Roleplaying, acting out the part of a character other than yourself, is a very popular pasttime. There exist a wide range of possible experiences from friendgroups playing Dungeons & Dragons around a kitchen table, to players going on weekend trips where they don costumes and act out being elves and wizards with like-minded people, and many steps in between. It is possible for a player's emotions while playing to affect them outside of the game as well, and the other way around too. This phenomenon is called bleed, and is the subject of much discussion in roleplaying design circles, with creators actively designing their games with bleed in mind. A game might intentionally seek to invoke bleed, which can create powerful emotional experiences, or seek to mitigate its effects by using a variety of common safety tools and good design practices. This talk will introduce Raymond Vermeulen's Professional Doctorate research project, which studies the mechanisms of bleed in analogue roleplaying games, the emotional design of this genre of game, and how this can be applied to the creation of digital narrative games as well.
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Playfulness intertwined with city-related themes, such as participatory planning and civic media are becoming more popular. In the last ten years, game designers have taken up the theme of play in relation to the urban environment. In this paper, we present a conceptual mapping of “urban play,” through the analysis of eight examples of urban games. Better conceptual tools are necessary to discuss and reflect on how games draw on, or deal with, urban issues. While urban games are diverse in medium, intent, and experience, across the spectrum analyzed in this paper, they hold the potential for various player experiences emerging through play that may be useful to designers. These are: a sense of agency and impact; feelings of relatedness and empathy; an awareness and understanding of complexity, perspective-taking and scenario-building, and either planning or taking action. The conceptual mapping offers scholars and practitioners a more nuanced vocabulary for designing games and playful interventions that might be used to tackle societal issues that either require or could benefit from genuine public involvement as engaged citizens.
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The concept of immersion has been widely used for the design and evaluation of user experiences. Augmented, virtual and mixed-reality environments have further sparked the discussion of immersive user experiences and underlying requirements. However, a clear definition and agreement on design criteria of immersive experiences remains debated, creating challenges to advancing our understanding of immersive experiences and how these can be designed. Based on a multidisciplinary Delphi approach, this study provides a uniform definition of immersive experiences and identifies key criteria for the design and staging thereof. Thematic analysis revealed five key themes – transition into/out of the environment, in-experience user control, environment design, user context relatedness, and user openness and motivation, that emphasise the coherency in the user-environment interaction in the immersive experience. The study proposes an immersive experience framework as a guideline for industry practitioners, outlining key design criteria for four distinct facilitators of immersive experiences–systems, spatial, empathic/social, and narrative/sequential immersion. Further research is proposed using the immersive experience framework to investigate the hierarchy of user senses to optimise experiences that blend physical and digital environments and to study triggered, desired and undesired effects on user attitude and behaviour.
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