Vol. 6, No. 1 (2012)
http://www.eludamos.org
Designing a Game for Playful Communication within Families
Ida Toft, Amani Naseem
Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture. 2012; 6 (1), pp. 39-52
Designing a Game for Playful Communication within
Families
IDA TOFT AND AMANI NASEEM
The article will illustrate and explain how we worked with research and our own and
secondary literature to create a game that had the potential to create social change.
The game Junomi was designed to address the problem of loneliness among Danish
teenagers and create opportunities for the families to play and experiment with the
ways in which they communicate together.
The game is a location based smart-phone game that takes place in players’
everyday environments around the city. Players invite close family members to play
for an agreed period of time (for example a week or a couple of months). Throughout
the game period, players create questions, each with three possible multiple choice
answers, and place them on a map to be found by other players. When other players
pass by the question locations on their everyday routes around the city, the questions
pop up on the phones.
One player might, for example, make a question involving what she would like for
dinner and locate it at the supermarket. Another player might then write a question
indicating that she won’t come home for dinner and leave it on her mother's route
back from work. When the mother receives the question she would have to forward it
to all the other family members if she wants to receive points for her answer.
Players receive points for creating questions and choosing the correct answers.
There are seven question categories to inspire the players to make different types of
questions. The questions and answers are saved, and can be browsed through on
the game map, and are thus similar to other family collections such as photograph
albums or videos. Junomi has been designed as a response to the widespread
problems of loneliness and weak family relationships in Denmark. The hope is that by
playing together, family members will get a chance to play with the way they
communicate and update each other, as well as a chance to experience closeness
and togetherness even though they are rarely at home at the same time.
The following section will provide an introduction to the situation experienced by
Danish families and, in particular, their teenaged members.
Throughout a familiy's history, norms, roles and habits of communication are
established during such ritual moments as dinner, breakfast, family evenings, chores,
SMS messages, phone calls and car trips and transportation time. Communicating
about new issues and changes in the family members' lives can be a challenge. This
is especially prevalent with teenagers as, during this transitional period in their lives
they face many new situations, dilemmas, doubts and insecurities, and yet spend
even less time together with their families, thus receiving and giving fewer
opportunities to build confidence and develop trust and togetherness. Torben
Eludamos Vol. 6, No. 1 (2012)
pp. 39-52
Copyright © by Ida Toft and Amani Naseem
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Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 6, No. 1 (2012)
Bechmann Jensen, a psychologist researching Danish teenagers says that Danish
teens have to be “cool, calm and collected” (2006 p.16) and that independence and
maturity are highly valued qualities needed for them to be seen as a success.
According to Bechmann Jensen, showing uncertainty can be a threat to this image
and for some even a taboo (Bechmann Jensen 2006). This makes sharing stories
and thoughts about their lives a challenge: a lot of trust and closeness is thus
required for teenagers to open up, and be comfortable enough to confide in family
members and in one another.
According to Kirsten Drotner, Professor of Media Studies at the University of
Southern Denmark, the pace of development in modern society drives a wedge
between generations, making many of the parents’ life skills irrelevant to later
generations. Instead, the skills for succeeding in contemporary society are learnt in
institutions, where the children spend most of their time (Drotner 2001). In a normal
family situation, both parents work, and on average the Danish families only spend a
few hours a day in the same location (Bonke 2009). These hours are, however, often
spent doing household duties and chores, and do not necessarily represent time
spent on what Bonke calls ‘primary care’ (when the parents do things together with or
for the child), instead merely representing time spent under the same roof. The time
families actually do spend together is usually very restricted and inflexible, often
limited to some time after dinner, or on weekends and as teenagers grow older the
time spent with their families becomes less.
Bodily, social and intellectual change characterizes teenagers' lives and family
relationships have to evolve, change and grow through these changes. This makes
communication, confidence and trust in each other important during these years.
However as described above, family life in Denmark provides limited opportunity for
spending time together to create these strong ties,
Statistics of loneliness among Danish teenagers reflect this apparent inability to
confide in the members of their close social circle. Almost every forth teenager
identifies loneliness as part of their lives (Simonsen and Hansen 2006). As many
teenagers are surrounded by people every day and have a seemingly rich social life
filled with parties, friends and social activities, it is surprising that so many identify
with loneliness and self harm. Psychologist Ida Kock distinguishes between the
qualities of different social relationships and characterizes loneliness as the state of
exclusively having weak social relationships and being without anyone to confide in
or trust (Simonsen and Hansen 2006). Junomi is concerned with improving
communication and strengthening close relationships among the teenagers' closest
social circles.
In the following section we describe the methods used to produce the data upon
which we based our game design. We then illustrate some of the considerations
involved in the design process and detail how we investigated the social situation.
We explain how we investigated what kinds of play could be meaningful for the
different situations the families live in everyday and how play could have the potential
to make the families feel close and connected throughout their daily lives. Finally, the
game and design decisions are evaluated through reflections, argumentation,
Experience Prototypes and follow up interviews. The discussion section at the end of
the article addresses how to make a game with a potential to make change.
Toft and Naseem • Designing a Game for Playful Communication within Families
41
Method
We wanted to design our game in a way which would be relevant in the sense that it
would have the potential to transform the current familial situation into a preferred
state (Zimmerman 2007). We considered the social situation to be complex,
consisting of issues on many levels. To investigate the situation from as many angles
and levels as possible, this project relied on a research-based design approach and
was based on literature from disciplines including psychology, sociology, media
studies, science and technology studies, and economics and youth research, as well
as our own qualitative research.
In total we carried out seventeen qualitative interviews to discover the details and
nuances of how the teenagers and parents themselves talk about their experiences.
The interviews were carried out in two phases. The first eight interviews had a
general focus, concentrating on the teenagers’ everyday routines at home and while
out and about in their neighbourhoods. The following nine interviews (of which seven,
three with teenagers, four with parents, followed on from the introductary interviews)
focussed specifically on communication with family and close relationships, in
particular when talking about experiences, concerns, wishes and successes in their
relationships. The teenage informants can be divided into two main groups, one
consisting of teenagers who were in the last year of Middle School and the other half
who went to High School (14-18 years). Among the informants is a mixture of
teenagers from divorced and cohabiting families with a varied number of siblings.
Also, two of the informants had parents from Iran, and saw themselves as fully
Danish. We chose teenagers from different kinds of families, as we wanted the
project to obtain as many perspectives on the target group as we could to be relevant
to as wide a group of teenagers as possible.
We also carried out two Experience Prototypes (Buchenau and Suri 2000) to explore
how the different aspects of the proposed concept could work and be experienced in
a working context.
By the term 'Experience Prototype' we mean to emphasize the experiential
aspect of whatever representations are needed to successfully (re)live or convey
an experience with a product, space or system. So, for an operational definition
we can say an Experience Prototype is any kind of representation, in any
medium, that is designed to understand, explore or communicate what it might be
like to engage with the product, space or system we are designing. (Buchenau
and Suri 2000, p.1)
The main prototype for Junomi was a Wizard of Oz-type (Buxton 2007) SMS
prototype of the game, which was played by the users during a twenty-four-hour
session as they went about their daily activities. Afterwards, interviews were arranged
to get comments about their experiences and further explore design opportunities.
The first Experience Prototype was carried out with two teenage friends. Cards were
designed for testing the categories used in the game and whether the rules of the
game were understandable before the main prototype session. The friends
understood the categories and the rules quite well and they were thus used again
during the main prototype, which was carried out with a family of two children (a girl
of fifteen and a boy of twelve) and their two parents. The children lived with their
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Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 6, No. 1 (2012)
mother but also spent approximately two days a week with the father who lived in the
same neighbourhood. It must be noted that there were two factors that could affect
the dynamic of the game that were not tested here: Firstly, the duration of the
prototype was only twenty-four hours instead of a period of several weeks or months
as the final game is intended to be. This was something that greatly effected the
pace of the game. Secondly, this prototype did not test how the players would have
played if they had been choosing locations for questions around the city for their
questions.
Since this was a research situation in which the participants did not initiate the play or
choose to play the game themselves, they may have felt a pressure to be active, and
remain active for the duration of the game. However, the follow up interviews did not
indicate that the players felt obliged to play.
The fact that we did both the design work and the user-research ourselves meant
that we did not boil down the data into a finalized analysis in report form, or make
scenarios or personas as is often done in user-centered or research-based design
processes. The data from the interviews were coded and categorized. The coding
was done directly onto Post-it notes or coloured paper, a method inspired by Anna
Maria Nicolaci Da Costa's way of working with empirical data in design processes
(Da Costa 2007). The Post-it notes were pasted on a wall to find relevant and
representative categories.
Although ethnographic research usually requires very detailed coding and
categorization (Coffey and Atkinson 1996), the method of using Post-it notes did not
allow for such measures. The size of the Post-it notes did not afford lengthy
descriptions, but called for concise phrasing. Rather than giving detailed descriptions
of the experiences from the interviews, they worked as references to our memories of
the situations.
This visible overview of the data on the Post-it notes facilitated discussions and the
clustering of the data by allowing connections to be immediately pointed out and
discerned. As the discussions and interpretation of data continued for several weeks
throughout the design and concept development, the Post-it notes reference to the
original data helped us retain the clarity of our memories of the teenagers in their
homes. Using short references to memories of the situations rather than a finalised
report or scenarios made our interpretations both agile and malleable. The
interpretations we drew could easily to travel far from the original situations. The
actual audio files from the interviews were therefore revisited during the process to
keep our work as close as possible to our original impressions.
Having all the data around us on the walls facilitated how we continually analysed
and reinterpreted the data throughout the design and concept development process.
The design practices of sketching (Buxton 2007) and prototyping allowed us to
explore possible futures by allowing for the critical examination of the properties and
ideologies inherent in possible platforms, technologies and the games. It is also
important to emphasize that the concept development and interpretation of data were
carried out as parallel processes so that design ideas and discussions themselves
could open up various perspectives from which to consider the data. The practice of
framing and reframing possible ways in which elements are prioritized (Löwgreen &
Toft and Naseem • Designing a Game for Playful Communication within Families
43
Stolterman 2004) and of (re)framing different configurations of systems and
technology opened up new sets of possibilities, repeatedly calling for “a new
understanding of the phenomenon” (Schön 1983, p.68). When designing a game to
deal with a complex issue, unfolding the situation by keeping the analysis and
interpretation of data open throughout the design process can support the
development of a nuanced understanding of the field, making data-based research
particularly suitable for this kind of work.
Design Considerations
This section illustrates some considerations we took into account when working with
the data from our interviews and the literature from larger empirical studies that we
found relevant to the topic. It explains how we explored the families' everyday lives
and daily routines to find moments and possibilities for play; and how we considered
what kind of play would be suitable and how various aspects of the situation could be
drawn in to the game and made playable. It finally details how we further investigated
different technological solutions and their potential to facilitate different forms of play.
This section is a snapshot of some of the concerns we had and, even though actual
processes were much messier than they might appear here, it serves to exemplify
the way in which we worked.
Using the mobile phone as platform
Both our own empirical research and other academic research shows that the Danish
families are extremely busy and spend a few hours a day together on average. As
one teenager explains:
I usually go out on Friday night, so I sleep until late in the morning, then my
mother and [mother's partner] often go to the gym on Saturday morning. So I
manage to just see them before they leave … then I go to football practice.
(Seventeen-year-old girl)
All eleven teenagers we interviewed wanted to spend more time with their families
and wanted them to know more about their daily lives. Some teenagers expressed
concern that they felt they isolated themselves from the family; as one girl expressed,
she felt like “she was not so much part of the family anymore” (16 years old). Others
felt nostalgic about the Friday evenings when the family used to gather around the
television and how they used to go and visit the siblings in their rooms and chat, play
or do homework in each other's company.
The teenagers expressed a considerable need for independence and for close
relationships with good friends and grown-ups who had known them for a long time.
But they also expressed that it was difficult to balance the two needs.
When designing our game, we considered these busy schedules and found that it
would be necessary to make it very easy and convenient to play together. So we
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Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 6, No. 1 (2012)
considered a range of technologies and looked into research on media studies, youth
culture and technology use.
The families already have a range of media they use to communicate with each other
in different ways, such as SMS Messages, telephone calls, paper notes and
calendars etc. Media scholar Christian Licoppe explains how the use of
communication technologies can be conceived not as compensation for being
together, but as part of a “continuous pattern of mediated interactions that combine
into ‘connected relationships’, in which the boundaries between absence and
presence eventually get blurred” (Licoppe 2004, p.136). He considers communication
in terms of mediated relationships instead of separate and particular mediated
interactions and points out that different devices have distinct properties that can be
used to add to this pattern of flows that constitutes communication between people
in intimate relationships. Taking Licoppe's view into account, we chose to design
Junomi in such a way that the game could become a part of players' communications
repertoire, and would include the possibility for playful and ambiguous
communication when played for a longer period of time (e.g. 6 months).
During our interviews we found that moments for chat and intimate conversations
were often squeezed in between other activities, for example during transportation,
homework or teeth cleaning. A father, for instance, would drive his son to ice hockey
practice and help him with his training, using this time to talk and catch up. Similarly,
one girl talked about her close relationship with her grandparents who often invited
her and her brother to their summerhouse and would always have some chores or
repair work for them to do together: While working they would catch up and talk
about all sorts of things.
We were inspired by the ways in which these families created moments for
themselves where they could talk and catch up together, often using practical
activities or other chores as excuses for dialogue.
Richard Ling and Jonathan Donner describe the mobile phone as a technology of the
intimate sphere: The large majority of mobile phone contact is between people who
are close in their everyday lives, and most of their communication is about practical,
everyday things, like what is in the fridge or coordination of activities (Ling and
Donner 2009). Since playing games is not a habit for many of the family members we
studied, we thought it would be most useful to build the game on the phone, a
platform the family members already use regularly to communicate with each other,
and on which norms and habits of communication are already established.
Furthermore, we thought that the location-based aspect of the playful questions
popping up around town in a way similar to practical SMS messages could be like
reminders to play and be playful in different places. We wanted to take advantage of
these qualities inherent in mobile phone communication in the development of our
game.
Ling and Donner also talk about how the quality of mobile phones allow for the
interlacing of activities (Ling and Donner 2009).
Interlacing of activities means that we can vicariously participate in situations or
we can organize one social interaction while we are still (physically) in a separate
one. (Ling and Donner 2009, p.139)
Toft and Naseem • Designing a Game for Playful Communication within Families
45
Taking advantage of this possibility of interlacing allowed us to make a game that—
contrary to a board game—does not need to be played in a particular situation. This,
and the fact that the game is constantly available, means that the game does not
require one to set aside time for it, allowing it to be interwoven into daily activities.
The mother who participated in the SMS Experience Prototype described how she
answered the questions on a bathroom break. This is one aspect of the game that
makes it easier for the whole family to participate. The game play can fit easily and
conveniently in with the families' busy lives.
Telling Stories
The location-based aspect of the game provides an opportunity for the design to
strengthen a family's feeling of togetherness and to make it possible for members to
think about each other in considerate ways. We considered how places are filled with
stories and memories. Making questions for particular locations gives players the
possibility to consider the context for the question may be “found” in and to take into
account each others’ schedules, routes and rituals in the city. For example, a player
could place a question on the playground to remind another player of childhood
memories. Alternatively, a player could create a question simply when thinking about
where another player might pass on their way home, thus giving them a hint to pick
up some cookies from the nice bakery they travel by, for example.
John McCarthy and Peter Wright write about how the narratives we use to recount
experiences play a pivotal role “not only in the way in which we make sense of our
experience but also for the way in which they can shape our felt, lived experience”
(McCarthy and Wright 2004, p.119). Building the game on questions and answers
would let the players create narratives about real experiences as well as to make up
fictional ones using their imagination.
When a player creates questions about a fact or an event and then writes
corresponding right and wrong answers, they not only change the way these facts
are communicated among the players, but also the player's own way of considering
both their experiences and the places they visit in the city.
McCarthy and Wright claim that the recounting of stories is self-referential, in that
narratives are ‘selective interpretations’ constructed for a specific purpose and for a
particular audience. In our game, we constrained the format of a question to two
incorrect and one correct answer to bring in an ambiguity which would give the player
freedom to play and interpret the events of their lives, through, for example, the
fictional answers they write, the types of questions they create, and the decision at
what point to start the story, and so forth.
We also wanted to make use of how the way in which players express themselves
relates to the way they think they will be understood by other players. As the game is
designed in such a way that asks players to formulate the questions themselves, they
must also consider what the others know or think about a subject.
In the Experience Prototype the family's daughter made a question about a funny
anecdote concerning her father. Even though it was the father who had originally
Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 6, No. 1 (2012)
46
experienced the situation, he got the question wrong because he had forgotten to
consider the story from his daughter’s point of view. A player could also put a right
answer as a wrong answer to test out others' expectations and interpretations of him,
making the others consider not just what is correct, but also what is likely that the
question's designer would tell them and put as the right answer. This is a very
straightforward example, but it also works on more subtle levels. McCarthy and
Wright explain this in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of inter-animation (McCarthy
and Wright 2004, p.122) in the sense of having to consider not only the question
designer's experiences but also who they are in relation to others, a process which
involves reflections on their family relationships. In the Experience Prototype, the
children who were dealing with the rather difficult situation of their parents being
divorced, used the questions to show their concern and care for both of their parents,
by asking questions referring to the parents' backgrounds, and the culture and
experiences they had had with each of them.
This section has given an insight into how we worked with research and theories to
understand the situation for which we were designing the game, and how we
discovered opportune moments in which play would be relevant and have potential
to create change in families' lives.
Discussion
For this project we recognized that the communications situation among Danish
teenagers is a difficult problem involving disparate issues and people with varied
goals and interests. As the sociologist Bente Halkier states, the heterogeneous
nature of social problems makes them indefinable (Halkier 2001, p.58). As written
earlier the practice of creative design (Schön 1983) allowed us to explore the
situation and its future possibilities concurrently. Attempting to create a game that
had potential to change a situation to a preferred state we can refer to Mary
Flanagan’s notion of Critical Play. Here she argues that games are spaces in which it
is possible to be in several spatialities simultaneously, and in which social and
political transformation is possible.
The challenge, then, is to find ways to make interesting, complex play
environments using the intricacies of critical thinking, and to encourage designers
to offer many possibilities in games, for a wide range of players, with a wide
range of interests and social roles. We can manifest a different future. It is not
enough to simply call for change and then hope for the best; we need
interventions at the level of popular culture. (Flanagan 2009, p.261)
As Flanagan writes about critical computer games:
Games are frameworks that designers can use to model the complexity of the
problems that face the world and make them easier for the players to
comprehend. By creating a simulated environment, the player is able to step
away and think critically about those problems. (Flanagan 2009, p.249)
Although most of the video games Flanagan addresses in her book model or
simulate problematic situations, we did not consider this as a useful way to design a
game which would improve communication. We considered how Tracy Vetting Wolf
Toft and Naseem • Designing a Game for Playful Communication within Families
47
et. al. argues that it is not possible to delineate these kinds of problems. Wolf et al.
explain that these are 'wicked' problems (Rittel and Webber 1973) and that designing
for ‘wicked‘ problems requires "the assessment of multiple possible solutions and the
integration of multiple facets [of a situation] " (Wolf et. al. 2006 p.2). According to
them it is not possible to boil down these kinds of problems to a single set of
requirements, nor to identify a "logical systematic plan" (Wolf et al. 2006, p. 4) which
would be necessary in order to make a simulation game. Our focus was not on
producing a game that modelled a system or situation, but was concentrated instead
on finding a way to make the communication situation playable and playful. Thus we
had to consider not just what we would put inside the game but also the whole
situation surrounding its play.
Ian Bogost (2007) identifies computational processes and simulations as being
characteristic and unique to video games, argueing that they can be used in
persuasive ways. In computational systems like video games, the construction of
dynamic models, rules and behavior are authored in code, in programming and in
processes. According to Bogost, the power for video games to disrupt and change
fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world, and their potential to create
significant long-term social change, lies not in the content of the game, but in the
rhetorical use of processes.
Our design approach takes a broader perspective, in order not only to consider the
potentials and possibilities of the processes within the game, but also to draw on
discussions from Science and Technology Studies on the relationship between
human agency and technology. This was done to explore the potentials and
possibilities in the game as a whole, including the qualities of the platform and how it
is already integrated within the families' habits in their everyday lives.
Bruno Latour and Marc Berg argue that humans and the technologies they use
should be understood in relation to each other:
… ‘we’ are what we are only in close co-evolution with the plethora of changing
artifacts that constitute, sustain, mold, and re-conceptualize us—from mundane
artifacts such as egg timers to the complicated historical and material processes
that have produced what we now call ‘the subject’. (Berg 1998 p.476)
It is important to consider such co-evolution in our project, as the goal of designing
technology involves, in this case, achieving a preferred state in the relationship
between the teenagers and the people they are closest to. Latour (1992) argues that
the discussion should be taken beyond humanistic or technological determinism. He
argues that both human and technological powers are equally able to originate
actions in society. Different technologies have different ontological and
epistemological foundations that determine the way in which they “constitute,
sustain, mould and re-conceptualize” the people who use them. The ideologies and
implications behind different technologies had, therefore, to be examined when
working out and evaluating proposed concepts for our design.
In such a design process, an understanding of the values in technology,
complemented by a detailed understanding of how they would work in the field, is
necessary in order to evaluate and judge a proposed design's possible implications
and its potential to make an apt change in a social situation. Our analyses of data
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Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 6, No. 1 (2012)
had thus to be continuously re-considered and re-conceptualized in relation to the
proposed game ideas.
From this perspective we consider our game to be a technology with specific
qualities, which frames the families' communication in playful ways. When questions
pop up on the phones, they work as a reminder to find a playful attitude, and as a
suggestion and an excuse to play in the daily hassle of routines and commitments.
The game is designed as a structure for play, making playing and experimenting with
ways of communicating a little bit easier for those who are often too busy, caught up
in life's concerns or simply out of practice.
This is an understanding of the relationship between game and play that can be
compared to Douglas Wilson's description of his own party games: "… it can be
productively evocative to conceptualize these kinds of silly party games not as
“systems”, but rather as festive contexts—as excuses to laugh with and horse around
with friends" (Wilson 2011). Similar to Junomi, these kind of party games do not
check up on how the players play the game, thus creating a gap between what the
game tells the players to do and what it is actually able to monitor and enforce. We
see that building a space of ambiguous rules between what the game directs and
what is actually possible foregrounds the social context and calls the players'
attention not only to each other but to the play and social interchange surrounding
the game. As the players in Junomi define the true and false answers, the system
does not check up on their accuracy: The players themselves have thus to consider
not just what what has been defined by the designers as the right answer, but what
the player who asked the question might consider to be the right answer in a
particular context.
Several authors point to how the context of play and the way games are played are
complicated and intrinsically interconnected. Referring to 'the assemblage of play',
game scholar T. L. Taylor draws attention to how games are placed within the
context of a larger net of nodes and structures (including physicality; virtuality;
physical, social and historical structures; and social relationships etc.) which
becomes part of and shapes the way a game is played (Taylor 2009). Also Mia
Consalvo (2005) has studied players' cheating practices. She draws attention to how
a culture and a network around cheating nurtures and facilitates the development of
individual play and cheating practices. These studies draw attention to the contexts
of games and how these contexts enable the players particular play practices.
For this project we studied the families' existing everyday lives, rituals, habits and
established practices of communication and their use of technology and used it as
the context in which to place our game. We looked for ways in which we could design
a kind of play that would be suitable to the social environment, and also how we
could draw the different aspects involved in this situation into the game. In short, we
examined how the different aspects of the families’ communication situation could
become playable.
Many games with a purpose beyond entertainment are based on the models of
persuasive games and procedural rhetoric. These games are most often designed to
have their impact after playing the game, for example getting players to donate to
certain causes. Some discussion has been conducted about how and whether it is
Toft and Naseem • Designing a Game for Playful Communication within Families
49
possible to evaluate and measure the success of the game in terms of long-term
change. Ian Bogost argues that the effect of a persuasive game lies in the reflections,
conversation and discussions it initiates, e.g. in the public media (Bogost 2007 p.317341). Junomi primarily focuses on creating change while playing, both in the sense
described by McCarthy and Wright when recounting and retelling, and also when the
players are more consciously contributing creatively to the game. Relying on players
to engage with the game in this way requires much more from the players than
simple decision making among defined choices. As Flanagan points out, games can
function as intervention, as subversion and as a space for imagining new futures and
realities, making change that reaches out into the contexts around the game
possible. In Junomi, these changes can be subtle or drastic, but how lasting the
changes are and how it may transform people's lives over time is very difficult to
predict.
The impact and relevance of the game was evaluated based on the Experience
Prototypes as well as reflections coming out of the theory and research. This is a
typical method for design projects with a purpose such as social change. Design for
social change is often evaluated and validated by examining the rigour of reflections
and argumentation to ascertain whether the design practice was based on solid
research. There are very few studies empirically investigating the impacts of social
change and the methods and practices of evaluation are therefore not very
established. This is especially a problem when it comes to soft changes such as
seen in this project.
It would be very interesting and relevant to study how the game play of Junomi would
actually manifest within a larger sample of families, playing over a longer period of
time. Furthermore, it would be interesting to see whether the experiences and ways
of communicating enacted in the game would reach into other realms of the families'
communication, and how that would change over time in a variety of families. It would
be interesting to investigate how disciplines such as educational research (such as
transformative learning, social psychology and micro psychology) can contribute to
such studies, as they actually has a longer tradition with established methods of
evaluating soft changes such as this project is dealing with.
Conclusion
In our attempt to make a design that had the potential to change the social situation
in the families to a preferred state, we made a game to instigate, frame, facilitate and
encourage playful attitudes towards the way in which family members communicate
together.
As we were designing for a social situation that is characterized as being
heterogeneous, complex and indefinable, we made a game that works as a frame for
playing within the actual life situation rather than creating a system that simulates or
models a situation. Through qualitative, data-based research we explored the
situation and, by continued analysis, work, framing and reframing, we gathered a
nuanced understanding of the different elements, aspects and interrelations of the
families' everyday communication. This facilitated the exploration of the situations'
playful potential, e.g. how small moments and elements of the communication could
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Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 6, No. 1 (2012)
be made playable. Inspired by theorists of Science and Technology Studies and their
thoughts on the relationship between humans and technology, we have explored the
values and potentials embedded in the technology to create closeness and facilitate,
encourage, invite, remind and suggest play in different ways.
Junomi is a very simple game in the sense that the rules are simple and the game
does not check up or follow up on how the game is played. How the game is played,
which questions are accepted and which are considered fun, how the categories are
used and which answers are defined as right or wrong is all negotiated among the
players themselves.
The game gives responsibility to the players. To play requires the family to create,
explore and experiment with their own ways of playing and relies on the family
members to be considerate and thoughtful of each other. It gives opportunities for
people to think about each other: their daily activities, movements around the city,
memories and moments that they have shared and constitutes an exploration of
playful ways of being together.
This article has addressed how the game has the potential to change the social
situation through the playing of the game. It is most likely that a good playing
experience will have long-term effects, though how long such effects will last, and
how they will transform over time, is very difficult to judge.
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