I’m a Public Policy major. I love talking about and finding new ways to communicate about policy. I also love games, and have regularly been designing them since the 5th grade. I’m honestly surprised I’d never designed a serious game before this point. This is despite me having long seen policy and game design as sympathetic to each other. Both are disciplines about constructing a set of rules and incentives; both are about managing the emergent behavior of complex systems. Even so, in my head, there was some sort of border. My interest in policy was one thing, and my interest in games was another. The closest I got was Ashen Lands, a roleplaying game about hope and despair in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Created in the midst of the pandemic, it was no doubt influenced by the real world, but any statements it had to make about real life were purely metaphorical.
Besides Ashen Lands, my design style was generally un-serious. I focused on making games that were approachable and lighthearted: games about hunting giant monsters, gardening, cooking, and the like. After this class, I still have as much love for those sorts of games as I ever did. They bring people together and give them joy. That’s valuable as an end in itself. But I’m left utterly baffled why I never explored serious games before. They’re an incredible way to communicate about policy, to bring together my two passions into the same whole.
This class taught me that serious games are a great way to get people really invested in complex systems, and to actually understand their nuance. Sure, you can tell people that “I just have a few concerns about the selected location for this housing project,’ multiplied across a thousand projects and a thousand locations, creates a housing crisis. But it is much more powerful to see that aggregate effect play out in real time, on your own table, and to in the process read the names of all the reasonable-sounding objections that got you there.
I’m equally excited about the other serious games I began in this class, which explored the ways we sometimes use short-form video as an emotional painkiller and the pressure placed on children to get into elite colleges, and would love to further develop them in the future. Meanwhile, I have countless more ideas for future serious games: I want to create a game that explains induced demand for traffic and the “one more lane” fallacy, a game that explains the nuances of voting systems, and a game that explores the origins of pork-barrel politics. Plus, I suspect every new policy and literature class I take from here on out will produce at least one new idea for a serious game.
Aside from just helping me to discover the potential of serious games, this class further expanded my toolkit as a designer. In particular, the reading on rules-writing was particularly helpful: all too often, this was a topic that I approached with the same tools I’ve used in other writing domains, flying essentially on instinct and not giving rules the attention they deserved as a medium of their own. My initial rules for both Sunnyvale and Helicopter Parent were difficult to understand and needed substantial edits. I’m glad this class challenged me to improve in this area, and I hope to continue improving in the future.
I also really enjoyed playing Peacemaker towards the start of the class and critically analyzing it. These ‘Critical Play’ assignments were a common feature of 247G, and I wish there had been more of them here. I get so much more out of games when I play and write about them than when I only play.
Finally, I loved the opportunity to begin exploring interactive fiction as a medium for P2. I immediately went off and did something weird: my interactive fiction was a short-form video experience, so on some level I feel like I didn’t really give the medium a fair shot. I hope to return in the near future and work on a more traditional interactive fiction, so I have a proper base to work from. The strong identification between the player and the point-of-view character in interactive fiction seems ripe for powerful moments. While only somewhat related, I hope to apply the lessons from this class about interactive fiction to my current work designing solo TTRPGs for Village on Stilts. With both solo TTRPGs and interactive fiction, the games benefit from the player’s strong association with the protagonist, and present a satisfying story while allowing the player substantial agency.
In addition to this, I hope to massively expand my P2, “Trance,” in the near future. At present, the various story threads are extremely linear. With a much larger library of content, I think that players would begin to feel the influence of the algorithm more strongly, and I’d be able to create larger, branching storylines.
Overall, this class was a rich source of new ideas and mediums. My list of games to work on in the near future is now officially far too long.
