Playground games: a design strategy for supporting and understanding coordinated activity

  • Authors:

  • Deborah Tatar;Joon-Suk Lee;Nouf Alaloula

  • Affiliations:

  • Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA;Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA;Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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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.