Developing Ideation Cards for Mixed Reality Game Design

Abstract

Mixed reality games (MRGs) encompass a variety of gaming genres such as pervasive games, location-based games, and augmented reality games. They enrich the physical world with technology to create new and exciting possibilities for games – but at the same time introduce new challenges. In order to make the vast design space of MRGs easily accessible we have developed our Mixed Reality Game Cards. These are a deck of ideation cards that synthesize design knowledge about MRGs and enable collaborative design in a playful manner. In this paper, we describe the iterative development of the Mixed Reality Game Cards over the course of six studies. The final version of the cards constitutes a helpful tool for future designers of MRGs both for rapid idea generation as well as for more in-depth idea development. We achieve this by utilizing different types of domain-specific cards (Opportunities, Questions, Challenges) as well as promoting the inclusion of domain-extrinsic Theme cards and suggesting different rules for interacting with the cards.

Co-designing Cards on Social Issues for Creating Educational Games

“…Illustrations are arguably a source of inspiration and an important element in the aesthetics of cards (Lucero and Arrasvuori, 2013;Wetzel et al, 2016). A study compared PLEX Cards, which contain a definition and an informative illustration; and DIXIT Cards, which represent abstract illustrations, and found similar results in terms of numbers of ideas generated (Kwiatkowska et al, 2014).…”

“…In Deng et al (2014), the cards were intended to make knowledge on tangible learning games accessible by translating "lengthy, dense, and jargon laden (body of literature) to design practice" (p.1). Wetzel et al (2016) presented sets of cards throughout the design process to create mixed reality games. Distinct sets of cards covered different stages of the design process, such as cards with abstract images applied at the ideation phase.…”

Designing Troubleshooting Support Cards for Novice End-User Developers of Physical Computing Prototypes

“…Numerous card-based tools exist to support the generation and development of ideas within a creative or design process and/or to provide specific knowledge during one. Domain, problem or activity-specific card tools include: MRG Cards (mixed reality games design [15]), DSD Cards (designing technology for children [2]), Exertion Cards (exertion games design [14]), PLEX Cards (design for playfulness [11]), Tango Cards (tangible learning games design [6]), Envisioning Cards (considering human values during design [9]), and Tiles IoT Toolkit (designing IoT prototypes [13]). Cards afford several benefits.…”

“…As cards can be moved next to one another or grouped, they facilitate comparisons [2] and can also help to break down a problem into steps [14] or to plan actions in order of priority. Arranging cards can support the framing and reframing of a problem, leading to hypotheses, while cards containing less-specific information can also help spark ideas [15]. As EUDs can easily arrange physical cards to explore relations or configure them into meaningful spatial arrangements, we feel this to be an appropriate medium for encouraging reflective troubleshooting, and planning and tracking activity.…”

“…Questions-particularly open-are commonly used to prompt thought or reflection [2,9,14], as is providing minimal information [11], or evocative imagery [14]. Cards can also provide context or knowledge [2,9,13], concrete examples [6,13] or instructions [9], however, too much information can overwhelm the user and be time-consuming to read [15], potentially disrupting the activity flow [6]. Descriptions should therefore be succinct and easy to digest [11] and information should be written in simple, everyday language, avoiding jargon [2,6,14].…”