Playground games

Abstract

From a design point of view, coordination is radically undertheorized and under-explored. Arguably, playground games are the universal, cross-cultural venue in which people learn about and explore coordination between one another, and between the worlds of articulated rules and the worlds of experience and action. They can therefore (1) teach us about the processes inherent in human coordination, (2) provide a model of desirable coordinative possibilities, and (3) act as a design framework from which to explore the relationship between game and game play---or, to put it in terms of an inherent tension in human-computer interaction, between plans and situated actions. When brought together with a computer language for coordination that helps us pare down coordinative complexity to essential components, we can create systems that have highly distributed control structures. In this paper, we present the design of four such student-created collaborative, distributed, interactive systems for face-to-face use. These take their inspiration from playground games with respect to who can play (plurality), how (appropriability) and to what ends (acompetitiveness). As it happens, our sample systems are themselves games; however, taking playground games as our model helps us create systems that support game play featuring not enforcement of plans but emergence of rules, roles, and turn taking.

When the implication is not to design (technology)

“…The questions of low-/no-tech solutions and whether a technology may do more harm than good are reminiscent of "zensign" [32], the notion that the features omitted from an application or system may be just as important as the features included. While this approach has much to offer design, our point is not about including or omitting specific features from a system but about whether the system should be built at all.…”