Social Play Spaces for Active Community Engagement

📝 Abstract

This paper puts forward the perspective that social play spaces are opportunities to utilise both technology and body for the benefit of community culture and engagement. Co-located social gaming coupled with tangible interfaces offer active participant engagement and the development of the local video game scene. This paper includes a descriptive account of Rabble Room Arcade, an experimental social event combining custom-built physical interface devices and multiplayer video games.

💡 Analysis

This paper puts forward the perspective that social play spaces are opportunities to utilise both technology and body for the benefit of community culture and engagement. Co-located social gaming coupled with tangible interfaces offer active participant engagement and the development of the local video game scene. This paper includes a descriptive account of Rabble Room Arcade, an experimental social event combining custom-built physical interface devices and multiplayer video games.

📄 Content

Citation: Gavin, J., Kenobi, B. & Connor, A.M. (2014) Social Play Spaces for Active Community Engagement. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Interactive Entertainment. DOI: 10.1145/2677758.2677789 Social Play Spaces for Active Community Engagement Jenna Gavin Auckland University of Technology Private Bag 92006 Wellesley Street, Auckland, NZ. +64 (0)9 921 9999 jengav14@aut.ac.nz Ben Kenobi Auckland University of Technology Private Bag 92006 Wellesley Street, Auckland, NZ. +64 (0)9 921 9999 ben.kenobi@aut.ac.nz Andy M. Connor Auckland University of Technology Private Bag 92006 Wellesley Street, Auckland, NZ. +64 (0)9 921 9999 andrew.connor@aut.ac.nz

ABSTRACT This paper puts forward the perspective that social play spaces are opportunities to utilise both technology and body for the benefit of community culture and engagement. Co-located social gaming coupled with tangible interfaces offer active participant engagement and the development of the local video game scene. This paper includes a descriptive account of Rabble Room Arcade, an experimental social event combining custom-built physical interface devices and multiplayer video games.
Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Input devices and strategies General Terms Documentation, Design, Experimentation. Keywords Tangible interfaces, gaming, social play, game controllers.

1. INTRODUCTION The video game industry has continued to grow dramatically over the past decade, cutting into mainstream media in participation and revenues as it becomes part of mainstream media culture [1]. Whilst gaming is sometimes (and naïvely) viewed by the public as an isolating activity, it is surprisingly social [2]. However, that social element is often related to collocated gameplay [2] rather than true social play. Social play is often characterised by play in pre-school children but this begs the question of why such play is not actively encouraged in older children, adolescents and adults? This paper outlines the design of a social play event that is based around challenging common perceptions related to video games and taking the concepts of gaming from collocated console play to one of physical, cooperative social play.
2. BACKGROUND & RELATED WORK 2.1 The Nature of Video Game Play
   Video games have become immensely popular since popularised by the emergence of Pong in 1972. In today’s society, video games are not just played on computers and game consoles but also handheld devices and cell phones. Because of the ubiquitous nature of these devices, games are no longer just played at home and at arcades, but are also played at work, at school, on public transport, and virtually anywhere that an electronic device can be operated. The amount of time spent playing games has increased over time [3] and it is considered normal that children and adolescents play more than 20 hours each week with 40 hours of gaming not being uncommon among young males [4], with it being observed that so called “pathological gamers” spent twice as much time playing as nonpathological gamers and received poorer grades in school as well as exhibiting attention problems [5]. The almost obsessional growth in gaming has driven considerable research which has examined potential positive and negative effects of playing various types of video games. Much of this work has focused on the detrimental effects of playing violent games [6] or further exploring the negative association between time spent playing games and school performance [7]. However, gaming does present a particular dilemma as there is much research that emphasises the positive value associated with educational games [8], that games do have the potential to increase prosocial behaviour [9, 10] and that exercise games are an attractive form of physical activity [11, 12]. It seems that the impact of gaming depends on the game, the nature of play and the play environment. 2.2 The History of Video Gaming The history of video gaming has been described in detail by many authors [13] so will not be considered in detail in this paper. However, reflection on the rise and fall of the industry provides insights in to the nature of play. Williams argues that the early 1980s were a crucial turning point in the social history of video game play that saw an erosion of what began as an open and free space for cultural and social mixing [14]. The history of video gaming can be summarised as slow adoption during the 1970s leading to a massive spike in popularity during the Atari heyday of the early 1980s, followed by the collapse of that company and the industry’s eventual revival in the late 1980s by Nintendo.
   The arcade establishment was the primary medium for the video game experience during the 1970’s and 1980’s, the golden age of arcade video games [15]. Despite the attention mandated by the video game screen, early arcade games wer

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