Some of These Things Are Not Like The Others
Would You Like to Write a Game?
Outlining a Process
Progress Report One: Objectives, Themes, Concepts, and Mechanics
- "The educational objective of our game is to illustrate the difficulties of approaching wicked problem by bringing countries, resources, time, and money together so that players can observe the interactions between each."
- "The game incorporates environmental issues as they relate to societal agendas and requires observation into the mechanics of global warming, as states will be required to pay carbon fees and find ways to reduce emissions while also aiming to come out with the most money at the end."
- "The game mechanic is actually inspired by monopoly and will involve a money bank, dice rolling, and a board with squares representing different countries, resources, information, and negotiation space. Each player is promoting a treaty for their state, so when one lands on a country, they gain the support of that entity. When one lands on a resource, a card is drawn determining what your resources are (your resources determine your wealth). Negotiation squares require a vote on treaties, which is determined by the number of country squares each player has landed on; for each treaty passed,carbon emissions lower (there will be a slide-gauge representing this), and each treaty requires various payments from states(players) for carbon contribution. Also, each trip around the board requires a payment for carbon emissions."
Progress Report Two:Game Prototype, Rules, Space, Materials
Progress Report Three: Play Testing and Revision
Fun/Unfun . . . Links to Course Learning Outcome
"What makes the game both fun and “unfun”because it is so frustrating is the constant loss and gain of resource medallions, every time you make a move, you can either lose or gain medallions at different magnitudes. When you’re trying to win, this is frustrating and makes the game take a long time because it’s very random but it’s also fun because it gives everyone the same opportunity to win or lose and it’s fun to watch others suffer at the will of the board. The different types of spaces also make the game more fun because they work as little conversation topics. For instance, if a player lands on the space titled, “Floating Garbage Patch” and they lose resource medallions, they may think about the negative consequences of waste and the lack of infrastructure to deal with that international issue."
Revisions to Clarify Links to Course Learning Outcomes
"We were also very intrigued to see if our educational objective came across clearly. It turns out that during game play, the educational objective is not very obvious, so we visually enhanced our game's images (the board, the player cards, etc.) to demonstrate the resource depletion through the greed to win concept."
Engaged Learning
"The most fun aspect of our game is how competitive we have made the game. Having Event cards and Outside actor cards help establish the competitiveness between the players because when players land on these cards, it causes them to take other factors into consideration when deciding how to address environmental issues."
A Metaphor for the "Wickedness" of Global Environmental Issues
"An important thing we learned was that not all of our original ideas would make it into the game. Unfortunately, despite the amount of hard work and creativity, we realized that not everything would tie in together smoothly. For example, in an effort to tie in some elements of wickedness, our original design included a CO2 emission slider that would rise and fall based on the actions of the players. The rate of the increases and decreases in emissions would be determined by a flux dial. However, we found it difficult to incorporate the mechanics of the dial into the game . In the end, we completely removed it and changed how the CO2 emission slider fluctuates. From this, we learned just how intertwined our game has become. By removing one element of the game, we were forced to rethink many of the other aspects until we’d realize that our design had completely transformed."
Lessons
- The Game Design Process Is Very Much Like the Writing Process
- Designing a Game Can Stimulate Curiosity and Imagination
- How Can I Get Peer Review To Work As Well as Play Testing?