Tabletop Games in the Age of Remote Collaboration: Design Opportunities for a Socially Connected Game Experience YE YUAN University of Minnesota, USA,
[email protected] JAN CAO Northwestern University, USA,
[email protected] RUOTONG WANG University of Washington, USA,
[email protected] SVETLANA YAROSH University of Minnesota, USA,
[email protected] Prior research has highlighted opportunities for technology to better support the tabletop game experience in offline and online settings, but little work has focused on the social aspect of tabletop gaming. We investigated the social and collaborative aspects of tabletop gaming in the unique context of “social distancing” during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic to shed light on the experience of remote tabletop gaming. With a multi-method qualitative approach (including digital ethnography and in-depth interviews), we empirically studied how people appropriate existing technologies and adapt their offline practices to play tabletop games remotely. We identify three themes that describe people’s game and social experience during remote play: creating a shared tabletop environment (shared space), enabling a collective understanding (shared information and awareness), and facilitating a communal temporal experience (shared time). We reflect on challenges and design opportunities for a better experience in the age of remote collaboration. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing • Human computer interaction (HCI) • Empirical studies in HCI Additional Keywords and Phrases: Tabletop games, Remote play, Social connectedness ACM Reference Format: Ye Yuan, Jan Cao, Ruotong Wang, Svetlana Yarosh. 2021. Tabletop Games in the Age of Remote Collaboration: Design Opportunities for a Socially Connected Game. In Proceedings of CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21), May 08–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan.