Before this project, I thought a teaching game just needed to be fun, since games are a way of learning anyway. Then I watched the GDC talk “Precision of Emotion: A New Kind of ‘Fun’ Approach in Educational Games,” which argued that fun is only a starting point. That was eye-opening: I realized we needed extra steps to build the learning into our mechanics.
I made Cave Talk with Sabrina, Jeffery, and Michael. My initial plan for the game was a decoding puzzle where players compared cave drawings with printed caveman phrases to work out what each syllable meant. But we debated our ideas for almost a whole class period, an evening, and office hours before landing on a first prototype that was different from mine. What I liked better was where we ended up: everyone builds one shared language from scratch. It was a new team dynamic, and I’m grateful for it: it taught me new skills for working in a group, like explaining my ideas, standing by them, and being ready to argue for them.
We wanted fellowship and challenge. The mechanics feed into each other: players attach a limited number of syllables to scenes, a Speaker describes a scene, and the Dictionary and Language Drift decide what carries over between rounds. The same talk said rules can encourage creativity, and Cave Talk’s rules do that: with so few syllables, words collide, so players get creative, leaning on gestures and tone to tell words apart, and start to see why homophones exist. In our assessment, players’ confidence with an unfamiliar language rose from 3.4 to 4.2 out of 5.
Playing the game myself was one of my favorite moments of the project. Some of our words became inside jokes, and it was fun to see the language develop. I got to watch that same fun again and again at other playtests during class: people speaking pure gibberish, giggling, and being so expressive just to get one idea across.
Caption: Lucas holding a yellow stick and saying it as “popo lili” after our game has passed.
I drew all the art myself, and I am not an artist, as you can tell from the cards. At first, some drawings were unclear: one group took my rock for fire and made a word for it, which was devastating to my artistic skills.
The thing I learned most from this project is how much being present matters on a team. For the first couple of weeks I was sick and working on another project, and I wasn’t as present for my team as I wanted to be. I often had to ask, “How was the playtest? What should we change?” instead of adding to that conversation, and I wish I had. My teammates were great about filling me in, but hearing about a playtest isn’t the same as seeing it, and I wanted to help make those decisions, not just receive them. Next time, I will host more of my own playtests. Watching players myself would help me see what needs fixing, which would make me a stronger designer and let me contribute more to my team, bringing my own observations to those discussions instead of just asking for theirs.
