A Playful City in the cards: Sharing power in game design by extending the card metaphor

Abstract

To democratize the power of games for smart cities, we are refining Hive Mechanic, an open-source game engine for embedding play with text messages, city data streams, and the Internet of Things (IoT). City-specific games have the potential to affect social issues, including to address regional economics and health disparities that vary by zip code. However, collaboration in design is notoriously difficult - and programming skills are often lacking in urban planners, artists, and ordinary residents. Rather than propose a consumer app for mobile phones, this project investigates the potential of coordinating play from a neighborhood server. More importantly, the authoring tool seeks to democratize design by aligning the use of print and digital "cards"in the design process to express feedback loops and interactive sequences without requiring any traditional software coding experience. We argue that for game design in particular, paper prototyping is especially important - and that authoring tools can expand participation by embracing a "card metaphor"to extend the power of paper prototyping into online authoring tools. This work in progress is a nine-month case study of using Hive Mechanic, including for public art, crowd-sourced mapping, and a transmedia scavenger hunt.