Artist Statement
Eco Quest is a simulation game designed to educate players about the challenges and opportunities of building and managing a sustainable city. Throughout the game, players will learn about tradeoffs and consequences and eventually make their own decisions about the impact of the choices that they make. They will learn to balance economic, social, and environmental factors. The aim of the game is to promote critical thinking and decision-making skills and push players to think about their responsibility toward the environment.
Ecosystem
The ecosystem of this game is the, well, ecosystem in a much more simplified way. It is a city ecosystem where there are factors at play, social, economic, and environmental. They all play into one another. As players progress they will get the hang of trade-offs and be able to have more influence on the game.
What do we want people to learn?
We want players to think critically about their role in their environment and to realize that building economically sustainable cities is perhaps more easily said than done, albeit not impossible. To make this more simple for the players, there are only 5 factors that the players are controlling and their aim is to make the city last for as long as possible before anything is negative. A negative, in any category, is a loss. A win would be cities that live on forever, or until the players have had enough!
How do we accomplish this?
Players will need to make decisions and tradeoffs at every turn which will hopefully help them understand how individual decisions impact the environment at large.
Initial decisions about formal elements and values
Formal elements: Initially, I wanted the game to be collaborative but I quickly realized that would be a challenge to make the game make sense. As such, I shifted to an individual mindset for the game. Moreover, I wanted there to be many more factors at play to simulate reality more closely, but this turned out to not be possible to keep track of, even for myself.
Values: An appreciation for the complexity of the environment and its importance.
Testing iteration and history
V1
Version one was a disaster. I created hand-written cards with a myriad of resources and decision points for the user. I had also written out a monopoly-type board with random chance events. The game dragged on for too long and was boring to play through. It lost much of its value in that. It also didn’t make sense for players to work together to build a city as there was often disagreement.
V2
I switched to a competitive model with more handwritten cards. I cut the number of resources and nixed the board to make it more discussion based. This pushed me toward the final version.
V3
Eco Quest
Game Components
Resources:
- Money
- Energy
- Infrastructure
- Biodiversity
- Population
Gameplay:
- At the beginning of the game, players all receive a certain number of resources
- On their turn, players start by pulling from the deck of pre-made actions.
- They can elect to take action and make tradeoffs
- Once the players are familiar with the types of decisions, they can make their own with realistic tradeoffs
- Players will take turns keeping their city alive, all resources must stay positive
- If a player reaches the point of any negative resource they lose
- Players may set their own win-point (e.g. 50 biodiversity)
- Games that go on forever are a success! Sustainable cities should last forever
(I playtested this with my younger sisters at home who didn’t want to be filmed)
