I used to think of a teaching game to be teaching disciplinary knowledge only – but now my thought boundaries have been significantly expanded. From our own game teaching people travel knowledge, to other groups’ fascinating games teaching people how to not get scammed, or how to put together a new language, or figuring out the origins of artifacts in museums. This made me realize you could practically teach anything to people in a fun way.
Our game, Don’t Die in Belladora, affords mainly the fun of discovery and challenge, which in a way resembles the fun of solo traveling in real life. Players get to accumulate resources and partake in unknown events which may or may not bring positive results. The unknownness and randomness in itself is part of the experience too.
Watching others play the game you know so much about was really a torture, because you have to resist the urge to explain things to them when they seem confused or even asked questions. I think this resembles when one is raising a toddler and watching them learn new tasks, sometimes you have to let them learn to fail and figure things out on their own to understand what/where you could’ve done better at.
I think what’s interesting about the process is that I’ve come to learn how to both diverge one very simple original idea to a lot of procedural and conceptual knowledge, and distill these complicated knowledge down to simple rules and informational design to make it digestable for players to understand within a reasonable amount of time. I also learned how to adjust and finesse different parts of the game experience to keep players’ motivation alive.
If I think of P1 as a game itself, I think the teaching team did a great job designing the game for us. There was fellowship built in to the process, there was challenge and expression involved too. By playing different kinds of table top games every class with team members, we not only got familiarized with different prototypes of card games, but also got to build familiarity and comradery with one another. I also learned constant playtesting with different populations is super important – actually running the game could always give you information that you didn’t think about. Going forward, I will carry that humbleness with me too.
