Spring Quarter, 2018
Prototype V2
OUR
A BETTER ATTEMPT
more players, more fun
In Prototype V2, this version was tested to the entire class instead of a small section of students in hopes of being more creative and fun. Based on their location in the lecture hall, students were assigned into colocated groups to simulate a movie theater or a large audience as the game would be played in a real setting.​ Once students were broken into groups, people were given the chance to collaborate with their team to recreate a certain type of image. Each group was given a category, and as a team they got to choose what image within that category they wanted to create.
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After completion, students are able to see all the different items all the groups have made in one single page. To maintain player engagement, we planned to created and read a Mad Libs story starring all of the pictures created by all the different groups, but we didn't have time to do this in our prototyping section.
BEFORE
EVALUATION SESSION
and what we learned
We received feedback from Patty, our TA, about cleaning up the instructions a bit more to make sure they're crystal clear. She also mentioned that the method of dividing people up should also be improved upon to help promote more interactions amongst the players, and to make the game play as smooth as possible.
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"I think the method of dividing people up could be iterated more"​
As we observed the users begin playing in this much larger setting, we noticed that some groups had less members than other groups. This is because we divided up our groups based on seating areas, not accounting for whether or not the seats were actually full. This resulted in groups with less players not being able to finish all of the images they were assigned, whereas the larger groups had no problems. The tinyURLs did improve the flow of people navigating to our prototype, and we experienced far fewer problems than our initial prototypes. In class, we set 5 minutes for the prototype, but when we actually played the game we did not need this full time and adjusted on the fly. We noticed that people sitting next to each other interacted with one another if they already knew each other prior to this game, but were more reluctant to talk to their neighbors if they were strangers. When we evaluated the feedback form results, we noticed that there was a lot of confusion in the beginning regarding how to come to a consensus regarding which object to draw. There was also some confusion with the instructions that everyone would be working on a different image based on their group.
" Make it more clear that everyone will be working on a different image based on what area of the room you're in"​
Some people reported it taking a while to completely understand the gameplay, but once they got the hang of it they really enjoyed it. A lot more people reported talking amongst their group than in previous prototypes. Overall, we got very positive responses in regards to this prototype, and people really loved seeing all of the final drawings at the end!
" Creativity in a short burst. Very clever and approachable"​
KEY INSIGHTS
and our future improvements
After our evaluation sessions, we found that people really enjoyed the creative nature of our game. Although we did not have time to implement the MadLibs storyline in this prototyping session, when we mentioned that that was a future plan we seemed to get positive feedback. In the future, we will implement this idea so users can see their story line once they have completed the drawings. In future iterations, this game will be played on an app, which allows for functionalities that would improve the experience. It would simplify the group formation process, as users could enter their seat number (or if the app is connected through the movie theater it could already know), and be split into appropriately sized groups based on the people around you and the total number of people in the theater. This way we could assign smaller groups smaller amounts of pixels so that everyone has adequate time to complete their portion. We also plan to implement a voting function to help groups choose what object to draw. Before starting the drawing portion, each team would see their category and can write in options for what they would like to draw. The group can then cast votes for each idea, and the winning idea will move forward as the image the team will be tasked with drawing.
