Identifying Game Mechanics for Integrating Fabrication Activities within Existing Digital Games

Identifying Game Mechanics for Integrating Fabrication Activities within Existing Digital Games

Identifying Game Mechanics for Integrating Fabrication Activities within Existing Digital Games

By Dishita G Turakhia, Stefanie Mueller and Kayla DesPortes

Abstract

“Integrating fabrication activities into existing video games provides opportunities for players to construct objects from their gameplay and bring the digital content into the physical world. In our prior work, we outlined a framework and developed a toolkit for integrating fabrication activities within existing digital games. Insights from our prior study highlighted the challenge of aligning fabrication mechanics with the existing game mechanics in order to strengthen the player aesthetics. In this paper, we address this challenge and build on our prior work by adding fabrication components to the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework. We use this f-MDA framework to analyze the 47 fabrication events from the prior study. We list the new player-object aesthetics that emerge from integrating the existing game mechanics with fabrication mechanics. We identify connections between these emergent player-object aesthetics and the existing game mechanics. We discuss how designers can use this mapping to identify potential game mechanics for integrating with fabrication activities.”

Reference

Turakhia, D. G., Mueller, S., &; Des Portes, K. (2022). Identifying game mechanics for integrating fabrication activities within existing Digital Games. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3491102.3517721 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3491102.3517721

Keywords

Games, game mechanics, fabrication games, game design framework, physical fabrication, research