APD- Week1- Play and Self

Play and Self- Week1

Link to  the play-through video

Theme

In response to the theme of "Play and Self", I made a psychometric game that shows how a person defines himself and makes an avatar based on the set questions. The outcome is customised and offers the specialty of one.

Method

The game is for fulfilling curiosity and killing time, and it’s straightforward to play. Players only need to answer three questions and then receive their avatar. I made all the images in Procreate. It is a game design in the current stage, but it will become a website game after developing it in Unreal.

Context

In Week1, Uyen showed us many forms of play, and encouraged the APD class to explore more about playing behaviour. The APD can be broken down into several essential elements such as inquiry, experiment and making things. Driven by fun and research, we can tinker and use our imagination to participate in games and activities as much as we want. In addition, the practice of existing research and works helps to study the field and make more connections with the theoretical scholarly literature.

By creating this game, I examine the idea of self-exploration for visualising peoples’ characteristics and conveying that everyone is unique. People not only can have fun in the process, but also obtain an avatar by the end. Henricks(2014) indicates that play can be understood as a project of self-realization, a project humans share with other creatures who play. Though players are playing the same game, they get different results that vary from person to person, and the plays also can go back to select different options to experiment with a different outcome. My work is constructed from multiple play attempts. The first attempt reflects one’s identification and more tries to satisfy curiosity or challenges to try other patterns.  

Reflection

In the current stage, the outcomes are made manually that every image is drawn by hand.  However, future development aims to combine programming to have better efficiency. Every option will be automatically generated and reflected on the final image. Also, the idea can be applied to other styles such as 3D objects and 2D animation. I look forward to making it into a website game that is accessible to play. People can play the game in the social community and share the outcome with their friends.