Playing is creating with PlayTIME: introducing and evaluating a tangible UI-based interactive scenario prototyping system
Date
2015-02-01
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Abstract
With traditional game prototyping activities, physical and digital game prototyping
tasks are commonly separate, often requiring iteration between the two and different
personnel to complete physical and digital tasks. In this thesis, we present PlayTIME:
a Tangible Interactive Media Environment for Game-Play, as a means to narrow the
gap between digital and non-digital game design techniques. The system is designed
to allow game designers to focus on physical prototyping while the computer digitalizes
real-world actions into a playable digital game. The current PlayTIME implementation
uses Tangible User Interfaces to facilitate specific functionalities in Unity,
a widely-used game engine. We hypothesized that using PlayTIME would improve
the game design experience for users. To test our hypotheses, we ran a user study
to evaluate the usability, creativity support and enjoyment of PlayTIME against the
usability, creativity support and enjoyment of Unity alone. We found that PlayTIME
had a significant effect on usability, but both qualitatively and quantitatively did not
show results better than Unity alone. We found that PlayTIME had an insignificant effect on creativity support. Finally, we found that users enjoyed PlayTIME
significantly more than Unity, citing that it is novel and makes design feel more like
play.
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Keywords
Tangible user interface, Game design, Game prototyping, Augmented reality, Interactive scenario