Design and implementation of cooperative multi-player game to foster social interaction

Nowadays, a high percentage of the population owns a personal device to connect with anyone at any time. Yet, these smartphones affect the face-to-face interaction, prompting individuals' attention to their devices instead. Besides, games have also shifted from tools to communicate through the use of competition and/or collaboration to complex systems with global interconnection, complicated artificial intelligence agents and high definition graphics. Nonetheless, smartphones give the opportunity to play games at any time and location, being the capabilities of personal devices merely explored in situations where people are collocated. The main objective of this thesis is to create an application for smartphones to encourage communication and socialization. Imaginary has been developed as a playful experience where players must overcome the lack of shared information to achieve a better outcome than other players or groups. The game shows a picture to one player that is unknown by the rest. Players can compete against each other or collaborate as a team to reproduce the picture as similar as possible. Asymmetry and lack of awareness hinder the player's task, making communication an essential tool to success. A user study was conducted to evaluate the impact of the application in the communication and to detect possible usability problems. It consisted of 6 sessions with 4-5 participants from different nationalities and levels of familiarity with others. The results have defined Imaginary as a relaxing, engaging and playful game that facilitates interaction and communication. Participants described the game as a new experience that can be used for team up, learning purposes or just for leisure