Overall, I had a very positive experience throughout P1. This lends mostly to the fact that my classmates and I truly wanted to achieve the project’s goals of creating a thoughtful and significant learning experience! This also meant that our game, and our learning outcomes, changed quite a bit in a very short span of time. While we realized that making a perfect game was quite impossible, we also didn’t want to sacrifice our outcomes, or create an experience that was purely educational. It was finding the sweet spot between these two aspects of the project that made it so exciting to see our final project come into fruition.
We did realize at some point that our game was perhaps lacking some fun aspects. So, one of the ways we decided to change that was to incorporate more challenge and role playing throughout our game. This way, having stakes based on how well one conveys their point, a secret goal one had to achieve, and tradeoffs between purchasing relevant station upgrades significantly increased the challenge that our initial idea was lacking. At the same time, acting out as a representative of a community allowed our players to immerse themselves within their imagination.
To tie debating/argumentation into the game, we coupled the mechanics of creating an argument, with giving players pre-determined facts that could aid their specific community’s struggles with the subway system. This interaction allowed for the debate rounds to be informative and consistent, giving a basis for players to actually ground their argument. The mechanics in the debate round also translated into different points being awarded based on the inspector’s subjective opinion. These points could then be used to upgrade the station based on a secret goal. Yet, placing an upgrade could also block out future ones, increasing the level of strategy present throughout this phase.
In my perspective, the game taught people in two distinct ways. The first one, and perhaps most obvious, was the fact that players had to use actual facts about their communities to create arguments. By having these facts at the forefront of our experience, either through creating arguments, or having to attentively listen to them, we expected players to retain them more than in our previous iterations. On a more deeper level, we also wanted the role-playing aspect coupled with argumentations to create a sense of empathy between our players and their respective communities!
We reached these conclusions because during our first playtest, we noticed that our message had simply disappeared within the game. I think that pivoting after this playtest was the best decision we made. While deciding to have new brainstorm sessions and struggle with how to incorporate our message in a fun game was surprisingly very hard, it was also a very important part of our project experience. It was at this point that I realized that we didn’t just want to ‘turn the project in’, but rather really hone in on an idea. I know I’m giving this a lot of attention, but it was a pretty powerful thing for me. The level of my teammate’s commitment really inspired me to think critically about this project and, more broadly, how I should strive to make decisions in general.
At the last playtest, watching our classmates actually get into arguments, role play their parts, and find the game interesting really showed me how far we had come. And at the same time, having them uniformly report that they learned something about the subway system and thought critically about other perspectives that weren’t their own made me so proud of having reached our outcomes! Of course our game isn’t perfect, but making it still was an amazing experience to be a part of.