In the winter of 2018-19, my classmates and I were part of a game developement experiment for Rigshopitalet, a large hospital in Copenhagen. We specifically worked with the Department of Oncology to develope games that might help ease communication between patients and their loved ones.
After interviews with doctors, nurses and patients, my group (Erik Kjær Andersen and Weronika Kulis) and I decided we wanted to develope social games that might help break the tension that often immerges between patients and their loved ones when the patient is suffering from such a serious illness.
Due to strict rules concerning cleanliness, many typical games, both board games and computer games, were impractical or in some cases impossible for the department to implement. Our suggestion was that each player use their mobile phone as a controller that would connect to the game portrayed on a TV-screen through the hospital’s WiFi. We envisioned a bundle of social games using this control scheme called “Hyggesokker” (eng: “Cosy Socks”) and developed prototypes of two possible games for the bundle.
The first of these, Falsk Faktum (eng: “False Fact”) was a game where an obscure fact would be shown on the screen, but with one crucial word missing, where the players then had to fill out the missing word. The players then had to choose which of the words they believed to be the correct missing word and the objective was to try to trick the other players into believing your word was the correct one.
The second game, Kakao Kop (eng: “Cocoa Cup”) was a Hangman-style game with different categories to choose from, where instead of the metaphor of a stick figure getting hanged, wrong guesses would cause cocoa to be spilled. Too many wrong guesses, and all the cocoa spills out of the cup, causing the player to lose that round.
We deliberately designed these games with very wide target audiences, so that the patient could play the game with their entire family regardless of the age of the individuals involved. The goal of this project was to introduce the Department of Oncology at Rigshospitalet to possible ways they might help their patients connect with their loved ones when they visit.
