APD Week8 Play and Body

By Xipeng Niu (Xavier)

Theme

Link: https://youtu.be/TDy0mkwtuxY

Play and body

My response to this week’s theme is a two-player maze game. The maze can be moved and rotate by ropes. Players waving their hands to move the maze box. The goal of this game is get the balls out of maze box from their own gate. It requires player using body movement to control the maze which enhance the difficulty of this game. Body movement as the method of playing this game is not as accurate as hands which also makes it more fun to play with friends.

Context

In this week’s lecture, works like Musical Embrace by Amy Huggard, Anushka 'Chet' De Mel and Jayden Garner (2012) and Hit Me by Kaho Abe (2011) reminds me lots of games I played in my childhood which are driven by purely body movements. Those kind of games don’t have as many mechanics as video games or kinetic games but we can have lots of fun playing with our friends. Thus, I decided to design a purely physical game without electronic devices.

Maze is a medium I chose as the base of this game. I want to design a game could allow two players competing by their body movements in the form of maze. This idea is inspired by foosball and finger soccer. They used a smart way to transform body movement into the input of games.

It is a typical Ludus play which has a clear rule and goal for players (Caillois, 1961). As a game in the form of physical movement, this kind of play is also considered as an important resources for children health (Alexander, 2018 & Carol and Iram, 2015). Thus, physical play is also a kind of tool to ensure children health.

Method

Cut a cardboard box
Adding walls to the box
Cutting cloth into ropes.
Assemble controllers to the box

Reflection

It is not a bad prototype from my feedback of play test although the visual effect is really rough. Definitely it could be decorated better if I am not in a self-isolated situation. This response is more like a street game we played in our childhood comparing with my responses last week. The fun of this game is largely coming from the difficulty of this game. Pulling ropes are not that difficult, the gameplay could be more difficulty by tying ropes to players’ elbows or arms to encourage players do more funny moves.

References

Alexander, S. A., Frohlich, K. L., & Fusco, C. (2018). Play, physical activity and public health : The reframing of children's leisure lives. ProQuest Ebook Central https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Caillois, R. (1961). Man, play, and games . Free Press of Glencoe.

Carol Archer, & Iram Siraj. (2015). Encouraging Physical Development Through Movement-Play. SAGE Publications Ltd.