APD Week4 Play and Place

Theme

Play and place

My idea for play and place is creating a party game encouraging players sharing their impression about "place" online like different websites. My interpretation about place is culture and community. Thus, I decided to expand the concept of place to virtual space. A place could have different culture and communities. Like every time I go to Melbourne central I see people playing skateboard as while as people sitting on grass and talking with friends. The play in my response is used as a vehicle of culture transmission about online places.

Context

As Matt mentioned in his lecture, place means a site-specific context which can mean physical, social, cultural, emotional and community. In this lockdown situation, social, cultural and community aspect attracted me most. As we cannot go outside, online community becomes more important than ever. Thus, I want to explore the community and culture of online place. My response is inspired by my experience of Melbourne central’s community I mentioned before. People could have totally different impression and social interaction about a same place. So I want to make a party game encouraging people sharing and talking about their own interpretations, interactions and communities engaged online.

Flanagan (2007) argued that play has been used a medium of culture transmission and community building. In his article, lots of events playful is listed as example of transmission of local culture. In my response, questions of websites are used as a tool of encouraging players exchange online culture and communities they know. Also, this game is designed to encouraging sharing experience and culture. It doesn’t have a relatively fixed rule or goal. “We play by negotiating the purposes of play, how far we want to extend the influences of the play activity, and how much we play for the purpose of playing or for the purpose of personal expression.” (Sicart, 2014). There lots of thing negotiable in my response which aimed to create a flexible and relax environment for players.

Method

The map for the game is designed by Adobe Illustrator. Questions are made of websites could have multiple aims or interactions. Like people use YouTube for different goals like streaming or watching tutorials. For those arguable questions I want to encourage people talk about their experience about them.

Reflection

Because this game need at least 4 players, I still cannot test the game for now. But as reflection, I am considering may be I can expand the range of questions from websites to more place have their own culture or communities like games and apps. Also physical location can be included. The punishment of fail to answer question can also have more forms. Like players could actually go to a real place to do something.

References

Flanagan, M. (2007). Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games & Activism.

Sicart, M. (2014). Play matters. ProQuest Ebook Central https://ebookcentral.proquest.com