APD Week 4 Play and Place

Theme

Play and Place
Method
This week I turned my room into an online virtual environment and invited my friends to join. I was going to make a point system which encourage players to smash objects inside the room(we’ve all been through some kind of situation which makes us want to smash objects around us ), but I have problem figuring out how to make destructible objects in Unity. Therefore, I turned the room into pieces which can be ‘disassembled’. The idea is to present a place that is quite personal to me to the public. This project is inspired the phrase 'make yourself at home'. This project encourages guests(aka players ) to do whatever they want to your personal space.

I created my room in Unity, using a plug-in called ProBuilder , enabled from the package manager window, this allows me to create my model in Unity without using third party software. By doing so ,I can quickly exams the size of each models and make sure the scale  is correct. The project also requires VRC SDK to make it run in an online virtual environment.

Context

The ideas comes from the video’ I turned my room into a VR Game’ . In the video, Valem turned his room into a virtual environment which includes several things to interact. Another example which explore the similar idea is ‘Kalonica Quigley- Apartment’. When COVID happened, the creator, Kalonica, moved out of her apartment and left most of her belongings behind. Her home became a strange and distant time-capsule of this time, and of her. This project is her apartment, recreated from memory.

The 'game' is about fun, construct, and deconstruct a space. There are no rule given to my friends, they can arrange those objects in different ways in my room, some decided to build a fortress with walls and doors while other decided to stack those object on top of each other and turned it into an ‘observation deck’ . Players have no missions to complete, they move the objects around just to play without any boundaries (Alexis Ralphs,2022). There’s no right way or wrong way to interact with the objects. Therefore, it is an opened-ended play. Study pointed out  people create a wide variety of games and practice many social skills when negotiating the rules of various games, the result shows that participants felt playing with the objects in the free-play sessions was more fun than in the pre-set sessions (Tilde Bekker,2008).

Response
https://youtu.be/7Hzh4gDjHaA

Reflection

If given more time , I could probably turn my room into an online VR escape room, it would be more interesting to complete challenges with my friends. Other ideas such as turning my room upside down could also work- things you see in daily life could be unusual if they are viewed from a different angle. Overall, I am quite surprised by how many people decided to join my ‘world’. The world even starts to become laggy for me to do screen recording. The way they reacted to my project and start to create their own things using objects in my room is also interesting. One thing Ｉlearn is that even something that you considered normal and common might be interesting to others.

References

Interactive play objects and the effects of open-ended play on social interaction and fun(Tilde Bekker,2008)

Designing for social interaction in open-ended play environments(Linda de Valk, Tilde Bekker, Berry Eggen,2015)

Stimulating physical and social activity through open-ended play(Tilde Bekker,2009)