The Mission: Sense deprivation as a resource for designing a playful experience

Framed as an explorative and design-based research, the paper introduces the game The Mission and the methodological thoughts behind the process of making it. The Mission was developed as an investigation of working with sense deprivation and sound sense stimuli as a way for design exploration.
The design process consisted of a series of experiments and prototyping in an iterative process of experiments, prototyping and reflections. As opposed to the mainstream way, the process started not from the game mechanics and definition of the rules, but from the exploration of human senses and extracting possible playful experiences from it. Exploring the playful potential of sensing sound and sense deprivation was the starting point of the concept. Game mechanics and rules were built on top of the aesthetic qualities of the play. As a result of the process, we made an embodied, sensory game, which was played indoors by 4-5 people on a public event.