week 1 assignment
Two communities for game audience:
Meet up Group
I have experiences of meeting a group of new people. At the time when people first get together, it’s really hard to start a conversation that everyone has a chance to talk. So I plan to design a card game for these group which gives them a chance to start the conversation.
I got the inspiration from the drama director program interview of Beijing Film Academy. Interview candidates are required to do a story solitaire for a limited time. For the first person, he has to start a the story in three sentences, then the following candidates need to continue his story based on these three sentences.
In my card game, there are cards with random words for every member in the group. Each person was randomly assigned a card. The first person who decided by a rotary pointer needs to start the story by the word on his card. Then the next person needs to continue the story based on the background provided by the first user and then to continue the story with the word he received. So every member would join the game and use their imagination to tell the story.
To make the game more efficient, I would set a time for each person and record the whole story. After the game finished, the whole group can listen to it and share their ideas. So this is a way I think about to get people who don’t familiar with each other together quickly and join the group conversation.
Procrastination Group
I’ve read a psychology research which says that if you are a person who has procrastination, you need a start point to do the task. As long as you use the start point, you would finish the task beyond expectation.
So I would like to make a game for these people to help them find the start point of doing task. For instance, if someone wants to exercise in the gym but often fails because of procrastination, the game would encourage him to start put him sports shoes on. And then give some incentive to encourage him put his sports clothes on. As the person who wears sports suit, he would more likely to go to the gym. The same for other task like finishing the assignment or having breakfast.
Game Concept
A wake up game for procrastination group. (oversleep group) Goal:
To wake up people who always oversleep
I want the wake up experience no longer boring and suffering for people, but fun, enjoying and competitive. I hope if users start the game, they would feel encouraging to get up on time and would like to play the game for long. As a result, oversleeping is not a problem for them, and by this way, they could find a chance to overcome the procrastination in different areas in their lives.
Rules:
If the user set up to wake up in 7am in the morning, the app would ring the bell on time. The only way that the person could close the ring bell is to do the facial emotion the picture shows on the app screen. For each challenge the user has done, he/she could get a score. All users score would shows in the community. The higher the score is, the higher rank the user would show in the community.
Another incentive is that, if the user get enough score, he/she would have more choices of ring bell music.
To improve the entertain element in the game, every week facial challenge comes from different facial model group. The more the user has challenged, the more funny and interesting facial emotion he will meet.
Chance:
Wake up sound choices, score
Competition:
Get score and compete with people in this community
Game On Summarize
What worked well?
When I tested the game, the prototype worked well since players knew how to work on it without extra explanation. Also the testing methods worked fluently—testing by call the players in the morning and playing the game remotely. The rule was clear thus all players followed the instruction I sent to them. One important positive feedback was that same players said the way to get up in the morning is really effective. They felt refresh at that time.
What didn’t?
Some of the players complained about the incentive of the game. They said that the noise caused by the bell was annoying and would bother other people in the room. Also, they didn’t see any incentive for a long term use of playing the game. Some said they don’t want to share their pictures to the community of making it public because of personal privacy.
How was it working with a community?
It was effective for some people in the community— for some people who would like to publish their personal info to the public and people who would like to build a habit to get up on time in the morning.