The Real Treasure is the Friends We Made on the Way: How a novel co-located game can deliver positive pro-social experiences.

The Problem

With an ever changing modern social existence there has been a growing desire to find community in our daily lives. With dynamic living environments, shifting work/life culture, and an ever growing online side to life some argue over the collapse of the modern community. This discussion is alarming as times of great social change show a need for individuals to find community more then ever. As students of information and society one of our goals should be to understand how community is changing, and use our findings to create positive impact on modern communities. 

Our Goal

The way people find and create community needs to change alongside our changing social structures. One way we have seen great success in community creation and formation is through gaming. With much of the world taking part in gaming in some capacity in their lives it only makes sense that likeminded players find each other and form bonds. From the classic Massively Multiplayer Online game to competitive E-Sports circuits we have seen games use case as media that can bring people together. Furthermore some games have had an "x-factor" of sorts where they transcend the online life and bring players together to physical gatherings and social meetings. Using our knowledge of information and society the team is creating a novel co-located gaming experience that facilitates community creation and growth. With our created game we want to study how communities operate and give useful findings to areas of social psychology, organizational psychology, collaborative information systems, and more.

We are creating a gaming experience that not only aims to create community, but give an outlet for researchers to study the ways community form and maintain themselves. Through the lens of games, we can see how people interact, collaborate, and communicate in order to complete goals and importantly learn about how community can be formed around them.

Approach

Through a combined approach of design, research, and engineering we want to both create a novel game experience as well as contribute findings to social psychology, community studies, and information systems. To do so we will go through a full design process as well as implement a research design.

Design Process includes:

• Game Design
• UI / HUD Creation
• UX Flow and Usability
• etc…

Research Design includes: 

• Many many Playtests
• Literature Review on community
• Overarching Research on Community
• etc…

Engineering Efforts includes:

• Coding a game from scratch!
• Creating a physical game experience (e.g. 3D printing?)
• etc…