The challenge game frame: Affordance oriented co-creation of privacy decision games

Abstract

Creating Serious Games (SG) involves the challenge of balancing a domain-goal with a game-goal while maintaining an engaging experience. Although several serious game-design frameworks exist, the potentials of dialogical interaction during the game-design process for exploring and matching motivations and requirements of stakeholders is widely overlooked. In this paper, we present an affordance-oriented game-design activity for co-creating engaging serious game-challenges. Displayed in a user study with 29 Norwegian computer-science students we outline the research of a novel card-based toolset - the Challenge Game Frame (CGF) - that creates dialogical interaction through the roles of players, teachers, designers, and scientists for balancing domain- and game-goals. Using the provided board and card set for ideating, the groups created game-challenges addressing awareness in privacy decision-making. For guiding further development of the CGF toolset, we assessed the qualities of the game ideation activity by questionnaire on effectivity/applicability of the tools and interviewing groups while additionally analysing the resulting privacy decision game-concepts. Outcomes indicate that the affordance-based game frame helped students balancing domain and game-goals. Utilising the affordance-cards helped students ideating privacy decision games as the board aided structuring and visualising the balance of the game-concept. The students' envisioned game-concepts were interestingly favouring unofficial play over official play in classroom settings. Conclusively, game-challenges for raising privacy awareness are suggested to be played independently of strict educational context. Implicated design development of the CGF is finally outlined and should include settings where researchers and teachers are part of the dialogical interaction during applied game creation.