BACKGROUND
As an international student, I lived in the college dorm rooms in my freshman year. I had two roommates who are the second generation of immigrants in the US. Since all of us are from different culture backgrounds, it took us a long time to know one another's cultures.
However, there was one topic that we all willing to share-the good we love to have. I noticed that we have very different food cultures but sharing the food we liked makes us became good friends. At the same time, we learned more knowledge about a different culture.
From this experience, I was inspired to design a game that was related with cooking, aiming to let users to embrace different cultures and building a warm community for users around the world.
User Research
I interviewed 10 people who are either international students or first generation/second generation immigrants. In order not to affect interviewees' thoughts and behaviors, i designed an unstructured interview-an interview with very few questions.
This interview only includes two questions and each users have 5 minutes to demonstrate their opinions.
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Question 1:
Introduce your experience with game and why you like a specific game.
Question 2:
Talking about something you want to share of your culture.
After the interview, I generated two answer pools that includes their common answers from Question 1 and Question 2.
Talk
Persona
Gender: Female
Age: 25
Job: Influencer
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Characteristic: Energetic, Outgoing
Habits: Hanging out with friends, Watching movies
Time Spend on Video Games Per Week: 15 hours
Favorite Video Games: Minecraft
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Focus Traits Of Games: The creativeness of the game
Real Quote:
" I like building my own home in video games. Even though it takes a long time, I consider it as an achievement "
Gender: Male
Age: 24
Job: Teaching Assistant
Location: Bay Area, CA
Characteristic: Shy, Efficient, Quiet
Habits: Video Games, Coding
Time Spend on Video Games Per Week: 6 hours
Favorite Video Games: League of Legends, Zelda
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Focus Traits Of Games: The gaming effect
Real Quote:
"I love playing games and I like making new friends in video games. I am a very outgoing person but sometimes I am too shy to share my feelings with my friends in real life."
Gender: Female
Age: 28
Job: Graphic Designer
Location: New York City
Characteristic: Energetic, Outgoing
Habits: Hiking, Camping
Time Spend on Video Games Per Week: 9 hours
Favorite Video Games: Animal Crossing
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Focus Traits Of Games: The storyline in the game
Real Quote:
"I enjoy the world in games. Whenever I want to relax, I always play the Switch."
Design Brief
Based on user research, a social simulation game would create a community for users to share their own food cultures. Therefore, I designed the game COOKIN, which aims on decreasing the cultural gap between people and encourage people to embrace different cultures. In COOKIN, players will have their own personalized kitchen and garden based on the origin location of the character they chose. All characters are animals. The game has three main scenes—a market place, the map and the user's personal home.
In the player's home, the kitchen and the garden can be decorated with culture related furnitures. In the kitchen, players cook their own food and in the garden, they can grow the vegetables they like. Users can trade the food they have in the marketplace and buy ingredients there as well. The map section helps players to enter other areas such as the forests. Players can also collect the things they want in nature.
Objective
The goal of COOKIN is to help people getting in touch with cultures around the world in the gaming process. Players come from any cultural background. In COOKIN, no culture is considered as the main stream because every culture is equally important. This is also the concept that COOKIN wants to deliver—raising people's attention to cultural awareness.
Ideation
Design Objective
Provide users opportunities to contact people from different cultural backgrounds
Embrace the diversity of cultures
Create a warm community to players
How
This game would create a lot of social interactions
This game requires players to communicate with users indifferent cultural backgrounds
Product Functionalities
The game includes a main section for players to communicate with each other and deliver culture related knowledge.
This game includes a main section for players to represent their own culture identities.
Based on the user research, this exchange of knowledge in cultures could be achieved through cooking since it reflects one of the main differences between cultures.
Branding
Information Architecture
In the information architecture, it goes through the three main sections of COOKIN—the marketplace, the map and players' home in the game.
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At the beginning of the information architecture, players are separated into two different user groups—first time players and players who already have an account. Tracing the gaming process based on these two user groups, the information architecture analyzes the actions that users would take based on the game tasks.
3D Modeling
In order to create a user perspective for the game, I designed my own role and finished the 3D modeling on Blender.
This panda would be used as character while go through the gaming process.
Wireframe
The wireframe displays six sections of the game. When a new user enter COOKIN,
they will step into the register pages before starting the game.
Players who have already registered can enter the character selection page. Each player can choose one character to represent themselves. Then, players can access the map, their homes and the market place.
In the map pages, players can zoom in/ zoom out the map and observe the details of a location.
​In the home pages, players have activities in their own kitchen. Through out the gaming process, players can check their own packages to see the items they had.
​In the garden pages, players can cultivate plants and vegetables. They use the calendar to mark the watering dates.
Conversations and tradings between users are made in the market place.
To change the name of players' characters, the character information pages is displayed to them. Players can edit their characters' information such as names.
