In Sunnyvale, CA, players compete to block affordable housing from their own neighborhoods while pushing for it in others. This central objective of the game is designed to simulate a core hypocrisy of the liberal NIMBY movement—they often support the construction of affordable housing in theory but oppose it in their own communities. By creating a game in which this is the incentive of every player, we were able to demonstrate what happens when this attitude is universal: very little housing gets built.
The process of creating Sunnyvale, CA was unlike any game I’ve designed before in that our initial minimum viable prototype was very successful, but our subsequent playtests kept getting worse from there. I’ve always known this is a possibility: sometimes you make bad changes and need to find out through experience. I’ve even experienced this before: sometimes, you just design a bad mechanic, or the balance is too far off for the playtest to be fun. What was different and disheartening here was the continued deterioration over the course of multiple iterations.
Ultimately, I think my initial failure to help improve the prototype was due to my inexperience with designing serious games. In serious games, it is important to create the desired aesthetic experience and achieve learning objectives at the same time. We made multiple changes to prioritize the learning experience after the first playtest (for example, creating a detailed map and objections that realistically interacted with it) that harmed player engagement. A plodding thicket of procedure that ultimately gummed up every player’s board such that no housing construction was possible may have been accurate to the reality of local politics, but it isn’t engaging at all, and players need to be engaged to learn.
What saved the game, in the end, was expanding the scope of what the game simulated to reintroduce drama. The NIMBY movement does not exist in a vacuum: in California, activism at the state level has created significant pressure on towns to permit the construction of new homes. To reflect this response to the player’s actions, we introduced a Housing Crisis tracker. If players do not construct housing, the Housing Crisis gets worse over time, and the tracker communicates the number of homeless that result from the players’ collective inaction. Further adding to the drama, each individual increase in the crisis level is unpredictable. When the level increases, it forces progress on housing and the removal of blockages created by the players. This creates inflection points and constant tension in the game, forcing action to occur. With this change, players were once again laughing and curious, and that opened them up to learning.
Going forward, I’ve learned a valuable lesson—serious games need to be interesting first, and only then are they capable of education.
