Design Insights for Exploring Identity Bubbles with Alternate Reality Gameplay

To activate conscious reflection regarding personal identity and identity-building processes in our daily lives is an increasing social concern. With this aim, we designed an Alternate Reality Game that invites participants to collectively explore these themes. Participants played with a prototype, evoking themes of identity through emergent dynamics from gameplay and interpersonal interactions. We analyzed participants’ appropriation of the prototype through logged activity, direct observation and interviews. The identified dynamics enabled iterative redesign and further exploration of the players’ interaction and behaviors. From this process, we synthesized four design insights as our main findings that may guide further research in the field: (1) how to explore design–play–reflect as a co-design process supported on individual appropriation, (2) how ARGs generate reflective social phenomena, such as varied social identity and power narratives, (3) how ARG design can open doors to balance power dynamics, and (4) how ARG designs can become generative social theories. Our main contributions, alongside the designed prototype, are these four insights, and their potential scalability to other ARG designs that seek to provoke social phenomena and collaborative interventions.