Homegrown is an experimental game-design project carried out as part of the master thesis at the Hochschule für Künste, Bremen, Germany. A novel game, played with real plants following a game play, inspired by the mechanisms of strategy board games. Homegrown attempts to facilitate interaction with plants through gamification. A user experience design cycle is followed throughout, including qualitative user testing. The process followed is illustrated on this page.

User personas are created to identify potential users that would interact with a project and were helpful in narrowing down on my audience. Need assessment was also facilitated through user interviews that offered essential insights to launch the project.

Green City Dweller

Your quintessential 20 something city dweller who likes to have plants around, buys plants on an impulse and likes the idea of a green apartment without the detailed know how to care for the plants in question. 

• Buys plants from Supermarkets and Home supply stores (IKEA, Bauhaus for example).

• Plant choice is influenced by social media and impulse buying.

• The placement of plants is aesthetically motivated instead of the needs of the plant.

• Transplantation and propagation aren’t themes they concern themselves with. 

• The degradation of plants is decisive in them either giving up on plants altogether or researching more about them.

• Hasn’t discovered the physical and biological working of plants.

• Don’t have a particular watering or fertilising schedule. 

Plant daddy Hipster

Early success with plants and a circle of friends sharing their interest helps the plant daddy shine. Green is his/her/their favourite color. They might be known to keep a clipper on their person at all times, asking you if they can have a cutting from your plants, or offering you plants as birthday presents. 

• Started buying plants at supermarkets, but now creep the flea markets, second hand stores and incredibly exclusive websites for plants. 

• People often seek plant related advice from them.

• Are known to rescue dying plants

• Propagation trays and jars fill their living space and transplantation is a calendar activity.

• May use fertilisers, chemicals to combat pests as well as digital accessories such as artificial lights and reminders in combination. Are optimisation oriented,

Bio Girl

An affinity towards bio produce, encourages their hobby. Limited space and knowledge factors in the measly produce. 

• Herbs and tomatoes are their first attempts.

• Balconies, rooftops, kitchen slabs and hanging planters are the preferred locations for planting, resulting in less yield but more experience. The produce is enough to organize a rooftop brunch which sometimes warrants a get together.

• Shares a healthy discourse and chit chat with local farmers in farmer markets on the best way to produce, the decisions to plant are however often dependent on the many constraints a city dweller must fulfil

• Might end up messing with the right timing for sowing seeds or watering too much or too less.

My interviews with users informed me of several things:

1. It was the experiences with the plants that made them worthwhile for the growers and not their optimisation. There is a big untapped opportunity that exists here, creating new experiences between plants and their owners. How can we create novel experiences between them, knowing as we do that plants in themselves are rather passive artefacts (or so it may seem). The passive involvement is connected with the slow feedback from plants. Patience is required to enjoy this relationship. Therefore I strove to tap their behaviours and make them more apparent to their growers, and therefore more enjoyable

2. Plant enthusiasts enjoy the chaotic nature of plants. They aren’t looking for optimisation, they are looking to be surprised by new leaves, flowers or movements.

3. Aside from the aesthetic joy, plant lovers also enjoy the health benefits, formaldehyde absorption, air purification, humidity are among the many health benefits. 

4. Plant daddies, who are interested in plant propagation and plant health find engagement with applications dull. It takes away from the haptic nature of their relationship to plants. 

5. Information needed by Bio girl and expert planters is available online, it’s just scattered. A better organisation of information is what they are looking for.

Before embarking on my own journey, I wanted to find out projects similar to my area of interest. Overtime I came across several projects that I had myself thought of but were already done by others. The plethora of projects that I found did however gave me hope that it was a theme worth investing time and effort in. Here are a few of those listed. These projects helped me recognise approaches that other designers had used to attempt different interactions with plants.

• Photosynthesis:: A board game. The object of Photosynthesis is to use light points that you collect to take your trees through their life cycle, from seedlings to fully grown trees. It’s a board game that uses plants' growth mechanisms to its advantage.

• Seedmate: A game design project at MIT that gamifies companion planting using traditional knowledge from Italian communities. Seedmate encourages to interact with real plants, it therefore enables a different interaction that digital applications or even board games.

• Jeffery: A speculative design project that speculates the relationship to plants if they could give immediate feedback tp human interaction. This theme is essential as the speed of plants’s feedback plays a significant role in our interaction with them.

• Planning Mobile Application for plants and crops: These applications are quite similar to each other. Using different aesthetic and interactions, they heavily rely on the idea of calendars and planners.

Benchmarking and need assessment through user interviews helped me define my audience as well as set a goal. Creating a more active interaction with plants that enables humans to discover plants’ mechanisms. I went through several ideas and design explorations that eventually led me to homegrown. 

• Plant based lamp:  A lamp that would house a plant in itself shutting out any external light to influence the way the plants grow inside. Photosensitivity and aesthetics dominated the idea.

• Plant Public Library: A plant cupboard on the street, much like those for books, would enable serendipitous interaction with plants and enable a community feeling. 

• Game and stories for kids: Mobile application games and stories for children. 

• Audio Interpretation of Growth: Interpreting the growth pattern and probability of growth from a randomized sample of seeds.

Following the design explorations, I started looking at plants as physical systems. They require earth, water, light and can be propagated in several ways. Soil and Water propagation being the more common ways. Furthermore I connected these physical systems to storytelling and diegetic universes. Putting the act of growing plants in an otherworldly context. The next logical step of which was creating a game with real plants. 

In the first iteration of the game I had three focus points.

1. Goal of the game

2. Mechanism of the game

3. Start of the game

Goal

The broader goal of the game is to enrich your relationship with plants as well as be part of a community. While this goal fits well with my personal motivations and desires, a goal of a game is associated with quantitative measures of success. A measure that helps players strive for something objective and clear. The game put plants in a context of boardgames strategies and gameplay, therefore the inspiration must be derived from them. The goal for the first iteration was set. Players shall strive to create maximum copies of plants through a careful manipulation of limited resources. 

Mechanism

Games are set in a diegetic universe and these diegetic universes have a set of rules, constraints and dependencies. Players agree to follow these rules even if they might not make immediate sense. These constraints in themselves are often borrowed from real world. In the world we live in land, the fertility of land, space, water, weather, sunlight and use of fertilizers—all of these play a role in the sale and production of plants/crops in the world market. Therefore these worldly constraints were an essential criteria to think about in designing the game mechanisms. It was clear to me that winning is connected to being able to grow more copies of plants while using your resources effectively. The exact conditions, constraints and interaction between players wasn't clear in the beginning. I arrived at it by sketching out multiple scenarios and playing them out using decision trees.

The first game iteration was very simple. It posed a lot of questions and left me unsure. If the system is enough to call this a game or is it simply friends making saplings together? How to increase a level of complexity that allows strategy to have a place in the game. The next logical step was to look at other games not only through studying them but also playing them. This was the same time that the pandemic started to grip the nation. Fortunately the people that I chose to spend time with (My COVID-19 family) had board game lovers in it. Our way to pass time was to play boardgames. Twice a week, from 8pm upto 2 am in the morning. This was a great experience to look at board games closely. Game mechanics and strategies become clear as well as how these mechanics affect players, making them play offensive, defensive or cooperatively.

Games played that inspired the gameplay include

1. Settlers of Catan

2. Wingspan

3. Agricola

4. Dixit

5. Puerto Rico

6. Hanabi

7. Carcassonne

8. Alhambra

9. Genial

10. Pandemic

11. Taj Mahal 

12. Exit

13. Dominion 

14. The Mind

15. Kingdom Builders

Here are some of the gameplays of games that inspired and were interpreted in Homegrown.

CATAN

Resource Management

• At the beginning of the game players pick the resources they would lay their house on. Here luck and turn plays an important role.

• Players can exchange resources with each other as well as with the marketplace at a rate of 3:1.

• Special cards give players power to take more resources from the marketplace or demand it from other players. A knight(ritter) blocks access to resources, placed by the player who rolls a 7 on the dice. 

Interpretation in Homegrown

• Bonus Cards: Bonus cards allow players to get more resources from the marketplace for the same price or take resources from other players in addition to other powers.

• Co-operation:: Rules were edited to encourage players to cooperate with each other. 

• Access to resources: Players can sell their saplings or established plants to obtain 2 and 3 Green thumbs respectively.

Agricola 

Gameplay

• The start player for every round is essential, she gets access to one time only actions in a round.

• End of game points allow players access to game points outside of the round based game structure. 

Interpretation in Homegrown 

• Bidding for new plants follows the decreasing order of plants owned by players i.e the player with maximum copies of plants must be the first to place a bid. 

• End of game points for propagating in ways other than soil and water propagation, moreover extra points for mutations in plants. 

How was it carried out?

1. Game was played with four players, Karan, Moyo, Anja and Lea. 

2. The game was played over a period of 6months. 

3. The players met via zoom owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. They met once every month. In the meeting the scoring and bidding would take place. While the propagation of plants was carried out at their own home. The sessions were recorded for the purpose of documentation. In addition a telegram group was created for all exchanges as well as qualitative feedback (exchanging a pot for earth or a sapling for water). In the beginning of each meeting players would also express their experience so far.

4. The first round was played with prototype bloom cards, green thumbs and water tokens. Over time the resource exchange was noted without the real exchange of these symbolic elements. Physical resources like earth, pots and plants were exchanged in real life. 

5. Karan played the role of marketplace and therefore provided players with the resources. 

Insights

1. For the test players it took a moment to absorb that the game was played with real plants therefore it was essential that it comes across in media that attempt to explain the game. Explaining the rules as well as clarifying them to the test players influenced how the instructional video as well as the rules were designed. 

2. The players played the game with enthusiasm, hacked the rules to their advantage and showed immense creativity in handling resources and propagating them. This brought the game to life as a functioning game. It furthermore proved that the games rules encouraged creativity. 

3. The scoring and keeping track of resources was handled by the game master, but this pen and paper scoring had scope for improvement, especially to make exchanges between players. This led to the development of a Homegrown mobile application prototype. 

4. The ways to get hold of Green thumbs was limited therefore more ways were added in the rules for players to get hold of them. Similarly the powers of certain bonus cards needed to be tweaked. 

5. Homegrown ended up being a successful (however unintended) gamification of teaching people how to take care of plants. Lea, for instance a complete novice with plants, with really bad past experiences with plants ended up winning several rounds. She also seeked conversations and help from other plant lovers. 

6. The order of buying resources and bidding, which was given significance in the last iteration proved to be an unnecessary complication that didn’t bring complexity to the game. Therefore that was also done away with. 

The scoring system and the marketplace in Homegrown was done using pen and paper throughout the test phase. It was facilitated further through a telegram group. While it worked well for the test phase, it became the responsibility of the game master to do the recordkeeping (in this case me). I explored the possibility of an application that would function as a scoreboard as well as a marketplace for the same. I designed a prototype on prototyping software after rigorous wireframing to create the first iteration.

The first iteration put more focus on buying. Also, the option of uploading photos created communication problems. It occurred to me that the quantities in the game were fixed and could therefore be replaced by functional icons. The quantities included

• Four types of plants

• Four types of saplings

• Resources: Water, Earth in pots, propagation tubes, bloom cards

• Green thumbs

• Game points.

1. Playing with REAL plants: The game is played with real plants, a concept that took time to sink in for most audiences. Therefore it was essential to make this clear in the video.

2. Timelapses: TImelapses as a medium were used. They served two major purposes, they fit well with the pace of the game as well as hinted at the behaviors in plants otherwise unnoticed by the naked eye. Furthermore the voice of the narrator is intentionally soft and mysterious to fit well with the meditative nature of the game.

3. Phases in the game: The video was initially envisioned as a kickstarted genre of videos. I moved away from this while the intention of the video was not to sell the game, rather give an overview to audiences not too keen on reading the rules immediately. It’s a golden truth that everyone wants to play games but no one wants to read the rules. Therefore the phases of the game were shown in the video to give an overview .

4. Planning and Storyboards: Owing to the pandemic access to sound and video studios was not possible, therefore I made makeshift audio room and photostudio in my house. Owing to timelapse footage, every sequence had to be planned to the dot to allow for the video to finish in time. The timelapses were recorded over 2 to 14 days based on the movements of the plants being recorded.

1. Gamification: The project successfully gamifies plant care. Even as that was not the initial intention of the project it helped test players transfer an understanding of plant care, requirements and growth mechanisms. 

2. Qualitative User testing: User testing for a game design is essential. User testing is the best proof of concept. The reactions of players and their involvement is a measure of a good game design. Are they having fun? Are they competitive or frustrated? A motivation to want to play the game lets a game designer know that the game is a success. Furthermore it highlights mechanisms that are unnecessary or those that should be fine tuned. 

3. Time: Homegrown takes time and yet within it’s structure it works. It pushes the boundaries of games in terms of time as well as artefacts. 

4. Playing with Plants: Using real living artefacts helps create a haptic and personal relationship to the game. Players see their collections grow in real life, which is great boost and heightens engagement. 

5. COVID-19: The game wasn’t designed for a pandemic, however works very well in this structure. Players don’t have to physically meet and yet enjoy a passive connectivity with each other through the game.