Open Playgrounds

Background & Objectives

Game experiences today are driven by the designer and the mechanics that are included by them. People sitting in groups enjoy simple card games especially with family and friends. With the current extent of technology, there is a higher chance for a group to carry phones in their pocket than a bunch of board & card games. In this research, we are trying to explore and understand how to empower users with the ability to co-design and control their user experiences in digital games.

We test our hypothesis by building open play ground games i.e. games which do not have any rules and are completely customizable. Sitting on top of the better together toolkit, we built a card playing game and interfaces that allow users to build new cards and share it with others in the card player community. Users can create new card games and play existing card games with different rules. We aim to find out how such a setup of open playground games can result in more engaging and enriching experiences to the players.