Hi everyone!
My name is Irene.
I'm here today to present our work:
Tabletop Games in the Age of Remote Collaboration:
Design Opportunities for
a Socially Connected Gaming Experience.
In early 2020, the coronavirus disease spread rapidly
and caused a global pandemic
to prevent further spread of the virus.
Countries worldwide impose social distancing rules
to limit in-person gatherings.
Tabletop gaming activities such as boardgame night,
which is a common social practice among family
and friends, is also affected.
So how did people manage
to move their offline tabletop gaming sessions
online, to stay connected with
their friends and families during the quarantine time?
And what is the impact of
technology usage on their game and social experiences?
To answer our research questions
we took a qualitative approach.
We started with observing
people in tabletop game related
online communities, to learn how people
adapt their offline practice to play online.
We also conducted interviews with
people who frequently played
tabletop games remotely with
their friends and families
during the quarantine time,
to understand the considerations behind their practice.
Our data reveal three categories of themes,
that describe people's social
and game experiences,
when moving to remote tabletop gaming setup.
In this presentation, I'm going to talk about two of
these insights and the design
opportunities these insights revealed.
When moving to remote
tabletop gaming setups,
we found people often attempting to preserve
the physical setup with
a hybrid approach for sharing the game space
People chose a hybrid setup
because they wanted to utilize
their physical copies of
the games or wanted to continue the game sessions
they started before the quarantine time.
In the hybrid setup,
we found people often utilize
a diverse range of physical components:
from sharing the entire game board and assets,
to share some smaller physical game pieces.
For example, in the mirrored setup,
each player will have their own physical board
set up and shared. During the game,
they will manipulate their board based on
other players' actions as well as their own actions.
Another common hybrid setup is
that one player who's often
referred as the gamemaster, will set up
a physical board and then share with other players,
often using a phone camera
mounted on a stand to capture the entire board.
The player with the physical board is also in charge
of manipulating the board as
other players verbally communicate their actions.
However, in such setup, many tasks,
such as keeping track of
different people's actions, the state of the board,
and game rules, become
more of the gamemaster’s responsibility
rather than shared responsibility among players.
As one of our participants commented,
setting up and running
everything on himself can be overwhelming and
make him feel like work
rather than an enjoyable game experience.
When people play tabletop games
remotely and interact with other people online,
their attention and their engagement also change.
As one participant commented, when playing online,
it is more difficult to find things
for his attention to grab onto.
And people will mostly just talking back and forth.
So he would easily lose engagement with the game session.
Besides, people tend to be more
impatient, compared to playing offline,
as they are more conscious with time,
which makes the game sessions get boring
easily when the perceived waiting time feels too long.
To adapt to such changes,
some community members suggested simplifying the game rules
so the game becomes easier to
win, to keep the game engaging
when moving from offline to online play.
Our findings on how people adapt
their offline practice to
remote play also highlights
opportunities for technologies to better
support people's remote game and social experiences.
As physicality and materiality play
an important role in people's tabletop game experience,
We think there are opportunities in connecting
shared tabletop game space and
supporting connected tangible game pieces
for a better game experience.
And to consider for people's
changed attention and engagement
from offline to online play,
tabletop game platforms should also allow
customization for better social experience
with family and friends,
rather than focus on enforcing
game rules for remote game sessions.
You can read more about our other findings
and our discussions in our paper.
Thank you for watching our presentation.