Description
When designing a digital interactive for a social learning space, one immediate indicator of of success is the buzz: whether or not visitors are talking about it! Get to know the best practices for building memorable multiplayer games that encourage conversation, cooperation, and social learning in the gallery. You will learn how to break away from “touchscreen tunnel-vision” to envision shareable interfaces and social interactions that are as fun as they are educational. Attendees are invited to bring their own ideas to adapt to this fun, playful framework!
Join Valentina Miller and Michael Lapides in a workshop that dives into serious game design patterns and creative content development. Valentina is the Production Lead of Night Kitchen Interactive and has taught classes in game design and digital media production at Drexel University for over six years. Michael is the Director of Digital Engagement at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, where he leads a team that focuses on on exhibitions, digitization, digital archive management and audience engagement.
Night Kitchen and the New Bedford Whaling Museum collaborated on “Voyage Around the World,” a 1-to-4-player serious game that puts visitors in charge of managing a 19th-century Yankee Whaleship. Players can work together—or compete—to meet the crew, see the world, complete jobs on deck, and survive environmental hazards like gale-force winds and icy waters. The choice is theirs, and no two player experiences look exactly the same! Valentina and Michael will share their thoughts about selecting a platform that supports both single-player and multi-player engagement, breaking down complex learning objectives, and balancing a high volume of content with the target dwell time.
This project underwent a rigorous prototyping and testing process which will be shared as a model with workshop attendees. We will showcase photos, videos, and data collected from playtesting that capture authentic visitor reactions and conversations. We will cover how to design a “flow state” that supports play and knowledge retention, strategies for embracing the creative chaos of emergent gameplay, and integrating gallery artifacts into a gamified reward system. The project team will share their processes for conceptual development, early-stage flowcharting, paper prototyping, and facilitating a beta test with visitors in different age brackets.
The workshop will close with an interactive brainstorming session. Develop your own ideas with our “interactive writers room” to apply serious game design patterns, think deeply about tactile game mechanics, and get a sense of how your own content outline might take shape. This promises to be a dynamic, lively session where attendees are encouraged to share, converse, and think outside of the box!