Eddie Melcer, Vice Chair and Assistant Professor at UC Santa Cruz MS Serious Games program, will present Mad Mixologist at the annual ICA Conference in the Digital Artifacts Exhibition.
This two-player VR alternative controller game requires a high degree of collaboration to create the perfect cocktail. Each player’s field of vision is limited by what the other player can see. With limited time to pour, mix and garnish the perfect cocktail, players must literally see things clearly and quickly from the other’s perspective in order to succeed! The challenge is two-fold. The player creating the drink must function using someone else’s field of vision. The player whose video feed is on must adjust their field of vision to optimally help the player creating the cocktail.
Though the game is incredibly entertaining, it also serves as a medium for diving deeper into the study of collaborative play using a tangible game, and shows how specific placement of objects influences collaboration. To date, it appears that distributing exclusive resources across players encourages a more collaborative interaction among players – a key finding for both Human-Computer Interaction and Human-Human Interaction.