The Deck of Characters
game app
The Deck of Characters
Background
A card game for humanity.
What is The Deck of Characters (DOC)?
The DOC functions like a traditional oracle where you ask a question and use the system to guide you to the answer. But its disarmingly straightforward and humorous universe of Characters, Tools, and Places keeps the game exceptionally fresh, empowering, and contagious. It is wonderfully of the 21st century.
How to play The DOC?
You can play The DOC alone or with friends.
You can play with the deck separated into its three categories: Characters, Tools, and Places.
Ask a question.
Shuffle through the deck and select cards as you see fit.
Flip the selected cards over. Look at them. Think about them. Write about them. Talk about them with friends. If you ever get stuck on a meaning behind a card, check out suggestions at an online library.
Our goal – Transform the Deck of Character game from physical to digital world.
Time: Jul 2020—Ongoing
Team: Peiyu Zhou, Patrick Lin (Mentor), Hannah Wnorowski (Game creator),
My Role: UX research and app design
research
Face to face
This game is initially designed for people to play face to face. There technically are no rules, no winner. The DOC is simply about connecting with yourself and those around you.
research
Play via text message
I, act like a dealer, played The DOC via text message over 30 times with friends and strangers from all over the world. Here are some insights:
Pros
Players can always scroll back to read the game rule, and comments from other players
Save the meaningful comment and continue the conversation after the game.
Cons
Selecting cards can be challenging when playing it via text message, especially when other player doesn't have the physical cards. Players need to type specific instruction, for example: 7th card from the left; or the middle one; or the one next to your finger tip.
Taking and sending photos take much time
Taking long time to text and response
research
Play via video chat
Communication via video chat is a lot easier. but still has its pros and cons
Pros
More engaging by seeing players’ facial expression and hear their voice.
Instant feedback
Cons
Selecting cards can still be challenging, but much easier than text message. Players can see exact what I see from the back of the camera.
Players constantly ask about the game rule, the meaning of the illustration, and which cards they selected.
No history to recall.
prototype
Mobile + Text Message
In order to have a better understanding of the gaming process, We divided it into two parts – to start a game and the play the game
Start a game
Set up a room and invite friends to join.
Play
Player can ask a question, and system shuffle the card. Player pick cards from three decks from the screen. Other players can see the selected cards and comment their thoughts. Player can tap “Pass the bucket” to end the game.
validation
Feedbacks from the creator
When I finished the prototype, I felt the best way to do the testing is to go to the original game creator, the mother of The DOC, who understand the game the most. Then I reached out to the game creator — Hannah Wnorowski, she also wants to bring The DOC online. So we had a zoom meeting. Here are some of her feedback
How might we bring a face-to-face interaction into the online experience, to make the online game more human—
Human should shuffle and pick cards, not machine. Human is an important role in this process, and the feeling of a human shuffle cards is different than the machine.
Seeing people’s face and their expression, hearing their voice are essential.
Help players to connect with each other
Sketches
As we learned from Hannahs's feedback, we realized video chat – which is players can see each other's face" plays an essential role in The DOC. So we changed the platform from phone to tablet.
prototype iteration
Tablet + Video
Start a game
Play
Human shuffle and picks cards are an essential part the game.
additional features
Collect beautiful story
To make this game more humanity, we decided to preserve the feature on our phone which is took a screenshot of the cards.
However, for better gaming experience for the players to save the meaningful comment and continue the conversation after the game, we decided to add a “pin” button on the screen to finish the role as screenshot.
ongoing project
The Deck of Characters App
Playing the game
We designed three ways to allow players to join the room and play, create a room, share or copy a room link, and find a room.
Collect beautiful stories
Players can go to their profile to review the explanations they liked or pined after the game at any time. We divided the collection into two parts for a better present, the regular thoughts collection page and the video pins page — only in video mode rooms, which allow players to save that moment quickly. Players can also add the pinned timeline into the thoughts collection for prompt lookup.
from this case study
Reflections
If I have more time
I need to dig in lots of details, not only the pages details; but also some game flows in this process that I need to work on, which the entire flow needs to be considered for every player.
Moreover, Hannah also mentioned some other pages such as The DOC community, shop, and cards of the day; these pages can reflect more “humanity” for our game experiences;
The DOC will be online in 2022 or 2023, and I will keep working on this fantastic project since Hannah and I are on the same page about this game, we all agree that this is a card game for humanity. The DOC has amazingly bonded me with lots of people, and I can't wait to use what Im going to study into this game.
