Designing a Game for Playful Communication Within Families

The paper introduces Junomi, a location-based smartphone game designed to foster playful communication within Danish families, with a particular focus on teenagers who report loneliness and spend limited time with their parents and siblings. Motivated by the observation that roughly one in four Danish teenagers feels lonely and that families share only a few hours of daily contact, the authors developed the game through seventeen qualitative interviews and a 24-hour Wizard of Oz SMS prototype. All eleven teenagers interviewed expressed a desire for more family time, and the mobile phone was selected as the platform because it already fits fragmented, busy family routines.

The central argument is that the game's value lies less in simulating a family problem than in its rhetorical structure and the social play context it establishes. Drawing on theories of mediated intimacy and on scholarship from Flanagan, Bogost, and Latour, the authors propose that an ambiguous, non-monitored question-and-answer format can be woven into everyday life and sustained over roughly six months. The design thus treats the phone as an ideal medium because families already rely on it daily.

The evidence presented is qualitative and reflective, drawn from interviews and prototype observations rather than quantified outcomes. The authors acknowledge that the field lacks established methods for measuring soft social change, making the game's effects difficult to evaluate. They call for larger, longer-term studies, informed by educational research, to determine whether the communication patterns carry into other family interactions. While they expect a strong play experience to produce lasting effects, they note that the duration and evolution of those effects remain unpredictable.