Designing a Game for Playful Communication within Families

Abstract

This article presents the game Junomi, a game designed to give families and teenagers opportunities to play with the way they communicate and also experience closeness and togetherness. Taking a research based approach and getting a detailed understanding of the situation to design for facilitated an investigation that helped seeing potentials for playful moments and spaces in the situation, as well as how the different elements and aspects of the situation could be made playable. Everyday communication is considered complex, heterogeneous and indefinable and the game does not, which models or simulate the complexity of the situation, but to create a frame that invites, suggests, reminds and encourage for a playful mind in the everyday and thereby gives possibilities for the families to, through play, explore and experiments with ways of communicating and ways of being together. The experience of the game depends largely on how the players choose to engage with the game.