GetSchooled! sets players up to deal with the pressure that is put on schools and the power of schools. Schools need to care for the whole range of needs of their students. To care for their students, schools need to define what kind of education works best for their students, while also following national perspectives of what kind of education works best. GetSchooled! represents education as the course curriculum a school offers. To introduce some of the philosophies that underlie thinking about what education should be, we had each player play as a certain educational philosophy. We connect course curriculum with educational philosophies by trying to match course training names with the educational philosophy it might relate to. I struggled with this because it seemed like we were being incorrect with the way we modeled courses to educational philosophy but it was a simple game mechanic for us. I really liked the research piece of this where I got to learn more about educational philosophy while trying to make the game fit.
I think we tried to incorporate too much into the game yet also not enough. Throughout playtesting it seemed like there was too much complexity in certain aspects while other aspects were too simplistic. With the broad view of a systems game, you can pick and choose what you model in your game and there is just so much to choose from. It’s finding the right frame and level of the system to achieve your learning goals and support game mechanics. You’re juggling both the system in your game and the larger system that you’re trying to model. Finding the right mechanics to match the system also seemed like a lot of trial and error to find the Goldilocks. I wished there were a list of a range of game mechanics to look at. Building a systems game is also hard in terms of all the things to juggle, it didn’t seem like we could perfect one small piece of it, and then move on to the next piece, rather the whole game has to synergize with each small part.
