I was a part of team 1, which created Cook Off!, a game that helps players practice cooking under a budget. Cook Off! mixes resource management and judging mechanisms to promote strategic thinking on how to balance budget with emotional satisfaction: players can score points by not only fulfilling nutritional requirements, but also by creating the most desirable dish amongst other players. Presented with a limited budget, random economic events, and savings goals that offer special abilities, players get to practice that balance under unexpected influences like real life.
Before starting the project, I had a much more limited understanding of what an education game can be. I expected it to be like Chronology or Bananagrams – games that explicitly focus on a knowledge domain to educate on. Throughout lectures, I realized that educational games can also grow implicit cognitive skills (e.g. learning how to work together via Pandemic) and that helped me broaden my vision for P1 could be. Although my team ended up focusing on explicitly educating on a specific domain, which is cooking and budgeting in our case, I find myself with a much broader understanding of the genre of educational games.
Playtesting and rapid prototyping for P1 happened at a much more frequent pace than I expected. Although I have many HCI / Design experiences before this class, I found myself frequently editing mechanics even during the game based on how players are reacting, which pushed me to be very sensitive to player dynamics and emotions. However, I did struggle with balancing rapid iteration with getting a good sample size before making a design change. Qualitative user research is always hard, especially in a school setting when sample sizes are never as big as we would want it to be. The balance just felt even more tough when we are trying to tweak so many variables between different playtests. Going forward, I definitely want to be more careful with version control and playtest documentation to capture every single detailed change.
Designing an educational game was also challenging in that I often found big gaps between our design intention and how it plays out in the player dynamics. In our playtests, players tend to be interested in winning the game, not in educating themselves through the game. The problem became: how can we embed the learning experience within the fun? How can we have players learn without feeling like they are being educated? Sometimes, my team would come up with a mechanic that players find no purpose in, since it only adds to the education, not to the winning of the game. Going forward, I want to focus on exploring more ways to embed the “seriousness” of the game with the mechanics that feel fun.
