Working with Nature's Lag: Initial Design Lessons for Slow Biotic Games

One of the most fundamental features of living organisms is their growth, a biological phenomenon that can be considered as a type of slow, tangible output responding to an environmental stimulus or an input. Given the relative slowness of growth, once it becomes part of game mechanics, the feature can lead to slow interactivity and slow gameplay in biotic games – a relatively new type of bio-digital game that enables playful human-microbe interactions. Currently, there is a lack of annotations on existing biotic game design guidelines, that 1) recognise biological slowness as a potentially beneficial feature in game design, and 2) provide specific advice on how organism's slow response time can be effectively incorporated in biotic games. To start addressing these limitations, we report on an initial set of design lessons learnt from our research on slow biotic games. Through these lessons, we have formulated and outlined a set of practical recommendations for prospective designers of slow biotic games.