"Pull the Lever, Kronk!": Mapping Controller Affordances to Collaborative Sense-Making in Play

As alternative game controllers have grown in popularity as a means of crafting social, cooperative, and collaborative play experiences, designers have leveraged the flexibility in physical affordances of controllers to support a variety of social-collaborative games. At present, the existing body of works in this space offers a broad sampling of designs to support and promote collaborative experiences as well as descriptions of the effects of individual games or controllers on one or more aspects of social-collaborative play. However, the lack of a broader understanding of the relationship between controllers' physical affordances and the nature of the player collaborations they support limits the ability of designers and developers to make evidence-based decisions in controller creation to support desired collaboration patterns. As a first step to establishing such an understanding, we paired creative sense-making analysis data from four sets of play sessions using playful experiences developed for alternative controllers with descriptions of each alternative controller through the lens of previously established themes for collaborative alternative controllers. We aligned approaches to controller design to patterns visible in the creative sense-making data, noting potential relationships between some aspects of game and controller design and players' sense-making processes during play. We present generalizable design insights gleaned from this work, aiming to provide guidance that can support informed decision-making during the design process as designers and practitioners continue to explore the great potential of alternative controllers to support collaborative play.