Enabling Co-Located Physical Social Play: A Framework for Design and Evaluation

During the last decade, we have witnessed an increased interest in social play in digital games. With this comes an urge to understand better how to design and evaluate for this new form of play. In this chapter, we encapsulate best practices for game design and evaluation, grounded in other game researchers’ work, as well as our own research and practice. We focus on a sub-area of social games that has experienced great growth and has attracted general interest in research and in practice. It is also the area that has driven our own research: co-located, physical, and social play that is technology supported. In this overview, we provide a sense of the challenges and opportunities involved when designing for this particular area, using good empirical grounding and presenting a framework in the form of lenses through which to think about the design of co-located physical social games.