I think Cabinets of Curiosity was so interesting to make for an educational game because our design was such a systems-heavy one. The colonial history of museum collections is such a multi-layered, complicated topic to teach, which is why I believe our group felt that this topic needed a systems approach to respectfully do it justice. We heavily focused on how MDA could drive our learning objective of teaching players about this colonial history. Our game didn’t just ask learners to memorize different facts about different cultural belongings and/or historical events. Instead, player actions mirrored actual museum collections practices, such as 1.) collecting through warfare, the black market, or by commission, 2.) investigating a belonging’s provenance, or 3.) repatriating a belonging. Even moreso, these player actions became constrained or strengthened by the modifiers applied by different historical event cards each round, reflecting the necessity of historical context to understand how museum collection practices were accepted or considered unethical throughout different time periods. Through mechanics designed to make the game immersive, we tried to evoke feelings of discomfort to push players to rethink their relationships to museums.
Coming from the GSE to design my first-ever game, I learned so much about my own capability to make a game that could facilitate deep learning experiences. Both in this class and in my Learning, Design, & Technology program, we talked about how memorization is not necessarily evidence of actual learning. I really appreciated how our systems-level approach to designing an educational game guided players to “learn by doing,” in a way. I also liked how our game not only asked our players to wrestle with their own morals but also demanded that we, the designers, also do so as we developed it. When trying to educate on such a heavy and power-laden topic, every decision to include, or not include, certain information or mechanics (which then opened up or constrained players’ strategies or options for other actions) felt so much more heightened because the stakes involved real communities, cultural belongings, and institutions. P1 helped me think about my capstone project through an educational lens but as a game designer, and I learned how to leverage “fun” in a way that makes educational content “sticky.”
Caption for featured image: This image shows a test game piece. While this game piece was never incorporated into our game, I had fun testing out the GSE Makery and imagining how I could use the maker space for future game design.
