more games

Eva Brandt gave us an assignment: each group should design a game for others to play and comment. There were 6 games to be played. In pairs, each group played each other’s game. It was a way to evaluate the games both as the creator and as the player.
All the games must be optimized in some way as they were tested for the first time: adjust small details to get them easy‑to‑play, slightly changes on the parameters or on the rules. Overall, the games were fairly well designed.
After game playing and discussing, some conclusions were drawn. It was obvious that designers are mainly visuals as 4 of the 6 games use pictures and/or drawing. The other most‑used item are words, pointing to the conceptual behave/thinking. One can conclude that designers mainly work with visual concepts. Is that natural process? Or is it a result of educational systems? Anyway, we must admit that words/concepts and pictures are a rich source of information to use as inspiration.
One of the games was project‑oriented. Based on the current project of the design team, one player mime a future scenario while the others try to guess what is the action, environment, and tools involved, etc. At the end the team gets the mimed situation and a set of guesses, most of them wrong, but valuable as they are interpretations of a performance that highlight the most important issues for the “performer”.
There was other that aimed to trainee mind to go over through several stages of associations between words and handwork (from drawing to model making). The outcome of this game was a word per player and the process that lead to such word. Actually, 'association' was the most heard word on others comments… it seems that creativity depend pretty much on (unusual, atypical) 'associations'.
Half of games sought free invention: at the end of those games the outcome is a (set of) product(s). Players received a set of random categorized pictures (objects, materials, environment, and scenario) and/or words. In some variations, words are a result of picture analysis. The outcome material is then use to invent a product or as inspiration to do it so.
Again, as mentioned on the last post, the game itself is not a strategy, but a tool to implement a methodology. Anyway, one should not devaluate the power of the games. Apart from being important procedural tools, they are also excellent social tools and a way of promote a happy and relax mood into teams.

creativity and games

I was presented by Eva Brandt from Danmarks Designskole with a lecture on design games. As this lecture will go on I'll draw some reflexions on the game presented and leave room for further conclusions.
Games usually have an element of competition between players, and are decided by chance, strength, skill or a combination of these. Its key components are goals, rules, challenge, and interactivity, generally involving mental or physical stimulation, and often both. These properties are the reason why games are a good scheme to promote successful relantionships within collaborative design stakeholders, even when these ones came from very different fields. Playing games increases the social enterprise because of its entertainment and leasure dimension.
The game introduced - the user game - as well others not presented yet, are framed on action reserch projects which encouraged stakeholders in participatory inquiry and collaborative design. The games used have facilitated a user-centered design process.
"The intention of the User Game is to help the stakeholders involved develop a shared image of the intended users grounded in field data"º. The players use 2 types of cards: numbered moment-cards each one corresponding to a video of 30 seconds to 2 minutes; and sign-cards with a word printed in each one which are used to label the resulted stories. The videos are ethnographic data from inspired field studies.
Based on the cards each player get, they start altogether, sequently or randomly, to build (crossed-) stories. If players feel that watching the video will help then they can do it. They can also decide to watch all the videos before hand to get familiar with the field material. At the end the stories are record for further use.

At this point I'd like to point out that the game works as sponsor of a must wide approach which is the story method, used for instance at Nokia Design as they believe in the power of the stories to create experiences.

^º Brandt, Eva, Messeter, Jörn (2004), Facilitating Collaboration through Design Games
Pictures' source: Eva's lecture presentations.