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Playground games: a design strategy for supporting and understanding coordinated activity

Published: 25 February 2008 Publication History

Abstract

From a design point of view, coordination is radically undertheorized and under-explored. Arguably, playground games are the universal, cross-cultural venue in which people learn about and explore coordination between one another, and between the worlds of articulated rules and the worlds of experience and action. They can therefore (1) teach us about the processes inherent in human coordination, (2) provide a model of desirable coordinative possibilities, and (3) act as a design framework from which to explore the relationship between game and game play---or, to put it in terms of an inherent tension in human-computer interaction, between plans and situated actions. When brought together with a computer language for coordination that helps us pare down coordinative complexity to essential components, we can create systems that have highly distributed control structures. In this paper, we present the design of four such student-created collaborative, distributed, interactive systems for face-to-face use. These take their inspiration from playground games with respect to who can play (plurality), how (appropriability) and to what ends (acompetitiveness). As it happens, our sample systems are themselves games; however, taking playground games as our model helps us create systems that support game play featuring not enforcement of plans but emergence of rules, roles, and turn taking.

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cover image ACM Conferences
DIS '08: Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems
February 2008
487 pages
ISBN:9781605580029
DOI:10.1145/1394445
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 25 February 2008

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Author Tags

  1. coordination
  2. democracy
  3. interaction
  4. interpretation
  5. multi-platform
  6. pervasive computing
  7. suple spaces
  8. ubiquitous computing

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DIS08: Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2008
February 25 - 27, 2008
Cape Town, South Africa

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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