Play While You Wait: Analog Serious Games in Gastronomic Contexts

"Play While You Wait" examines whether analogue serious games can transform restaurant waiting time into a source of social and emotional engagement. Its central focus is Sabrosa Oportunidad, a tabletop game developed through two Design-Based Research cycles with 38 participants organised into five groups in Cartagena, Colombia. The work is grounded in self-determination theory, the MDA framework, and servicescape theory, and it argues that waiting, long neglected in hospitality research, is a consequential moment in the dining experience that analogue play can activate more effectively than digital alternatives.

Validation results were strongly positive. Participants consistently reported high joy and euphoria, none disengaged, 82 percent said the game would motivate a visit or recommendation, and 55 percent indicated they would otherwise have conversed less. Comparison with digital training games, commercial titles such as Kitchen Rush and Sushi Go!, and the Cracker Barrel peg puzzle situates the design within broader play traditions. From the iterative process the authors derive three transferable principles: physical, visible risk generates the strongest group emotion; engagement follows a non-linear curve that benefits from rhythmic variation; and analogue play prompts spontaneous social coordination.

The authors frame these principles as open, provisional propositions rather than established rules. The sample was small and uniform, so generalisability remains untested across other establishments, age groups, and gastronomic cultures. A notable gap is that service-staff feedback was not systematically gathered, leaving unresolved whether the game introduces friction during food service. The study was declared low-risk, voluntary, and anonymised, complying with Colombian data protection rules, and AI tools were restricted to translation and language refinement under human supervision.