Creative Sense-Making Analysis for the Representation of Collaboration in Embodied Play

Social interaction, and collaborative interaction in particular, is a core component of many games and other forms of play. While several forms of analysis exist to cover social aspects of play, many do not account for embodied components of collaboration during play. This paper presents our novel use of the creative sense-making (CSM) framework as a means of understanding embodied collaboration throughout the duration of dyadic, embodied, goal-oriented play. It describes the process of translating the framework, which had previously been used to study open-ended embodied collaboration, into a tool to analyze embodied collaboration in goal-oriented games. We detail key components of the analysis process, including codebook development, iterative coding to establish inter-rater reliability, and visualization methods to display trends across all play sessions with a game. This work demonstrates the utility of CSM as a tool for gameplay analysis as an addition or augmentation to existing techniques, and provides researchers and practitioners with a practical guide to applying CSM in games contexts.