DESIGNING FOR PLAYFUL EXPERIENCES IN OPEN-ENDED INTELLIGENT PLAY ENVIRONMENTS

This paper describes an explorative study with an open-ended play environment. An initial interactive design, called FlowSteps, was developed for children aged 7-8 years old. This design was aimed at supporting the playful experiences of curiosity, exploration, challenge, fellowship and competition during three different stages of play: invitation, exploration and immersion. FlowSteps was evaluated with twenty children playing in pairs with the design. Results show evidence of the playful experiences supported by a variety of design elements over the three stages of play. We propose that these insights can help the development of playful, interactive designs for open-ended play. Play is an important aspect of children's lives. It helps children in practicing new skills and exploring imaginary worlds (Acuff & Reiher 1997). Within play, a temporary world can be created with dynamic boundaries and rules (Huizinga 1955). Our research focuses on supporting social and physical play by offering children open-ended play designs that challenge them to come up with their own games (Bekker et al. 2010). This paper explores how to design for playful experiences within an open-ended play environment. When designing for open-ended play, we actually design for an experience. Korhonen et al. (2009) have identified twenty playful experiences based on literature study and empirical research with videogames. The aim of these playful experiences is to support development of more playful interactive designs. Additional research is needed to understand how to apply the playful experiences in the design process. In his work on interactivity and play, Polaine (2010) describes the experience of interaction as a process that goes through several stages, based on the four modes of interactivity (Salen & Zimmerman 2003). The experience starts with an invitation to play (first mentioned in Pesce 1996). In this 'invitation stage', the potential player is attracted to the play design by sight, sound or smell senses from a distance. Next, the player explores opportunities for interaction and play in the 'exploration stage', wanting to understand aspects such as rules and affordances. This stage leads to the actual play experience: the 'immersion stage'. The fourth stage of participatory interaction, such as social networking and presence technologies, is outside the scope of our project. Our design research examines how to design for these different stages of play and how the playful experiences can be supported in each of these stages. This paper describes an explorative study with a first design prototype, called FlowSteps, intended for children aged 7-8 years old. We address two research questions. We explore (1) how to design for the playful experiences of curiosity, exploration, challenge, fellowship and competition (2) for three different stages of play: invitation, exploration and immersion. The structure of this paper is as follows. First, we describe related work in play research. We continue with a description of our concept FlowSteps and how this relates to the playful experiences and stages of play. Thirdly, the set-up and methodology of our explorative study is discussed. We present the results of this study from the perspectives of game play, playful experiences and stages of play. We conclude this paper with a discussion.