My team’s party game idea is a modded version of Beer Pong, where the main element of modification is there being either a slip of paper or a playing card underneath each cup. The slip of paper may contain an embarrassing question, a mini-game, or some sort of challenge that the person whose cup had the ball go into it has to do.
The questions we want our prototypes to answer:
- Should this lean more heavily towards being a fun party game? Or should the emphasis be on the social connection/intimacy aspect?
- This is an important question because the nature of traditional Beer Pong is very much centered on the challenge aspect of fun — it was not originally designed to make for fellowship type fun. What kind of shift in dynamics might we see introducing this social connection aspect? To answer this, we plan on creating two prototype versions: for one of them, we could place playing cards under the cups, and every time the ball makes it into a cup, the mini-game that that card corresponds to in King’s Cup is played. For the other, we could place slips of paper with more intimate questions or challenges. We could compare which one was liked more by the user testers. I predict that because it is more likely that the user testers will not be very close friends, they may prefer the more challenge-fun-oriented version over the more intimate one.
- How close of friends would want to play this game?
- This is an important question because this will help guide the way we generate our paper slip ideas. We can prototype this by creating questions/challenges/etc. of varying degrees of intimacy, and ask our user testers which ones they liked. Again, because it is more likely that the user testers will not be very close friends, I predict that they might prefer the more light-hearted ones than the more intimate/emotional ones.
- Number of cups to use (i.e. size of game)?
- This is an important question because it will help us determine the scale and size of the game, as well as inform us about what the ideal length of time playing this game might be. We can prototype this by experimenting with the number of cups the game is played with and see which configuration was most liked. I predict that they might want a few cups less than traditional Beer Pong, as the added mechanics of our game might make the game take a lot longer.
