Introducing Scene and Unseen, created by Group 17: Yanny Gao, Elliott Rodgers, Winnie Chen, and Lour Drick Valsote!
Artist Statement
Scene & Unseen is a social storytelling game that asks players to embody a single element of a larger narrative that a final player must deduce. We designed the game for five or more players per round, and it is recommended for players ages fourteen and because we wanted our players to be old enough to understand how different narrative components come together to build a larger, cohesive story. These players will leverage creative performance, collaborative improvisation, and mystery to create moments of spontaneous social play. Four players (the “Actors”) receive a prompt card that outlines the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, and WHY of a particular scene in one of five categories (Stanford, Celebrity, Everyday Melodrama, Meme Culture and Internet Lore, and Cyberpunk), but each player only performs one of these elements. All other players (the “Guessers”) observe the scene and must reconstruct what they think happened in the original scene.
Our goal was to create a game that encourages expressive physical and verbal storytelling and creates laughter through ambiguity and creativity. Similar to a game like Gartic Phone, Scene and Unseen does not have “winners” in the traditional sense as players are not in competition with one another. Instead, they are working together to try to tell a story where the process is the fun. We were especially interested in how our game could lean into intrigue and creativity when players know the full context but can only hint at a small part, forcing them to lean into timing, tone, and creative performance as a group. Inspired by games like Charades, Spyfall, and Awkward Moments, we wanted to experiment with structured absurdity and narrative misalignment to generate fun. In this way, our game generates fun through challenge, fellowship, and expression, as players have to work together to act out their respective roles to recreate the prompted scene.
The game was designed with accessibility and replayability in mind. This game is easy to pick up and does not have a high skill barrier because prior acting experience is required. Additionally, each scene is relatively short and self-contained between rounds, making it easy for players to swap in and out each round. The guessing mechanic offers a natural arc to each round, and the open-ended nature of the scenes leaves room for inside jokes and group dynamics to evolve.
Concept Map
Initial Decision
From the beginning, we designed Scene and Unseen around the idea of collaborative chaos as we sought to create a game that thrives on social interpretation, improvised performance, and the not-always-clear connection between what someone intends to communicate through their actions and what other people perceive and interpret. We were not interested in traditional point-based systems or competition. Instead, we wanted to create a game that was fun specifically because of the group dynamic it required, a kind of ensemble-driven storytelling that leans into awkwardness, surprise, and the joy of watching meaning fall apart and reassemble in real time.
In our earliest vision, players took on distinct roles: one player acted out a scenario while three others acted as “Scene Builders,” interpreting the performance and attempting to reconstruct the rest of the story. The mechanics at that point included action cards to guide the performance and mood cards to shape its tone. As the design evolved, these roles shifted toward a shared performance structure, and we replaced those early cards with full scene cards that presented four elements: a Who, What, Where, and Why, to be performed collectively. The prompting mechanic is the crux of our game, so we took a lot of time to develop prompts that players could feasibly act out.
We grounded the game in mechanics that allowed only one line of dialogue per player and prohibited actors from explicitly naming their assigned scene element. We implemented these constraints with the intention of generating unexpected dynamics, misunderstandings, and humor. If players could simply say what their prompt was or talk around it enough, the round would miss that element of chaos we wanted to design for in our game. Our aesthetics at this stage relied on interpretive tension, performative absurdity, and spontaneous narrative creation. We wanted players to feel like they were not just playing a game but participating in a piece of surrealist theater, wherein the game generated fun through a heavier reliance on narrative-building.
Inclusivity is core to the game’s values because we believed every player should feel safe being silly. That is why we prioritized creativity, limited verbal communication, and low-stakes expression over rule mastery and performance skills. While having professional acting skills would definitely be of help, we wanted people with no acting skills to be able to have just as much fun. We wanted a game that was fast to teach, inviting to newcomers, and infinitely replayable. This commitment led us to prioritize design principles like ease of onboarding, replay potential, and support for both chaotic and collaborative player behavior. Whether someone is shy or dramatic, literal or lateral-thinking, Scene and Unseen invites them to step into the spotlight and then immediately trip over it together.
Iterations
First Playtest
Our initial version of Scene and Unseen was directly inspired by the card-based party game Awkward Moment, which challenges players to react to socially uncomfortable scenarios with unexpected responses. We wanted to preserve that blend of absurdity and relatability but also be able to introduce physical performance into the equation. In our first design, one player was the Actor, receiving both an Action card and a Mood card (e.g. “tripping on stage” while feeling “deeply proud”), and performing a short scene. The remaining three players were Scene Builders, tasked with watching the performance and independently writing down their interpretation of the scene by filling in the Who, Where, and Why. We thought this structure would strike a balance between performance and interpretation where everyone could contribute creatively.
However, during our first playtest with four classmates, it quickly became clear that the Scene Builder role lacked clarity and energy. We realized a few points that we wanted to address in future designs for our game:
- Players were unsure of when and how to contribute, and their role felt passive compared to the Actor’s spotlight.
- The Mood card also introduced unnecessary complexity and did not always have a meaningful influence on performance.
- The game had potential, but the asymmetry in player experience held it back. In some rounds, for example, the person responsible for the Who may have had a bigger influence in building the scene than the others.
Second Playtest
For the second playtest, we revised the rule structure to give both Actor and Builders more defined constraints. The Actor was now only allowed to speak one line that was not something that described their scene directly, but a sentence that made emotional or narrative sense in performance. Scene Builders still worked independently, but we explicitly stated that they could not speak or collaborate during the round. We tested the second iteration with five players, including two who were not familiar with party games, to see how intuitive the onboarding process felt. The performance rule worked much better: scenes became shorter, snappier, and more interpretable.
However, we once again received the same feedback: the Actor had all the fun in the rounds. The Builders wanted in, meaning they wanted to play a larger role in the game. Several players admitted they were “jealous” of the acting role and wanted the opportunity to perform, too. They would even playfully compete over who got to be the Actor next. This confirmed what we had begun to suspect: the core pleasure of the game wasn’t in decoding the story. Rather, it was in embodying it.
Final Playtest
For our final playtest, we completely restructured the format to embrace ensemble performance.
- Instead of one Actor and three Scene Builders, the scene now included four Actors, each assigned one narrative element — Who, What, Where, or Why — from a pre-written scene prompt card.
- All four Actors saw the full card and knew the entire scene, but only performed their assigned part, in order. Meanwhile, a fifth player (and/or other players who are not actors), the Guesser, watched the scene unfold with no prior context and attempted to deduce the original story.
- We eliminated the Mood card entirely, since it no longer played a meaningful role in the structure.
- We created five categories of prompts including Stanford, Meme Culture and Internet Lore, Celebrity, Daily Melodrama and Cyberpunk.
We tested this version with seven players, with roles rotating across several rounds. It produced the strongest response by far. Players laughed, improvised, misread cues, and leaned into their roles. More importantly, everyone was involved; no one felt sidelined. At the end of the game, they even exclaimed, “We want to play again, we want to play again!” The social energy we had originally admired in Awkward Moment came through, but in our own voice: chaotic, theatrical, and collectively built in the moment.
Afterwards
After that final playtest, we received one last piece of critical feedback — while the acting and guessing were engaging, some players found the formatting of the prompt on the scene card confusing or difficult to parse quickly. In response, we made one final revision to polish the game’s presentation. We implemented a consistent color scheme across the box cover and cards for visual cohesion, and redesigned the prompt layout to improve readability.
Each element — Who, What, Where, and Why — is now clearly labeled with a heading in a bold, contrasting color and underscored to distinguish it from the body text. This segmentation ensures that all players can easily identify their role at a glance and helps the card feel more structured and approachable during fast-paced play. Furthermore, in response to comments about how some things were significantly more difficult to act out than others, we’ve implemented a difficulty indicator on the back of each card. Though small, this final visual pass made onboarding smoother and helped the tone of the cards match the personality of the game itself.
Ultimately, the process taught us that shared performance, not judgment or deduction, was the emotional center of our game. We let go of our original structure, not because it was broken, but because our playtesters showed us something better: a game where misunderstanding is the feature, not the flaw, and where everyone has a role to play in the spectacle of the unseen.
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