A Three Person Poncho and a Set of Maracas: Designing Ola De La Vida, A Co-Located Social Play Computer Game

This paper argues that co-located social play games, particularly those staged at "play parties," can foster temporary play communities by widening the game's magic circle through deliberate social design, event curation, and design for "semi-spectatorship," the alternation between active play and observation. Its central case study is Ola de la Vida (ODLV), a three-player cooperative game played with a Wii balance board, golden maraca controllers, and a shared poncho. The research is qualitative and rests on a single game, drawing on developer interviews, focus groups, and observations across four events in 2017, and the authors acknowledge that academic literature on designing for co-located social play remains thin.

A three-month post-development review, incorporating a developer group interview, player feedback from events and social media, and focus group testing with 18 students, identifies four design approaches: spectacle, physical game design, internal semi-spectatorship through mechanics, and external semi-spectatorship. These approaches are linked to the formation of temporary communities. The shared poncho and physical contact appear to reduce social anxiety and encourage teamwork. The findings are presented as partially successful rather than uniformly positive, however, because some players found mandatory physical dependencies frustrating, the poncho impeded observational learning, and the physical layout constrained verbal coordination.

Respondent data and play-party observations suggest that ODLV's mimetic controls, exaggerated scale, and performative, gestural movement make the game accessible and entertaining for both players and spectators, thereby widening the magic circle. On this basis the authors propose "internal" and "external" semi-spectatorship as design concepts for social play. They caution that the controlled focus-group setting limits how far these conclusions generalize, and they call for further studies in authentic play-party contexts.

The paper's final section is a bibliography of works on play theory, co-located social play, proxemics, spectatorship, and party-style games such as Mario Party, Samba De Amigo, and Clash Royale, which situates the design arguments within existing scholarship.