Author: Jessica Cromp

Our team is working on the Social Trust Party Game and our client is Elaine Fath of the Center for Transformational Play. This week we met our team members, discussed our goals and also decided on our roles. We have a very large team with 7 members, so staying organized and making sure everyone feels heard will be of the utmost importance. We feel confident that our skillset is varied enough that we will be able to adequately divide up tasks and also help to bring a lot of unique perspectives to the table.

Here is the project listing given to us:

Project Description:

Through party games, strangers can become friends, and friends can build lifelong memories together. As designers, could we structure these games to build an even deeper, lasting trust between different types of players, even after the experience is over? Can a game facilitate players feeling comfortable sharing their personal thoughts and feelings? How do we get from a light-hearted acquaintance to a meaningful friendship? What are the different personality types to account for, and how might they contribute to or disrupt social safety? And crucially, is it possible to create a social game where all players feel seen, appreciated, and empowered?

This project aims to develop a 5 to 15-minute digital party game which seeks to answer some of these questions. The team will also develop and present their understanding of social dynamics and game mechanics conducive to building trust and social intimacy.

Deliverables:

• A short party game for groups of 3 or more. Groups are permitted to be divided and rejoined as part of the game.
• At least 3 different methods of measuring social intimacy, with their philosophies, pros and cons identified and tested in practice.
• Several iteration cycles of the party game where decisions were made to optimize the social intimacy metrics. Design insights from each iteration should be presented.
• Honest exploration of outliers in personality and play styles. Rather than write off players who are disruptive or not engaged with the content, the team should attempt to be descriptive and incorporate these outliers into their theory of closeness and social dynamics for more profound insights.

We gathered as a team to review the requirements and to also brainstorm on games we felt fell into the category of a party game. These ranged from card games, computer and mobile games. From there we looked at what characteristics in these games help to support social trust and encourage social interaction. Putting them into categories helped us to begin to narrow down our game ideas.

Jonathan was kind enough to stop by and bring us some games that focus on cooperation and learning about your fellow team members. We are looking forward to playing these to help us with our research.

What’s next

Next week we plan to attend the Transformational Workshop with Elaine from the CTP. Here we will break down different sections that will help us to better determine our high level purpose. Once we have this established we will be able to use it as a reference throughout our design process. We are hoping to meet with Elaine before the workshop so that we can have the opportunity to ask questions and to make sure we understand the parameters of our game.