Life on Wings: Relating to a Bird's Life in a City through a Board Game

This paper presents a novel board game called Life on Wings, designed to create an experience and awareness about the life of birds in an urban landscape. The game lets users experience the life of six tropical urban birds across three seasons of a year. By performing different activities of birds, players learn about the challenges that an ever-changing urban environment creates for bird species. We reflect on our design process and describe the key design decisions that led to the development of our game. We also present insights of a playtesting session that was conducted with 11 participants to evaluate the design aspects of the game. Based on the study insights we present three implications on collaboration over competition, local game movement and longitudinal first-person perspective. Through this work, we aim to inspire more playful explorations on human-wildlife cohabitation.