Interaction & Play - The Brief
“Propose a meaningful play experience that creates engagement with Auckland’s Aotea Square.”
The first thing that struck me about the brief was the odd concept of meaningful play, there are plenty of easy to make assumptions on what it could mean and I’m sure almost any kind of play (even poorly designed play) can have meaning. So in class, I asked our lecturer Ben what the concept referred to and he told me I can find it in the aptly named book “Meaningful Play” by Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman.
“Meaningful play occurs when the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game.” - (Salen & Zimmerman, 2010)
From reading this, I believe that that meaningful play relates to user communication/feedback, and how that communication affects the overall play experience. As an example, you are playing a 3rd-Person action game when your character is shot by an arrow, the character flinches or stumbles with a small blood particle. This has communicated to the player that they have been hit and have taken damage, this then gives context to the rest of the play experience as it is plausible that enough of these hits will kill the player and they may attempt to avoid further damage, this is what I believe meaningful play refers to.
Now that I have an understanding of meaningful play, the brief comes into a little more clarity keeping in mind the secondary requirements:
• Personal critical evaluation of relevant precedents,
• Prototype user testing,
• Displaying an understanding of play and technology’s role in society,
• Chosen interaction and play research topic(s) and concept.
My teammate Andrew took some notes and made a blog post covering Aotea Square, its functionality as well as relative information about the site.
https://dinomightofficial.tumblr.com/post/186289236490/aotea-square
With this information and clarity, my team and I have begun brainstorming ideas and searching online for inspiration for our project.
Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2010). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Aotea Square [Blog Post]. (2019, July 14). Retrieved July 15, 2019, from https://dinomightofficial.tumblr.com/post/186289236490/aotea-square