The Maze: Enabling Collaborative Planning In Games Through Annotation Interfaces

The Maze is a multiplayer game in which players collaboratively coordinate activities in advance in order to win. Utilizing planning, The Maze explores how players cooperate with each other by experimenting with available collaborative planning mechanics, communication channels, and view perspectives. Players use the in-game annotation system to plan actions in advance and then execute their plan to complete objectives and win in the game. Based on previous research on disaster response planning, we see an opportunity to develop games that help disaster responders practice effective planning activities through games. We present background research that helped inform the design of the game, followed by a description of the concept and design. We reflect on our observations from the gameplay testing session and discuss future work.