Prior to this class, I had never made a game before. In my mind I was thinking, “Why am I taking a game design class, I’m not even a gamer!” But as I took this class, and looked back on my experiences with games, I slowly started to realize that games were all around me throughout my life.
I’d always loved the idea of games as a form of education, because as an avid Quizlet user in my middle school French class, I loved the mini-games I could play with the French-to-English flashcards I had made (those were the good days when Quizlet was free). It was a fun way to learn my French vocabulary; much more fun than simple flashcards. So when I first heard “teaching game”, those were the kinds of games that first came to my mind. There’s a question and an answer, and through some gameplay, you learn the answer to its corresponding question.
Now I know that teaching games can be a lot more than that. In fact, none of the games made in this class had a simple question-to-answer mechanic, nor was it about memorizing as many words as possible. In our first brainstorming session, we were asked what we could teach – our group decided to go with my teammate Game’s idea about teaching people how to NOT get scammed. But hey, if it’s a game, couldn’t we feed into our fantasy and pretend to be the villain for once? That’s how Scamboo! came to life – teaching people how NOT to get scammed, by teaching them how to scam.
My favorite moment from developing Scamboo! was deciding the scammer profile names. Our team came from all over the globe: Game from Thailand, Rachel from China, Olu from Nigeria, and me (Yuina) from Japan – but I think the first conversation that really brought us together was when we started telling stories about what kind of scamming happens in our own home countries.
For example, Olu shared that “Yahoo Boys” are a slang term for young boys in Nigeria pretending to be a “Nigerian Prince” to scam people, hence we have “Yahooze”. “Sagishi”, Japanese for con artist, became “Sagi-sushi”. There are more stories I could share, but I should probably keep it here.
Those story-swapping conversations turned out to be exactly what we wanted Scamboo! to create at the table: people talking through how scams actually work, together.
Getting there was humbling, though. Internally playtesting the game ourselves, we painfully noticed how we, the game creators ourselves, had skipped every line of educational text we had carefully written, and simply matched icons – but the game was still sailing smoothly! That was my biggest takeaway – players learn what the game rewards, not what the designer hopes they’ll read.
I started this class insisting I wasn’t a gamer – but now, I don’t think I can look at a game without asking what it’s secretly teaching!
