Exploring sociality and engagement in play through game-control distribution

Abstract This study explores how distributing the controls of a video game among multiple players affects the sociality and engagement experienced in game play. A video game was developed in which the distribution of game controls among the players could be varied, thereby affecting the abilities of the individual players to control the game. An experiment was set up in which eight groups of three players were asked to play the video game while the distribution of the game controls was increased in three steps. After each playing session, the players' experiences of sociality and engagement were assessed using questionnaires. The results showed that distributing game control among the players increased the level of experienced sociality and reduced the level of experienced control. The game in which the controls were partly distributed led to the highest levels of experienced engagement, because the game allowed social play while still giving the players a sense of autonomy. The implications for interaction design are discussed

Probing experiences

Try to remember how your alarm clock woke you up this morning. Now imagine a completely different situation; say after a night out and only five hours of sleep or the time you had to go to the airport at six in the morning. Waking up is a vulnerable experience that may colour the rest of your day, yet the accompanying product, the alarm clock, is not aware of the different contexts of waking up. Wouldn’t it be possible to design an alarm clock that could support, or adapt its behaviour to, the different emotional experiences of a user waking up? Here lies a challenge for industrial designers. Instead of designing ‘just’ functional products we should focus on designing for experiencing (Sanders, 1999) or designing a context for experience (Overbeeke et al, 1999), as we like to call it. This new focus needs new methods to access the user’s experience. If we can access and capture the experience of a user we can use this information and inspiration for new designs. In the case of a context for waking up we need to know the emotional aspects of the user’s experience before designing ways how the alarm clock can detect and express these emotions and act in an intelligent way to that information