Over the last few years we have seen the rise of "serious games" to promote understanding of complex social and ecological challenges, and to create passion for solving them. This project-based course provides an introduction to game design principals while applying them to games that teach. Run as a hands-on studio class, students will design and prototype games for social change and civic engagement. We will learn the fundamentals of games design via lecture and extensive reading in order to make effective games to explore issues facing society today. The course culminates in an end-of- quarter open house to showcase our games. Prerequisite: CS147 or equivalent. 247G recommended, but not required.
Hi Gordon, your game was so epic! Here is my feedback
What values you see in the game, and how they are reflected in the choices made by the game designer?
Empathy felt clear to me because the player takes on the role of a therapist. Therapists must treat their clients with care and in many ways have to relive their experiences with their clients. Both of these aspects of the job require empathy, taking a step back from casting moral judgements, and providing care and support.
Hearing/listening also felt like an important value in your game because therapists need to pay attention and gather the whole of a story before coming to conclusions. This value also incorporates the obligation to truth and making sense of a situation that therapists take on throughout their relationship with a client.
I cared very much about the personal story of the client within the game, but couldn’t locate a more general topic/cause that the game wanted me to care about.
Modeling a conversation between a therapist and their client would rarely require visuals, for that reason i think Twine is a great choice!
Although the game choices didn’t seem to necessarily edit the path you were on, they did affect your access to knowledge along the path, which i thought was an interesting approach. My lack of information made me put more thought into my later responses, because i couldn’t just say “I don’t know” to the client, and I didn’t feel very confident about saying any of the given options either.
Your game felt so suspenseful with the discovery aspect of having to decipher which of the text options was a lie!