Running Head : DISPENSABLE , TWEAKABLE , AND TANGIBLE COMPONENTS : SUPPORTING SOCIALLY

Our paper examines a flexible approach to designing general game components inspired by traditional game components. Our goal is to design digital game systems that offer the players greater choice in dictating the rules, pacing, and sociability of a game session – we describe this as supporting socially negotiated gameplay. We employ five design principles to meet this goal: dispensability, live-tweakability, tangibility, mobility, and value. Our work demonstrates this approach with the design of an augmented game system composed of playing cards instrumented with NFC chips and a mobile device with three digital game components: a Card Viewer, a Score Board, and a Turn Keeper. We report on initial user sessions and articulate two emerging challenges for supporting socially negotiated play: (a) solving the interaction costs to enable greater flexibility and (b) managing user expectations for the automatic part of a manualautomatic system. Keywords: Game Design, Game Components, Flexibility, Tangible Interfaces, Augmented Games, NFC DISPENSABLE, TWEAKABLE, AND TANGIBLE COMPONENTS: SUPPORTING SOCIALLY NEGOTIATED GAMEPLAY 2 Introduction Traditional game pieces like dominoes, playing cards, and dice have developed over centuries of design and acculturation to become enduring pillars for gameplay. Technological developments contribute to this evolution. The origin of playing cards is tied to the technological developments in the seventh century from scrolls to books. Wilkinson (1895) explains that scrolls were originally kept as records of dice games with images of the dice. When these became books with leaves, game symbols printed on leaves became game symbols printed on cards. Such general game components are different than toys in that there is a clear gameoriented purpose to them. They are different than specialized game components such as a puzzle piece in that these are generally useful for a large number of games and contexts. Today, Pagat.com's index records over 800 distinct card games. The breadth of this collection is a reflection of how games have developed around cards just as cards have been shaped to fit the games they are played with. This shows the success of playing cards as an engaging and enjoyable game medium. Also, the large variety of games demonstrates its versatility and its openness to appropriation. A large aspect of this openness is the support of socially negotiated play – the idea that players determine the rules and the pace of the game among themselves. This is a distinction about analog games that we have arrived at by comparison to digital games (see Related Work). The complexity and power that comes with current technological opportunities also includes a change in who determines the play, the pace, and the social experience of a game. Many of the technological augmentations for games come at a cost of players’ control of the game and the medium. As a result, the design of digital systems that support socially negotiated play remains underexplored. Our Vision Thus, we seek to investigate digital game components that act as simple and useful pieces for hundreds of games. We view this as a step in understanding and adding to a collection of well-established game elements such as playing cards, dice, or even simple pen and paper. In the same way that these popular game components can be appropriated for many games and by many people, we seek to extend this flexibility with technological capabilities. In particular, we want to explore the support of socially negotiated play. To accomplish this, we present our design investigation of digital components for traditional cards that offer new technological capabilities such as • helping track the game state, • providing information to players, and • offering augmented mechanics for play. We introduce five design principles for designing an open system: dispensability, livetweakability, tangibility, mobility, and value. These principles are explained in greater detail in the next section. DISPENSABLE, TWEAKABLE, AND TANGIBLE COMPONENTS: SUPPORTING SOCIALLY NEGOTIATED GAMEPLAY 3 Starting with a pack of playing cards, our system outfits each card with an NFC chip and uses a smartphone with an NFC-sensor to augment the gameplay experience. Figure 1: Our system set up with Turn Keeper and Card Viewers. Named Coardial (a play on the words “cordial” and “cards”), this hybrid physical-digital system offers three digital game components that support a digital connection between game components and the social connections among players. A Card Viewer component offers contextualized rules, explanations, hints, strategies, etc. that go beyond the instruction booklet often packaged with card games. A Turn Keeper scans cards as they are played to keep track of the game state and to direct the game experience with visual or audio effects and computed game logic. A Score Board records both the aggregated score of the game and the record of cards played. An example of Coardial can be seen in Figure 1 where participants are playing a game of Crazy 8s with a centrally-placed phone for the Turn Keeper and individual phones each running a Card Viewer and personal Score Board. Players can scan cards in their hands for information about the card. On their turn to play, they scan their card with the phone in the middle of the table. Driving Design Principles To realize our vision, we identified five principles to guide our design thinking more concretely. These are presented here both as a set of principles that have been useful to us and as an invitation for readers to consider their merits when taking a “flexible” approach to game system design. We have used these five concepts in developing each digital component with the objective of producing an ecosystem of playful game pieces. 1. Dispensability. Dispensability refers to the ecosystem’s capacity to leave out hardware or software components that players deem to be non-essential or antithetical to the game that they want to play. Such a component can be ‘unhooked’ from the ecosystem without rendering the system unplayable. This is similar to the systems concept of fault-tolerance and graceful degradation. It supports our vision of socially negotiated gameplay in that the choice of components is the player’s. Our system is primarily designed as a tool rather than as a game director. It is important that we convey our vision wherein these components are not meant to be intelligent first and foremost. They are more like the casino personnel who deals out cards in blackjack and nudges players; sometimes counseling on actions available. Intelligence and decision-making control 1 Near Field Communication is a specification for a very short-range version of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) that permits chips to read and write data only within very close proximity. For our devices, this is around 2 cm or less. DISPENSABLE, TWEAKABLE, AND TANGIBLE COMPONENTS: SUPPORTING SOCIALLY NEGOTIATED GAMEPLAY 4 rest in the players’ hand. Similar to the analog components of cards or dice, we envision the game experience to depend on the components only as much as the players want it to. The opposite value is ‘indispensability’ wherein every component is required. For example, an analog score sheet is a dispensable component in a game of cards. Yet, in most digital games, the scoring system is baked into the code and players are required to play according to predefined scoring rules. This is restrictive. For example, the card game, Bridge, has rules about how games should be scored and when a game is won or lost. If players want to play a few deals of Bridge regardless of whether or not a score is accrued or a game is considered ‘won’ or ‘lost’, the indispensability of a digital scorekeeping mechanism interferes with this desire. Instead, players need to fiddle with the computer’s notion of “starting” and “ending” a game to accommodate a casual, practice deal of Bridge. In this scenario, the indispensable scoring system is a burden. 2. Live-tweakability. Live-tweakability is the capacity to quickly and easily accept changes in the midst of play without having to wait until a game session is finished or even having to pause the game. If a component is affecting the game experience adversely (e.g. the game timer is too fast), players who can adjust it ‘in-vivo’ are afforded greater freedom to tailor the game experience to the needs of the moment. This principle is explored also by other digital game projects that see it as a way to translate the flexibility of the analog to the digital (e.g. (Frapolli, Brocco, Malatras, & Hirsbrunner, 2010) pursue this same ‘live’ configurability, but with an expectation that users are proficient at programming in a Lisp-like language). 3. Tangibility. A tangible interface refers to systems that emphasize physicality as an interaction technique. Kirk et al. (Kirk, Sellen, Taylor, Villar, & Izadi, 2009) define tangible interfaces as when “everyday physical objects are used to control and sometimes display digital information”. Similar to the vision of pervasive gaming (Magerkurth, Cheok, Mandryk, & Nilsen, 2005), our desire is to take advantage of the bigger physical space afforded by playing cards and the user interface benefits of a tangible interface. For us, these benefits are the semantic meaning and physical affordances that accompany traditional playing cards. These benefits allow us to build on the strengths of existing game components that are ready to appropriate. 4. Mobility. Mobility supports the idea of “play anywhere”. We envision solutions that do not tether you to a location or to features that are not always available, such as internet access, a stationary computing device, or another large display. Projection interfaces such as SideBySide’s handheld camera/projector gun (Willis, Poupyrev, Hudson, & Mahler, 2011) and portable tabletops such as Bonfire (Kane et al., 2009) or PlayAnywhere (Wilson, 2005) employ picoprojectors to untether users from stationary surface computing displays and allow novel, augmented interactions almost anywhere. Our system is designed with a similar ethic, allowing users to use mobile devices and pico-projectors wherever they are. 5. Value. Our system is meant to augment the game experience. Potential augmentations include multimedia embellishments, ‘introductory courses’ to teach a game, trainers to improve skill, tracking statistics or replays, or networking functionality. While this principle does not directly address the idea of social-negotiation, it recognizes the value that the technological augmentations bring to a scenario. We have found this to be important to keep in the forefront of the design process as we explore novel interaction methods and these hybrid systems. Guided by these principles, we designed Coardial, a flexible system that allows a mobile device, such as a cell phone, to offer digital components to accompany and augment card games. DISPENSABLE, TWEAKABLE, AND TANGIBLE COMPONENTS: SUPPORTING SOCIALLY NEGOTIATED GAMEPLAY 5 Related Work We drew on surrounding literature to inform and situate our work. Understanding the tradeoffs from analog to digital Traditional playing cards excel at supporting an enjoyable mix of competition and sociability (as a widely representative survey of card-players (Crespi, 1956) suggests). Our concern is to be deliberate about the impact of introducing digital components. Just as the replacement of dominoes with playing cards changes the dynamic of gameplay (at a minimum, it made the experience more portable and convenient), we want to anticipate the effects of digital augmentation on traditional play experiences – and decide which we want. Researchers from the University of Waterloo and Queen’s explore the effects of automation in tabletop gaming by translating two board games, Checkers and Pandemic (Z-man Games), into low-automated and fully-automated tabletop-computing applications ((Pape, 2012; Wallace et al., 2012)). While players report liking the automatic placement of game tokens, the evaluations surfaced the following insights: • Automation changes the flow, sometimes resulting in missed actions, confusion, extended pauses and missed opportunities for social interaction. • Automation prohibits the development of house rules. • Automation prohibits allowances made to novice or less capable players in more social settings. • Flexibility of the physical or low automation interfaces enables participants to make sense of the current game state and to make appropriate decisions. These observations are echoed in other research about online game pace and sociability (Losh, 2008; McEwan, Gutwin, Mandryk, & Nacke, 2012; Wohn, Lee, Sung, & Bjornrud, 2010): Automated games can move too quickly for players to follow. Sociability, when mediated by the software, is heavily influenced by the digital medium instead of being shaped by the players themselves. In response to these themes, we want to maintain access to the non-automated, manual nature of traditional game components in how they allow the players to negotiate the play, pace, and social elements in a game (Xu, Barba, Radu, Gandy, & Macintyre, 2011). “Flexible” game systems design We take a “flexible” approach to game design that has not been explored very deeply in the literature on game system design. Some commercial games are being designed to allow social negotiation of rules, pace, and sociability: J.S. JOUST and B.U.T.T.O.N. as digitallyenhanced “folk games” are notable examples (McElroy, 2012). A few studies have been conducted of socially negotiated games played over digital platforms. A pilot study of a rule-free tabletop and handheld card game system for UNO has collected responses from participants showing that they considered missing rule constraints and the possibility to cheat as positive aspects of their experience (Lobunets & Prinz, 2011). The analog to digital comparative study in the prior section (Pape, 2012; Wallace et al., 2012) studied low-automated versions of Checkers and Pandemic. A study of invented custom games of Halo 2 (Cheung & Huang, 2012), an online multi-player computer game, shows that players develop ‘honor rules’ to enforce new games that are socially sanctioned. Players rely on the software’s record of player actions to keep others accountable to otherwise digitally unenforceable rules (such as disallowing gunfire in a certain area). The importance of information, accountability and the experiences of play as performance DISPENSABLE, TWEAKABLE, AND TANGIBLE COMPONENTS: SUPPORTING SOCIALLY NEGOTIATED GAMEPLAY 6 are shown to be key findings in these studies – contributing to these findings will be our contribution in this project. Related augmented card game systems Projects that use RFID-enabled cards coupled with digital readers and systems are a technological precedent for our project (Floerkemeier & Mattern, 2006; Müller, Evequoz, & Lalanne, 2006; Römer & Domnitcheva, 2002). These projects bear similarity among each other in their goals to preserve the social enjoyment of card games, to provide augmentations for novice players and to handle tedious tasks like scorekeeping. Floerkemeier and Mattern (Floerkemeier & Mattern, 2006) built an RFID-instrumented table whose function is to track the entire game. Their users used mobile phones to interface with the digital system and played with real cards with RFID. After an evaluation, their participants asked for audio output to relieve the burden of looking at the mobile phones as much during play. They asked for more variants of the games offered – the players had a favorite rule set that was not supported. In their report, the authors speculate that a simple way for players to program rules or download new rules would help solve this problem. Römer and Domnitcheva (Römer & Domnitcheva, 2002) present a similar RFID physical-digital hybrid for the game, Whist. An RFID scanner in the middle of a table is accompanied by a public shared display and the individual's private PDA display (Personal Digital Assistant). Scoring and information about legal moves is provided to the players. Initial user demonstrations showed that players used the “cheating alarm” to learn how to play. Furthermore, “Players did not like to be forced by the system to play the game in a way they are not used to. For example, forcing the players to take off the cards from the table before dealing out the next round of cards already is an annoyance to some people.” Additions of digital components to physical games are not new. For example, Hasbro's MONOPOLY Electronic Banking game that introduced a new banking card system consisting of elecronic bank unit and bank cards. This unit tracks players' cash electronically, help pay bills, collect gifts and debts from opponents, and adds an educational component to teach players about responsible money management. Overall, this and the RFID systems are different than ours because of their single-game, monolithic approach and their inflexibility. These systems dictate the game’s rules and the pace. Our approach is to find a balance between digitaland social-mediation. Our expansion beyond these projects will be to further explore tangible interactions, end-user appropriation, and the idea of general gaming components. Scenario: Crazy 8s and Pirates! The following scenario is to be read as an introduction to how Coardial can support socially negotiated play via the interaction possibilities with an instrumented card deck. We first describe Crazy 8s, an existing card game, to establish an understanding of the interaction techniques. Pirates! is our own variation of Crazy 8s designed to take advantage of computing functionality and to make the gaming components be core elements of the game experience. Everything described has been implemented excepting the social networking functionality. DISPENSABLE, TWEAKABLE, AND TANGIBLE COMPONENTS: SUPPORTING SOCIALLY NEGOTIATED GAMEPLAY 7 Crazy 8s Players start with 7 cards each and try to discard a card on their turn to ultimately get rid of all their cards. They can only discard a card over the top card of the center pile if the cards having matching suits or numbers (e.g. A six of hearts must be discarded on top of another six or another heart). If the player can’t play, a card is drawn instead. Specialty cards include the 8 that acts as a wild, the Queen skips the next player, the 2 requires the next player to draw 2 cards, and the Ace reverses the turn order. Pirates! We designed Pirates! as a variant of Crazy 8s to take advantage of the computational capability of the phone. In Pirates!, players discard cards like Crazy 8s, but are also challenged to guess the digits of π. The device keeps track of the current index of π to be guessed and, on occasion, players must guess the next digit correctly or be penalized. The special cards from Crazy 8s are replaced by a King, Queen, and Jack. The King represents a Pirate King, a wild card that forces the next player to guess the next digit of π. The Queen can be played instantly to avoid guessing and reverses the turn order. The Jack moves the guessing index back a random amount and skips the next player. The player can ask the mobile device for hints (“The next digit is not an 8.”). After a guess, the index for π advances forward. The computer augmentations of Pirates! are helpful for keeping track of the current guessing index, for offering hints, and for generating a random number for the Jack. Setup to Gameplay Tim and Julie sit down to play. This is part of their weekly series of card games. According to the scoreboard on Facebook, Tim is 45 points behind. Tim jokes, claiming that it is time for him to close the gap. They take out two phones and a deck of NFC-enabled playing cards. Tim scans his player card to register his player token and Julie does the same. Tim takes a card from the deck and taps his phone to the card. The phone’s NFC sensor reads the card’s unique identifier. The phone chirps in acknowledgement, looks up the card in its database, and loads the entire 52 card deck into active memory. It asks Tim what game he is playing. Is it Poker? Hearts? Depending on Tim’s answer, the software will load a set of rules and reconfigure the interface for playing that game. On the touchscreen, Tim selects Crazy 8s. The system assigns point values and informational text to each card. The eight is worth 50 points; face cards, 10; and, every other card is worth its numeric value. The device’s Card Viewer (Figure 2) is a digital component that can display the point-value and instructions for any scanned card, keep a collection of lastscanned cards, or transfer the current score to a personal scoreboard. This game data is minimal. Beyond the point-value and informational text, no other data is encoded, not even rules. In addition, the Turn Keeper component is activated for Crazy 8s (Figure 3) and some basic rules about turn-order; Reverses, and Skips are enabled. These offer a sufficient set of computational features for facilitating a socially negotiated game experience but are designed not to tread on the players’ authority over the system. Thus the intelligence of the system is not the foremost quality, but rather, it is the role of the system as a support component. DISPENSABLE, TWEAKABLE, AND TANGIBLE COMPONENTS: SUPPORTING SOCIALLY NEGOTIATED GAMEPLAY 8 Playing Crazy 8s The game begins. As each card is played, it is scanned into the system. The mobile phone announces the card played and whose turn it is. When Tim can’t play a card, he swipes the Turn Keeper to pass on his turn. To Tim’s disappointment, Julie slams down her last two cards: a Queen and an eight, which, as a ‘Skip’ and a ‘Wild’, guarantee that she ends the game. She does not bother scanning the cards, dispenses with the formality, and simply announces “Game over!” Reluctantly, Tim switches to the Card Viewer component, scans his remaining cards, groans aloud when the total comes up, and uploads the score online. With his seven, Ace, and eight, he is now down by an additional 58 points. Julie grins. Playing Pirates! Hoping for redemption, Tim unloads the game data and loads the Pirates! rules. A new set of point values populates the database for the generic Card Viewer. The Turn Keeper (Figure 4) is revised to include a specialized guessing interface for keeping track of which digit of π is to be guessed, to ask for hints, and to check a guess. The game proceeds until Tim plays a King. The phone gleefully challenges Julie with its electronic voice, “The Pirate King tests Julie!” Julie wonders, What was the 6th digit of pi, again? I know it’s high... She presses the green button for her hint, “The next digit is not a 0.” Julie groans. She guesses, “7?” and presses the yellow button to check. “Pi at position 6 is the number: 9.” She’s wrong! According to the rules, she must draw 9 cards. Tim cheers! Things are looking better for him in this game. In a gesture of magnanimity, he offers to let Julie draw one less card. Although this isn’t an official rule, the system is flexible enough to allow this deviance. Instead of the computer dictating this rule, it is up to Julie to accept the offer or not. However, she laughs him off and the game progresses. In these scenarios, the software does not have a full representation of the game rules for Crazy 8s or Pirates! It refrains from checking legal moves or confirming that players drew cards. The physical configuration of devices is up to the players. If Tim and Julie had more devices, they could decide to use them all — one central Turn Keeper and personal Card Viewers, or choose a subset (Dispensibile, Tangible, Mobile). The software configuration is similarly undefined. Tim can track his score with the Card Viewer application or play a game without keeping score at all. Opportunities for tweaking the rules abound (Live-tweaking).