhance the initial design. The game was far more successful than I thought it would be and mostly due to the playstesting stages and nutting out some smaller nitty gritty’s, which really helped to develop the concept further. With more time and further development into the future, it would be interesting to see digital animation/film or projection mapping incorporatated in combination of the audio, so that when the player lands on one of the key locations they become immersed within the story through both audio and visual.
The interesting thing about the game that occured was how unique it was with each round of play. Due to the nature of backwards and forwards - a tug of war all the way throughout in order to escape and the different varients such as player choices, game cards and board choices - the results and speed in which the game took to end changed every single time. You could be near the finish and be sent back to the start or midway throughout the game, ensuring players are constantly taking over one another in order to escape and win.
To watch a short 5 minute video on player testing feedback, please click the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXm8JZAnDXg
Riede, F, Johannsen, NN, Högberg, A, Nowell, A, Lombard, M. The role of play objects and object play in human cognitive evolution and innovation. Evolutionary Anthropology. 2018; 27: 46– 59. Availble at <https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21555>
Hughes, B. (2002) A Playworker’s Taxonomy of Play Types, 2nd edition, London: PlayLink.
Bucks County Free Library. 2021. Benefits of Playing Board Games - Bucks County Free Library. [online] Available at: <https://buckslib.org/benefits-of-playing-board-games/>
By Amber Stacey
Email Amber Stacey
Published On: 16/03/2021