top of page
A boardgame design for karaoke activities
Karaoke Boardgame
Type
Interaction Design
Game Design
Individual Project
Time
01/2023
Location
Delft, Nederland
Overview
This project was done in the course of Exploring Interaction. The design goal is to help bad singers feel engaged and pleasant at Karaoke social activities in a playful way.
Introduction
Singing together in Karaoke is a significant part of the socializing activities upon entry of a new social group, especially in some Asian countries.
However, usually only those who are good at singing will occupy the microphone, while others just sit around feeling embarrased.
Thus, I want to break the embarrassing imbalance between the two types of people?
THus
How might we help bad singers feel engaged and pleasant at Karaoke social activities in a playful way.
Final Work
Cycle1 | Ideation
Research Process
Cycle1 | Ideation
In order to gain deeper insights of the context and seek for design directions to fulfill my design goal, I went through four steps of research process:
Main Insights
After gathering all the insights from former research process, I analyzed the logic inside them and got these main insights:
Design Directions
In summary, I came up with two main design directions along with the different aspects of design goal according to the directions as a guidance of my later work.
Interaction Vision
One of the core game system in Mario Cart is about the balance of items that players get. Those who takes the lead would just get some almost useless items such as coins , while those falling behind will get the chance to explore all kinds of cool items either to speed up, disturb other players or even become unrivaled for a period of time. This breaks down the tradition that only the good players would feel the fun of the game, which allows every participants to get pleasure from different aspects: play well or play fun.
This corresponds with the characters I wanna convey through my design: to get equal pleasure, balanced social gains and total comfort whether you are a good singer or not.
Cycle2 | Iteration
In Cycle2 I followed the following flow: firstly, I broke down Interaction Vision into four properties, explored the affordances of each property, tried to implement them in the form of prototyping, tested them for insights, and finally came up with a concept that summed up all the properties to implement Interaction Vision.
Cycle2 | Iteration
Properties of IV
From the analysis of how Mario Kart achieves the effect of letting bad players "play fun", I came up with four properties I wanted to explore through prototyping. I took the aspects of design goal gained from Cycle 1 as the main criteria to see how the prototype worked and what required improvement.
Prototyping & Testing
_00.png)
_01.png)
THus
My concept is a Karaoke boardgame that turn the core part of Karaoke from just singing into playing. Participants play different roles, collaborate with each other to finish funny singing tasks, experience adventure throughout the magical map to gain the treasure.
Cycle3 | Demonstration
Using the Prototype Gamification from Cycle2 as a base and adding the other three properties to it, I carried out three rounds of iterations to achieve the final experiential prototype.
Cycle3 | Demonstration
Prototype2.0
Prototype3.0
Final prototyping process
In final prototype type, stroytelling of the characters were did in comics to make t more vivid and appealing. An adventure guide was added. The distribution of tasks were redesigned. Most of the energy was put into the game art design. Firstly, I decided on the vibe key words according to the insights gained before and looked into some inspirations:
Then, I started to do my own game art design with procreate and indesign:
Final prototype
Evaluation
During the evaluation process, I tested three groups of users. My test criteria are derived from the two effects of the design goal and the five qualities of Interaction Vision.In addition, I also evaluated the long term effect and impact on the experience of non-target participants.
Among all of the participants, 7 of them are my target users as bad singers who used to be afraid of Karaoke. After the testing I gave them questionaires to fill, to see how they feel about the effects of design goal and qualities of interaction vision. The results can be seen as follows:
Effects of Design Goal
For the two Effects of the Design Goal, Karaoke Adventure has completed the Design Goal very well.
The target users overall believe that the product has eliminated the sense of isolation they once felt in Karaoke, bringing them together with other participants to play together around a board game.
At the same time, the product has brought them something they have never experienced before. The sense of pleasure made them feel the fun of Karaoke activities.
Qualities of Interaction Vision
Of all the qualities, the best accomplished was Bantering, where users felt a moderate sense of banter during the game, joking freely without feeling offended.
Communicative, Attractive and Comforting were also well done, with many participants saying they thought Karaoke Adventure was cool and had the intention of sharing their experience with their friends.
Playful received lower scores, and there was a wide variation between the groups, with participants who usually enjoy board games or video games rating the gameplay of the product lower. However, almost all participants agreed that the product had fulfilled its mission as an Interaction Media that accomplished its Design Goal in terms of playfulness.
As a result, Karaoke Adventure fulfils the requirements of the Interaction Vision in general, creating a fun, balanced and comfortable experience for users.
Long Term Effects
It was really pleasant to see that Karaoke Adventure did bring positive long term effect to the users by letting them feel the pleasure of Karaoke and be more confident with their singing. Two of them even came more than once to my testing because they found it really fun. I did an interview with one of those two users to see how he felt about the long term effects. Glad that it did help bad singers feel better about themselves.
Experiences of Other Participants
In order to investigate the Side Effects of the product beyond the Design Goal, i.e. the experience of non-target participants, and also to ensure that good singers were equally happy with Karaoke Adventure as participants in the Karaoke event, I conducted interviews with 11 non-target participants from three groups to gather their views on Karaoke Adventure.
For those who love karaoke themselves, or have no resistance to it, the pleasure they get from Karaoke Adventure doesn't seem particularly strong by comparison. However, they also showed a positive opinion of its entertainment and fun, and particularly praised its driving social role.
In addition, they mentioned many points that the target audience had not noticed, such as how well the game prevents the mike hogging the microphone. This is a point they feel is very good.
All in all, Karaoke Adventure is creating brand new fun for the target users and also giving the non-target participants a fun experience as well.
Between-Group Differences
Interestingly there were also clear differences between the groups in the three tests: the atmosphere in the first and third tests was very hot and almost all participants were high, staying on to chat and sing and play late into the night after the two-and-a-half-hour-long game. In contrast, the participants in the second game were clearly a bit more restrained, the entertainment effect of the task was not as strong and they left after the test.
This means that the extent to which Karaoke Adventure can be effective also has a lot to do with the personality of the event participants: at least three or four participants in the first and third sessions were very outgoing. They were very good at heating up the atmosphere, and the entertainment nature of the game was maximised by them. In the second game, the majority of participants were very reserved, and in the questionnaires and interviews they also expressed that they were "embarrassed" by some of the game contents.
Karaoke Awkwardness
to Social Awkwardness
In a way, the game transforms the imbalance between good singers and bad singers in Karaoke events into an imbalance between extroverts and introverts.
However, in the new context created by the game, when enough extroverts are present, they are able to drive the mood of the introverts to break this imbalance and get everyone high. This is different from the current situation because although some good singers do try to accommodate the bad singers, they still lack something like Karaoke Adventure as a medium to really make this happen.
As for the particular situation where there are too many introverts at an event to move the atmosphere to enhance the entertainment, I will try to address that in a future iteration.
NEXT
bottom of page