Playing is creating with PlayTIME: introducing and evaluating a tangible UI-based interactive scenario prototyping system

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.