Design for a Playful World

At Game in the City 2009 we hand­ed out cards to all par­tic­i­pants. Here’s a pho­to:

As you can see, there are nine vari­ants. Each has an illus­tra­tion of a fox doing, well, some­thing on the front, plus a quote. The quotes all relate to the nature of real­i­ty in some way.

Part of the card can be tak­en out. As you can see in the fol­low­ing pho­to:

The part that is removed could be kept as a reminder. What remains is sim­i­lar to a view find­er. You can look through it and take pho­tos of peo­ple, adding their faces to the fox bod­ies.

We went around dur­ing the con­fer­ence doing exact­ly this. A selec­tion of the pho­tos we took of peo­ple can be seen below:

Pho­tos by Kars Alfrink, from the Flickr album Hub­bub cards at GitC 2009.

The rest of this post is a descrip­tion of the mak­ing of these cards, with a focus on the role sketch­ing played in the design. I’m post­ing this because we more or less stum­bled across this form of play by acci­dent. How­ev­er, we manip­u­lat­ed cir­cum­stances so that this acci­dent, this serendip­i­tous encounter of an inter­est­ing form of play, was bound to hap­pen. I think this is a trick of much val­ue to design­ers of games and play­ful expe­ri­ences.

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