Moah

The Idea

Moah is a new social medium and social gaming experience with the goal to make users more aware of people around them. With the huge number of social media and other applications keeping our attention locked at the phone, Moah is aimed to make users curious about what is and who is around them in a relaxed and playful way. In its essence, Moah is a collection of collaborative mini games, with an emphasis on collaboration. Many of the games will have a chat function which will allow the players to communicate and plan game tactics. An example of a game could be a memorization game where several images are shown to the players on their phones and the goal is to memorize as many of them as possible in a limited amount of time. The chat function during this mini game would allow players to decide which images they will memorize which would make it a bit easier. When the time is up, each player would get to write down as many items as they remember, and the final score would be based on the total amount of items remembered by all players.

The major difference that separates Moah from other applications is the way that players are placed in games with other players. In Moah you do not initially know which people you play with; you are simply matched with other Moah users in your close vicinity. That could mean that if you are at a café and there are other people with the Moah app at the same café, you would most likely be matched with those people because they are the closest to you. However, the games do not necessarily require the user to talk to or interact with other players in real life, but it could depend on how the games are designed in the future. Though, this may be a fundamental design choice to further consider going either way with the games or mix and match. Maybe a user can choose which type of games to he or she wants to play. Although, we hope that the notion of knowing that the person you are playing with could be anyone in the same area as yourself, would lead to some feeling of excitement and/or curiosity of your surroundings.

Scenario

Lisa has the Moah app on her phone and is having a coffee at her favorite cafe. She gets a notification from Moah on her phone telling her that there are people close by ready for a game.

She opens Moah and joins the game lobby while taking a sip of her coffee. After less than a minute three more people have joined and a game can begin.

The game that is randomly chosen by the application is ”A Game of Whispers” and Lisa is given the first round. She is shown a sentence for three seconds and does her best to memorize it. She then gets to rewrite it and send it to the next player in the chain. She looks curiously around to see if she can spot any of the players in her lobby. One person looks up and smiles at her, she smiles back.

After about 30 seconds the last player sends his sentence, the game ends and the players get a combined score of 500 points. Lisa send a message to the temporary group chat telling everybody ”Good game everyone! Enjoy your coffees! :)”

Lisa finishes her coffee and continues with her day until she gets another notification from the Moah app.

Wireframe

Full Design