Studio 6 - Statements
Contextual Statement
Most of the board games are designed for long-term usage. They can be used multiple times after bought. Also, there are many different genres and rules to fit them in different time, place and mood. This project, Ponto, tried a different way to approach the usage. It is not a one-off game but can be enjoyed lightly like eating a snack. And, it does not stay as a toy, and percolated through to the public and their daily life to extend the area of ‘play’. The meaning of ‘extend the area of ‘play’ is increasing the popularity of the board game, so people may have less interest in board games can enjoy the games. The McDonald’s Monopoly event is a good example. The Monopoly is called as a family board game, but the actual use of the game is set on groups of people who are interested in it. However, using board games in the marketing increases the sale. Moreover, the Monopoly event increases the public interest of board game and that affects on people’s diet. So, the Monopoly event extends the popularity of the board game to the public. Of course, McDonald has a higher awareness because of its name value. So, the influence of the popularity is strong compared to my project. It is one of the reasons that I choose the vending machine as the medium to communicate with the public. It is popular, convenience and easy to maintain compared to a shop and it helps to increase the public contact. Also, the vending machines coincide to the purpose of the project because the items selling in vending machines are mostly the daily essentials and foods such as snacks and beverages.
Japan has about 5.52 million vending machines in the country. They sell snacks and beverages as New Zealand Vending machines do. However, those 1.52 million vending machines are not filled with the food and beverages only, but they are selling umbrellas, books, neckties and rice and they also sell insurances through the vending machines either. When the number and types of vending machines increase, people do not need to face each other to buy a thing. Then, the communication between people decreases and it can cause the reduction of the sociality and lose the connection between communities. There is a problem already in the communications in the physical community. The increase of digital-based social media and the wide use of smartphone caused the social communication lean to the digital medium. The developed technology linked people who are not in the same place, but it disconnected the communication between people just next to us. So, Ponto tried to rebuild the physical community by using the existing technique, the board game.
The purpose of the project is to build a physical community and the place, playtime and the targets are important because the place will group the people and people will be linked by sharing the each other’s time. So, I could not say that my project is for anyone in any place. Because it is too broad and I needed a threshold point to reduce the production process and time.  As the threshold, I decided the train passengers as the target user. The reasons are; First, the number of the trains station and the route of train rail is fixed and the travel time is steady compared to other transports and they helped me a lot to set the average play time.  Second, the number of passengers that a train can carry at once is higher than other transports. The Higher number of passengers means there is a higher potential for the usage. In fact, the number of train passengers was increased. From the article of Our Auckland published on 6 April said that 19 million passengers made trips for the year to date by train and it is an annual increase of 19.4 percent. (OurAuckland, 2017) This statistical data shows the number of target users will be increased and the potential of the usage even higher than now.
The play time is also affected from the train passengers. A report of ‘The use of travel time by rail passengers in Great Britain’ said that train passengers are spending their travel times on;
·      sleeping/snoozing;
·      reading for leisure;
·      working/studying (reading/writing/typing/thinking);
·      talking to other passengers;
·      window gazing/people watching;
·      listening to music/radio;
·      text messages/phone calls - work;
·      text messages/phone calls - personal;
·      eating/drinking;
·      entertaining children;
·      playing games (electronic or otherwise);
·      being bored;
·      being anxious about the journey (e.g. delays or where to get off);
·      planning onward or return journey; and
·      other.
The most important point on above list is the ‘window gazing and people watching’. In the report, the window gazing rated higher in people who journey of less than 15 minutes duration and they suggested that is a possible travel duration threshold below for doing something else. So, the play time of each game is less than 15 minutes because people may not get interested in anything else if they have something to do, and the threshold of the spare time is 15 minutes as the report.
Now a day, smartphones are using widely for killing time and my project may not be able to bring a big change to the world. However, I believe Ponto can build a different type of community compare to the online community. And the board game is not an electric and electronics fixed technology, so the project tries to escape from the ‘electronics jail’. Ponto has a vending machine to connect the board games and users, an Arduino is used in the vending machine and I coded the Arduino. However, the key item of this project is the board game. So, analysing the board game component and finding methods of building a community using a board game was the main research area. Extension of these, the emotions related to the components of the board game was very interesting and it will be a good future research area.
 Conceptual Statement
Ponto is a socially engaging board game to support users to build a physical community and it can be bought from a vending machine. The game is constituted of 3 different component. Each package contains one component of the game, not a whole game, so the user must find the other user who has a package of another component. It is a very inconvenience process. However, it is needed process because the purpose of the game is rebuilding a physical community. And this process will pursuit the new way of the community by meet, talk and play the game with others.
Each package contains one of dices, cards or tokens and up to 7 different games can be built by the pairing the packages. There is a short storyline to increase the relation between packages. The storyline is;
There are 3 little aliens living in a vending machine, and they are named as Rockie, Scizzy and Palate. Rockie loves cookies, Scizzy loves fizzy drinks and palate loves chocolates. When they fight, Rockie wins to Sizzy, but he cannot win to Palate. Scizzy always loses to Rockie, but always win to Palate. Â
These characters came out from Rock-Paper-Scissors game. The story affects to the rules of the games.
The main target is the train passengers but it can be anyone who can access to the vending machine. The game is designed for playing during the travel time so it can be used as a travel game too.
A board game is a basic format of the social game that makes people face to each other, talk and enjoy. It is different to the online which has anonymity. So, their words, acts and emotion of a person is delivered to the opponent directly. It makes people take care of themselves and it helps to develop their sociality. While playing this board game, people in different religions, cultures, ages, genders group up with one common factor, ‘play’. And it can be a new culture and new community can be built within this new fresh culture.
Ponto in technical side tried to focus on breaking down the board game to its components and reflected each property of them.
Dice: Emotions delivered from rolling a dice such as tension, hope and so on.
Card: inference and prediction skills to win the game.
Token: A technique to get the advantage of the game.
There are only 3 components now, but the extension is possible and same components can be redesigned to a different rule. Now, only 3 games are ready to play, and all others are still under development. Each package of Ponto is the only half of a board game. It is nearly impossible to play with one package, and if it is possible to play with one package, players cannot enjoy much as the set. And, the game attaches the user to the community since the user starts looking for other users.
The main item of the project is the board game, but the vending machine is also iconic in this project. It is a bridge between the users and the board games because they only can get the games from the vending machine. The vending machine also reflects the ‘fast, easy and convenience’. The time taken on designing board games took so long, so I was planned to skip the vending machine production. However, the board game became more complex, so it stayed as a concept with few demos. Then, I built the vending machine to reflect that the start point of the project is the vending machine.
I am thinking of 2 different future developments. One uses existing Social Networking Services to find the opponents and they will build a new fused community of the digital and real world. It will extend the physical community to the digital world and also works on the opposite way.  So, the advantage of both types of the community will be reflected in one combined community. The other method is using the board game as a new advertisement medium. Like the McDonald’s Monopoly event, uses their own story with own models and build small board games and sell them in the real vending machine or use as a promotional material for the higher benefit. Or, combine the real food as board game components or use the package of the item as a board game, so it can build a community of ‘eat, enjoy and share’.
I learnt a really important point from this project. The idea of the initial project was a consumable board game, but it is developed to a social development tool now. And it also reflects the problems and became provided a solution. I did not think about this at the beginning, but it is developed well over the researches and developments. This project tells me how the research and developments are important.
References
OurAuckland. (2017). Record numbers of passengers using trains. [online] Available at: http://ourauckland.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/articles/news/2017/04/record-numbers-of-passengers-using-trains/.
Lyons, G., Jain, J. and Holley, D. (n.d.) The use of travel time by rail passengers in Great Britain. Under revision for publication in Transportation Research A: Policy and Practice.












