Novel and fun card game for communities to use AI to trigger conversations about the complex emotional issues impacting them.
Role: Creator, designer, researcher
Support: MIT Center for Constructive Communication
Time: July – current
Background
Games and play offer unique spaces for people to engage in collaboration, collective creativity, and nuanced identity expression. In response to the established polarizing effects of social media, we wonder how intentionally designed games might offer unique opportunities to facilitate healthier discourse between people on and off-line.
Project
Analogia is a game for sharing real stories within communities using a combination of talking prompts and absurd images. Players take turns prompting one another to tell stories by playing image cards in response to story-threads. The only objective in this game is to make space for the magic of storytelling by being a generous listener and active facilitator in the process of getting to the heart of what you and your community truly value.
Building on research methods used in serious games research and user-centered design, Analogia is a physical prototype of an interconnected system in which card games can become the artifact of community dialogue. Both the images and conversational prompts used in the game are uniquely generated for each community that plays it. Leveraging rich free-text survey data, the cards are generated using text-to-image and large-language models.
Players are prompted to tell stories by conversation prompts, which are specifically chosen for the community the game is generation.
Analogia image cards are generated using Midjourney based on metaphors extracted from free-text survey data.
Research questions
How do game spaces impact our ability to speak authentically and emotionally about the issues affecting us? Are we more honest when we play games?
How do images help us open up and speak more honestly about our feelings? Are there things that are easier to talk about through visual metaphors?
How might free-text data, and other community generated content interact with AI to create downstream community conversations? Is this a valuable and ethical use of generative models?
Running at playtest outside at the Somerville street festival Art Beat
Research
Analogia is currently being developed as an on-going prototype using feedback from a variety of communities. It is currently be evaluated.