Game Over!

The Hybrid Social Play project has been successfully completed.. This has been an interesting and instructive journey. First and foremost we would like to thank our funding partners: Tekes, Veikkaus, Alma Media, Tactic Games, Kyy Games and Moido Games. Their expertise was invaluable for the project.

Further, we would like to extend our thanks to all workshop participants, co-authors, and student volunteers who helped along the way. Special thanks to Annakaisa Kultima and Jaakko Stenros for their help with the project, and Nancy Nilsson for the illustrations.

The project report have been finished and will be available soon. Please follow these pages!

The Hybrid Social Play research team:

University of Tampere	University of Jyväskylä	University of Turku, Pori unit
Professor Frans Mäyrä	Professor Raine Koskimaa	Professor Jaakko Suominen
Janne Paavilainen	Jonne Arjoranta	Katriina Heljakka
Timo Nummenmaa	Linda Lahdenperä	Lilli Sihvonen
Ville Kankainen
Elina Koskinen
Jani Kinnunen

Hybrid Toy & Board Game Design Workshops

Workshopping in hybrid board game workshop at Tactic Game premises in Pori.

Hybrid Board Game design workshop at Tactic Games, Pori.

As the Hybrid Social Play project is coming to a closure at the end of the year, we had the last two design workshops on hybrid toys and hybrid board games in October and November. These workshops were hosted by our industry partner Tactic Games in Pori. We would like to thank Tactic for the excellent premises and arrangements! Kudos to all the participants as well!

The hybrid toy workshop was held 12th October. Four teams designed hybrid toy concepts focusing on character toys and wooden toys. The workshop was very successful and it was praised by the participants and by the jury who came to examine the finished concepts and gave feedback. Wood for example is a very interesting and traditional material that can be enhanced in many different ways. There was a lot of new insights and information sharing that is relevant to both industry and academia working in this field.

Accessory concept for a hybrid character toy.

The hybrid board game workshop was held on 2nd November. This time the design concepts were based either on Afrikan Tähti (Star of Africa) or Kimble – both of them are classic Finnish board games. The teams designed interesting new concepts where digital and material was merged in different ways. Important part of the design was to appreciate and enhance the traditional game play without hindering the tactile enjoyment of the original concepts. Opportunities with social media integration were also studied and discussed.

The outcomes of these workshops will be used to further developed the hybrid design guidelines we have been working on. The design concepts themselves will be presented and described in the Hybrid Social Play final report that is current work-in-progress. Stay tuned and play along!

Back in Business

Summer and the holiday season is over, and the project is going full steam ahead. The spring was a busy one and the autumn does seem interesting as well. We had two workshops during the spring: one for the money game design and another one for the transmedia design that focused on alternate reality games. Special thanks to our partners Veikkaus and Alma Media for hosting these events.

The design workshops were successful with many interesting hybrid game concepts and happy participants. There are several new publications in the pipeline on different topics related to hybrid social play.

During the autumn there will be workshops for hybrid social toy design and hybrid board game design. Plans for the workshops are underway and we are looking forward to work together with our partners in order to find out the best principles for hybrid social playability. As the project nears its end, we will also start working a report to gather all the interesting bits and pieces we have learned along the way. Stay tuned!

Transmedia Design Workshop

The transmedia design workshop was held at the end of May. The goal for the workshop was to design hybrid alternate reality game concepts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game) that mix print media with various forms of digital media. The approach was similar to previous hybrid money games design workshop with parallel design method and concept design canvas. We also utilized the Playful Experiences -framework in the form of PLEX-cards.

The concept canvas was modified to support hybrid alternate reality games design. There were several design constraints in place to help ideation. For example every concept needed to use at least three different forms of media and should connect both older and younger media users. There were also set of themes that the game concepts should use.

Transmedia design workshopping materials.

Various workshop materials from Legos to PLEX-cards.

The outcome of the workshop were four hybrid alternate reality game concepts that lean a bit more to the physical domain than the digital. The goals and constraints were taken into account well in the concepts, and all of them were feasible for actual production. Sociability emerged in the concepts for example as a encouragement for civic activity, group gatherings, cooperation, and competitions. The workshop method in itself was considered fun and social, and the participants felt that it could be used in the future to bring forth the tacit knowledge in organizations.

As a result we produced a preliminary checklist for creating hybrid alternate reality game concepts that will be studied further during the upcoming months. We thank Alma Media for hosting this workshop, it was a pleasure 🙂

Pokémon GO Game Experience

We have published our first research paper on Pokémon GO game experience. The research was published in the CHI 2017 conference in Denver (6th-11th May). Our paper “The Pokémon GO Experience: A Location-Based Augmented Reality Mobile Game Goes Mainstream” (Paavilainen, Korhonen, Alha, Stenros, Koskinen & Mäyrä) focuses on the positive and negative game experiences as told by our qualitative survey respondents (n=1000). See the video trailer here:

On other news we have arranged analysis and design workshops on money games in January and April. Both were great success and we are looking forward in disseminating the results in the near future.

The next workshop will be focused on transmedia and it will be held in the late May. In this workshop we will be focusing on designing concepts for alternate reality games with hybrid and social flavors.

Hybrid Money Games Design Workshop

The design workshop on hybrid money games was held an the end of April. The goal for the workshop was to design novel game concepts that utilize hybrid and social elements in a gambling game. Six game concepts were designed by utilizing a concept canvas that was created for the purpose of the workshop. Four teams with various industry and academia experts worked together, following the principles of parallel design method (http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/parallel.htm)

The hybrid elements were present in the concepts in various forms. They contained new technological features like augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR), while also combining different forms of play: game played physical environment could extend into the digital domain and vice versa, thus reaching both the traditional audiences and those less interested in traditional money game formats. There were also concepts combining traditional board game features such as unique characters and narratives with money game mechanics. Sociability was seen important in the concepts, even if it was not very deep in the nature. For example the knowledge of other players’ presence, ambient sociability, is an important factor in making the game feel more sociable than it actually is.

Concept canvas was used to document the game ideas.

The outcomes of the workshop will be further analyzed and used as a material to develop design guidelines for hybrid money games. Big thanks to Veikkaus for hosting the workshop!

Design Guidelines for Hybrid Board Games

In September, we had a workshop where we invited researchers, professionals and partners to test different types of hybrid games. After a few hours of very intensive play, we had discussions on what works and what doesn’t work in hybrid board games.

Here is the short version of the suggestions we came up with:

Create digital elements that bring added value to the user experience, either by expanding or extending the experience.
Digitize chores that are unnecessary and not fun. Bookkeeping can be tedious and complex, but an app can handle it easily.
Take into account all the senses. It’s easy to add music or sound effects tied to specific events.
Make sure that when your technology fails (and it will), it does so gracefully and with as little frustration to the player as possible. How do they get quickly back into the game?
Consider whether you need to develop new technology for this purpose or whether something premade also works. All mobile phones have camera apps, so you don’ t need to make your own if that is all you need.
Make game elements easily extendable. A list of random effects can easily be extended if it is handled by an app.
Think about what content from your game can be easily shared on social media. People love sharing stuff they play, so make it easy.
Make sure you app works on a wide variety of devices. Nobody wants to be left out of a game because you didn’ t support their phone.
Let players customise the appearance of digital elements. It’s more fun to play with characters you chose or designed yourself.
Provide Youtube tutorials to demonstrate the game play.

Hybrid Board Game and Transmediality Workshop

The first workshop in the project was successfully arranged 19.9.2016. The goal of this workshop was familiarizing the project partners with a set of hybrid and transmedial board games, and to introduce ways of analyzing hybrid games. This workshop is the first in a set of two workshops concentrating on analyzing hybrid products. The second one, which will follow soon, is focused on the hybrid solutions of money gaming and hybrid toys.

The set of board games chosen for this workshop was based on the project researchers’ initial analysis. Games were curated on the basis of what kind of hybrid and social elements they had, and the test session was focused around these elements. The games chosen were: Battle Star Galactica, World of Yo-Ho, Bycatch, XCOM: The Board Game, Alchemist, Anki Override and One Night Ultimate Werewolf.

The analysis was done by filling out a form during the test session and using it as a base for analysis discussion. After the discussion the workshop participants designed a new hybrid element for a chose board game, or modified an existing hybrid element based on the analysis conducted. The workshop was closed with an open discussion on observations done during the day and implications these give for the future workshops.