After months of deliberation, Games for Changed announced its G4C Award winners last night in four categories: Most Innovative, Best Gameplay, Most Significant Impact, and Game of the Year. Without further ado, the winners are:
Blindside (Most Innovative) Developer: Epicycle / Platform: Mac, PC, iOS
A fully-immersive 3D audio adventure set in a world you’ll never see. Inspired by one of the creators’ personal story of being temporarily blinded in a high school chemistry accident. A Kickstarter success story with 200 percent of its goal raised.
Reach for the Sun (Best Gameplay)
Developer: Filament Games / Platform: Web
Behind all those leaves, roots, and petals is an intelligent bio-machine of starch, nutrients, and water. Help a young seedling grow and reproduce before winter approaches. From previous Games for Change Award winning-studio Filament Games and funded by the US Department of Education.
Data Dealer (Most Significant Impact)
Developer: Cuteacute Media OG / Platform: Web
A game about collecting, collating and selling personal data. Funded by several Viennese and Austrian government agencies supporting arts and culture.
Quandary (Game of the Year) Developer: Learning Games Network / Platform: Mac, PC
Players shape the future of a new society while learning how to recognize ethical issues and deal with challenging situations in their own lives. The latest from the Learning Games Network, a spin-off of The Education Arcade at MIT and the Games+Learning+Society Program at the University of Wisconsin.
Also during the event, gaming luminary Jesse Schell was presented with the debut “Game Changer” Award, recognizing his significant, global contributions to the gaming community and his work to inspire and mentor new generations of game creators, by Drew Davidson, the Director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. Schell is an award-winning game designer, acclaimed author, CEO of Schell Games, and Distinguished Professor at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Schell Games specializes in creating transformational games, or games that change people and society for the better. It recently celebrated its 10th anniversary as well.
Also during the event, gaming luminary Jesse Schell was presented with the debut “Game Changer” Award, recognizing his significant, global contributions to the gaming community and his work to inspire and mentor new generations of game creators, by Drew Davidson, the Director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. Schell is an award-winning game designer, acclaimed author, CEO of Schell Games, and Distinguished Professor at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Schell Games specializes in creating transformational games, or games that change people and society for the better. It recently celebrated its 10th anniversary as well.
Finalists were selected by a blue-ribbon jury, including Jay Geneske (Rockefeller Foundation), Tom Giardino (Valve Corporation), Eric Hedaa (Nike), and David G. Wilson (EON Entertainment), who were on site at the 10th Annual Games for Change Festival to present the awards to the winners. Jane McGonigal, world-renowned game designer and public speaker could not attend the ceremony but participated in the selection of the winners.
Games for Change awards the $35,000 prize for the Sex Etc. Game Design Competition to Kaho Abe and Ramsey Nasser for their game, Safe Sex With Friends.
The 10th Anniversary Games for Change Festival kicked off yesterday, and it has been an amazing one so far. Here are some highlights:
Sex Etc. Game Design Competition: Winners Announced! Safe Sex With Friends took the $35,000 grand prize in our first-ever game design competition. Designers Kaho Abe (NYU Game Center), Ramsey Nasser, and Sarah Schoemann (NYU-Poly) will work with Answer, a progressive nonprofit with more than 30 years’ experience providing and promoting sexuality awareness to young people.
The three finalists included Safe Sex with Friends, SexEd Super Task Force, and Check/Mate. After hearing presentations from finalists, and careful deliberation, jurors Matt Parker, Lana Dakan, Lucinda Holt, and Naomi Clark, selected Safe Sex with Friends as the winning game. Safe Sex With Friends is a social web and mobile game that uses a simple pick-up-and-play mechanic to teach teens and young adults the basics of when to use barrier protection for safer sex. By referencing the familiar game-style of tile-based word games such a Scrabble, Safe Sex with Friends teaches safer-sex methods in an approachable and engaging way that’s easy to learn but hard to master.
“We are really excited, and so grateful for this,” Kaho and Ramsey said after they were announced as the winning game designers. “We really wish that Sarah were here to accept this honor on stage with us.”
Half the Sky: The Game Impact Report Published
Learn about the metrics and partnerships behind Half the Sky: The Game, a large-scale Facebook game for change based on the award-winning book ”Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide.” Since launching in March, the Half the Sky game has seen 851,000 players, who have triggered donations for 192,300 in books and $118,040 in life-changing surgeries. Donations total $342,316. Download the full report here.
Amplify Learning Games Revealed
Indie game developers working with Amplify unveiled their new games for learning at the Festival. Schell Games, Zachtronics, Preloaded, Highline Games, Ira Fay Games, Strange Loop and Bossa presented demos of their games, which are being piloted in schools across the country. The games are playable on the Amplify Tablet and iOS, and will be released in spring 2014. Read about the games on Amplify’s site. Upper One Games: A New Company from CITC and E-Line Media
The Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC) in Anchorage, Alaska, and E-Line Media launched Upper One Games to develop a robust slate of commercial and educational games infused with Alaska Native culture, knowledge and values designed for relevancy in a global digital-gaming marketplace. More on the partnership available here.
Pipe Trouble Now on iPhone, Passes Independent Review
In the wake of a positive independent review, Pipe Trouble, a controversial web game about natural gas pipelines, is now available for the iPhone. Pipe Trouble’s controversy began in March, sparked by reports that the game allows players to blow up pipelines and advocates eco-terrorism. The controversy spread nationally and into highest levels of Canadian government, ultimately pressuring public broadcaster TVO to pull links to the game from their website and launch an independent review.
“Pipe Trouble does not support, glamourize or advocate violence in any way… Pipe Trouble is not a game about blowing up pipelines,” the report states. “It is a game about building pipelines. To succeed, players must pit their spatial ability and speed against economics, regulations, efficiency, the environment and yes, sabotage. The game is designed to make you think, and it does.”
Since the independent review began there has been a second wave of corrective coverage, often raising questions of game literacy and outdated assumptions surrounding the video game medium, Pop Sandbox wrote in a press release.
In attempts to improve the environment, we do things like recycle and use energy-efficient lightbulbs. But what if our responsibilities in — and impact on — our cities’ environments were far greater? In Eskom Energy Planner, players are given complete control over the electrical infrastructure of a virtual city, putting them in charge of managing everything from power plants to lights left on in an unused room.
Players build different types of power plants to keep the city running, tasked with balancing each plant’s positive and negative impacts on the happiness and environmentally-friendliness of the city. In the time waiting for revenue to develop, players explore smaller ways to be environmentally friendly, by turning off lights in unused rooms or fixing a mess of power cords in an office space. This versatile gameplay showcases the point that environmental strategies cannot merely be top-down or bottom-up, but rather a mix of the two.
To learn more about this Most Significant Impact Game nominee, we got in touch with Executive Creative Director Michael Wolf of Formula D Interactive.
What motivates you to make games for social impact?
To answer this, I need to address two questions: First, what motivates us to work on projects that have the goal to improve a social or environmental condition? I mean, there is much better money in selling stuff to people that they don’t really need. For us designers it is the same level of skill and effort that goes into designing a game that targets people’s unhealthy eating habits as there is to create a gamified shopping mall.
However, the personal rewards are different. Most of us including myself are happier people when our work affects our world positively. So, instilling positive social change with our work is something we are proud of at Formula D.
The other question is, “Why games?” The assumption that computer games can have a positive impact on the social fabric of our societies is bold and fascinating. But it is also controversial.
I am glad that there are also critical voices which challenge the TED-style claims that games are about to change the world. As designers and enthusiasts of serious games we need to be careful not to promise more than we can deliver.
However, I don’t have a doubt that games are fantastic vehicles to influence behavior. Games allow people to slip into unfamiliar and sometimes unpopular roles. They are consequential environments, where we can safely experiment with actions and effects, most of which we would not dare to try in reality.
To me, at the core of changing behavior is deep experiential learning. We change our behavior when something hurts, for example, when we burn our fingers. Behaviors that are more difficult to change are the ones that don’t effect the “now,” but our future, like smoking for example, or the behaviors that don’t affect us directly, but our environments and neighbors.
Games can create immersive environments, which let us experience future scenarios based on our immediate actions; they may make us feel compassionate as we identify with the role of somebody else. This “probable me” of role play is one of the most powerful ways of learning. To me this bares the true potential of games for social impact.
How long has Eskom Energy Planner been in development, and what tools were used to make it? What’s your team’s background in making games?
We initially developed a very basic energy game for a touch table exhibit in the Necsa Visitor Centre, for South Africa’s Nuclear Energy Corporation. The budget allocation for this exhibit was very low, but since we saw the potential of the game, we agreed to deliver the project, making sure we maintained the copyright of it. We then approached Eskom and suggested our energy game as part of their demand management campaign. They liked the idea.
From the initial engagement to the current version of the game, we have gone through various iterations; altogether we worked on the game for eight months spread over two years. The game is built in ActionScript 3 with a PHP backend and MySQL database for user registration and score tracking.
Formula D Interactive is not a classical game design company. We are all about technology and 21st-century learning strategies, of which gaming is a fundamental part. Our interactive exhibit work for science centers and museums often comprises game elements. These games can be around recycling, life skills, or science subjects like nanotechnology and chemistry.
We also create interactive content for corporate learning. The business world has used board games to simulate business processes and strategies for decades, and we help them to tap into the potential of digital games. Our favorite projects, however, are games that have the potential to fuel positive social change.
How did Eskom come to purchase Energy Planner? Can you describe your partnership with them?
At first, Eskom did not really engage much in the development of the game. They liked the game, but it seemed they hadn’t really decided what to do with it. But in the most recent and longest project phase Eskom engaged two of their specialists to be part of the design team: one demand management expert and an energy engineer who provided us with real energy data and helped create the logic of the back-end calculations. Their subject matter experts really pushed the game to the next level.
How did developing Eskom Energy Planner differ from Formula D Interactive’s past projects? What was the most important lesson your team learned from making this game that could be applied to other games for change projects?
I think compared to other projects Eskom Energy Planner may have a bigger reach and thus a higher potential in terms of its impact on energy behavior in South Africa. We also see a lot of opportunity for the game to be used as a training and induction tool for Eskom employees and the recruitment of new staff.
With the continued commitment of Eskom we will be able to build different levels and adjustable scenarios for different audiences and purposes. Ultimately, we would like to make the game a crowed-sourced problem-solving platform for real-world energy challenges.
An important lesson learned not only from this project is that building a good game for social or environmental impact is not enough. Specifically for conservative companies like Eskom, using a game in their communication strategy is unprecedented. Clients of these projects need more than good game designers, they need strategic thinking for the implementation and roll-out of the game as well.
Is there a game for social impact you wish you had designed or want to design? What is it and why?
We have a lot of ideas. I am personally extremely interested in life skills, psychoanalysis and (self)coaching. In 2011 we created the Life Choices touch table game, a multiplayer mini-game for teenagers. Players are presented with various everyday life scenarios and have to make decisions, which lead them to the next scenario within a decision tree. It would be exciting to develop this further and possibly create games as a first aid for people who experience a personal crisis in their lives.
What do you think of the current state of games for social impact?
I think it’s early days. Even the larger category of serious games, which includes highly commercial products, still seems to be a niche. Recently, my daughter had her fist day at school and the headmaster exclaimed in his speech that this was the beginning of a new era for the kids: the era of learning!
Unfortunately, this statement represents a very common perception that fun and games, basically the majority of activities before one starts school, have little to do with learning. Once we get games back into schools, we may be surprised about the social impact.
Quandary, the latest game by the Learning Games Network, allows players to shape the future of a new society while learning how to recognize ethical issues and deal with challenging situations in their own lives.
Designed for players aged aged 8 to 14, Quandary is free-to-play online here. Set in a fantastical science fiction world with graphic novel-style storytelling, players lead a new human colony on a distant planet. By sorting the colonists’ thoughts into facts, solutions, and opinions and taking into account arguments from multiple perspectives, players develop skills such as critical thinking and decision-making.
We contacted executive producer Peter Stidwill to ask about the development process of Quandary.
What motivates you to make games for social impact?
Our philosophy at the Learning Games Network is that play is how we learn best. Our motivation comes from seeing players respond positively when engaging in challenging gameplay that requires thoughtfulness and reflection. Quandary is a perfect example of a game that does just this. Players must make difficult decisions in which there are no clear right or wrong answers but important consequences. They gain practice in recognizing ethical issues, equipping them to deal with challenging situations in their own lives.
How long was Quandary in development and what tools were used to make it?
Quandary was developed by a team of experts across the fields of child development, social and emotional learning, and game design, and took over two years from conception to launch.
Scholars from Harvard and Tufts University devised a prototype that was tested for viability. Designers at the MIT Education Arcade and the Learning Games Network, a nonprofit spin-off of the MIT Education Arcade and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Games+Learning+Society Center, refined the game. Technical and graphic production was by FableVision, an award-winning storytelling digital media production and learning company. The main production tool was Adobe Flash.
How did you fund the game?
Quandary was funded by a private family foundation that identified gaming as one of their key platforms to engage a young audience in thinking about ethical issues, emphasizing skills such as critical thinking, perspective-taking, and decision-making. The funder also wanted to maximize reach and so the game is completely free to play at http://www.quandarygame.org.
How did you come up with the scenarios in Quandary?
In consultation with child development experts, we sought to create an engaging narrative that was both relatable but also fantastical. We conceived of a captivating graphic novel style that invokes a world where pre-industrial technology meets fantastical science fiction as human colonists attempt to build a viable outpost on a distant planet. This game world provides a space rife with ethical dilemmas and a diverse set of characters and perspectives, and crucially gives the player the freedom of identity to explore their role.
Of the three scenarios currently in the game, we sought a balance between dilemmas immediately relevant to the target audience (e.g., the formation of cliques within a group) and novel situations (e.g., a predator attacking precious food supplies). We also wanted a mix of individual, community, and societal dilemmas.
How many schools are using Quandary? What sort of feedback have you gotten from players/students, teachers, or parents?
Unlike many educational games, we were lucky enough to have a marketing budget that allowed us to advertise via the Cartoon Network website, which helped drive high traffic during our launch period. We coupled this with a grassroots push to our teacher networks and teamed-up with BrainPOP to feature the game on their GameUp portal. Quandary will also be one of the first games to be featured on the new Playful Learning portal launching this summer, driving uptake and increasing the sharing of teacher tips and classroom implementation ideas. Players, teachers, and parents alike have been very receptive. We’ve been featured on Moms Rising (Quandary: Help your child think ethically through gameplay), and we’ve had numerous requests for new features and content — something we are addressing with an extension to the game coming later this year. Watch this space!
What do you think of the current state of games for social impact?
While there are many great examples of games for learning and change, there are still significant barriers that limit uptake. Collections such as Games for Change’s own site are a great way for people to find, discuss, and build work in our field. But there is a distribution problem within the school context and tackling it is a core part of our mission at the Learning Games Network. That’s why this summer, along with our partners, we’re launching Playful Learning.
Playful Learning is a new initiative that comprises a growing knowledge base of games (learning games and commercial games alike) and a network of grassroots teachers ranging from games-based learning gurus to the playfully curious. We want to equip teachers with the knowledge, tools, and support they need to bring alive the philosophy that we learn best through play.
What if there was no such thing as freedom of the press? What would you do if your family was held hostage by a man called “The Great and Honorable Leader” (a dictator who is anything but), and to keep them alive, you had to spread propaganda as widely as possible? The Republia Times emulates these scenarios — all you need to do is play to find out what happens next.
The Republia Times is a simply designed Flash game that showcases the warped nature of media in a dictator-led society. At the start of the game you are named editor-in-chief of Republia’s most important newspaper, and are under orders from “The Great and Honorable Leader” to only publish articles representing the government and Republia in a positive light. The government holds your family hostage “as a precaution against influence,” and uses your family’s well-being as incentive to do as they say.
As editor you decide what articles are published by dragging and dropping headlines from the News Feed onto the paper itself, fitting articles on the page like pieces of a puzzle, and playing through each new day with the goal of increasing Readership and Loyalty (to please The Great and Honorable Leader, of course, and to keep your family safe).
Players start as oppressed journalists forced to publish propaganda, progress through the game’s exciting twist, and are finally forced into accepting an inevitable fate. We were fortunate to get in touch with independent game developer Lucas Pope, who created the game in under 48 hours at the Ludum Dare game-making competition, to find out more about what went into the creation of The Republia Times.
What motivates you to make games for social impact?
Honestly, I don’t really set out to make a social impact with my games. The subject matter is something that interests me and I find it easier to construct a narrative using those building blocks. For Republia Times in particular, the rigid nature of a communist bureaucracy lends itself well to the game mechanics.
What tools were used to make The Republia Times?
I used Photoshop for art, Audacity and a Motif synth for sound, and TextMate for programming. The game is built on Flixel, a popular Flash library for low-resolution games.
What’s your background in making games?
I’ve been making games for most of my life. I started professionally in 1998 when a group of friends and I created a small game company in Virginia. Since then I’ve worked at a few larger studios. I enjoyed my time at big companies but working on other people’s games doesn’t give me the same satisfaction. I’m currently working independently.
What were the challenges of making this game in just 48 hours in Ludum Dare?
The biggest challenge was getting enough food and sleep. I really enjoyed the pressure but it takes a lot of concentration. I’ve only made two 48-hour games and I’d say I got lucky both times. The key for me was finding a solid, simple concept quickly. My basic strategy for any game is to have nearly the entire thing mapped out in my head very early. If I can get to that point quickly then the actual execution is a lot of fun and goes quickly.
The Republia Times was a little tricky because even after I had the concept worked out, I needed to write a lot of topical, fictional headline text. Being creative with newspaper copy under severe time pressure is a skill I hadn’t exercised.
Were there things that had to be cut, or more features you wanted to implement?
I had originally envisioned many more stats for the player’s performance. The final game has only Readership and Loyalty but I started with a few more that I can’t even remember now. I got a little ways into implementing more stats but soon realized that it would require more descriptive article text. It’s hard to encode multiple discrete topics clearly in just a few lines of text. I cut it down to just specifying Loyal/Disloyal and Interesting/Uninteresting for each article. That made it a lot clearer with the nice side-effect of removing any conscious concept of stats.
There’s also a few typos in the text that I regret not catching.
Papers Please and The Republia Times both take place in the same universe and have similar Orwellian themes/tones. Where do you draw inspiration for the style and worlds created in these games?
I enjoyed 1984 when I read it so I’d say that’s been a pretty big influence. As mentioned a few answers up, the setting just happens to work well with the kinds of game mechanics that I enjoy. Strict rules, external pressure, and oppressive bureaucracy all have direct effects on both what the player is doing from moment to moment and what their overall goals are.
Is there a game for social impact you want to design? What is it and why?
My mind is completely occupied by my current project, so I’d say no, not at the moment.
What do you think of the current state of games for social impact?
Game development is more accessible than ever and I’m happy to see gaming grow as a medium. Games are a pretty critical way to communicate with people these days so it’s the perfect place to deliver a social message.
People-eating monsters have taken over the city, and it’s up to you to make it out alive. One catch: you have suddenly become totally blind.
BlindSide, a Games for Change Award nominee in the Most Innovative category, gives players the experience of living without sight as they hear their way through a danger-filled city. It is a single-player, audio horror adventure game without any visual elements, where players navigate the main character, Case, by rotating their iOS device or using their computer’s keyboard.
BlindSide was inspired by one of the designers’ temporary experience with blindness in high school. To learn more about the creative process behind the game, we reached out to developers Michael T. Astolfi and Aaron Rasmussen for a Q&A, below.
What motivates you to make games for social impact?
In the case of BlindSide, we were partially motivated by Aaron’s personal experience with blindness. He wanted to share with others his experience of waking up blind in a world strongly oriented towards those who can see. We thought that by creating a rough simulation of the sudden loss of sight, we might be able to provide players with both an engaging piece of entertainment and also offer them a better understanding of how much we rely on sight to complete even simple tasks.
How long was BlindSide in development, and what development tools did you use to make it? What’s your team’s background in making games?
It took us about a year to finish BlindSide from concept to launch. We both had other ventures/day jobs, so we joke that BlindSide was primarily created between the hours of 12 a.m. and 4 a.m. We used Unity Pro as our game engine, and a variety of audio tools for sound creation and editing. This was Aaron’s first game, not counting the ones he made on his TI-83 in high school, and it was Michael’s second public release after receiving a Master’s in The Design and Psychology of Video Games from NYU’s Gallatin School.
What do you want people to take away from your game? We want people to come away with a little more perspective on what it’s like to be blind, and what navigating a world without the use of sight is like. We want people to take away an exciting game experience, but hope it increases empathy as well.
What was the biggest challenge in designing an audio-only game? What advice do you have for other developers who are creating audio-driven environments?
We aimed high with this game, and created a fully collidable 3D world you could move around in freely. Striking a balance between too much exposition and too little was difficult. One of the hardest parts was realizing that without graphics some simple tasks, like crossing the street, could become major game challenges, and embracing that fact rather than fighting it.
The other big issue for us was cutting down our audio environments for mobile. One of the outdoor scenes went from over 30 simultaneous sound sources to 14. Our advice to other developers is to aim high — don’t forget that people navigate our world without sight every day. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to create as rich of a game experience without graphics as you would with them.
Is there a game for change you wish you had designed? What is it and why? Aaron: Yes, it’s not one of the nominees, but I wish I would’ve created Battlefield 3‘s single-player campaign. It might be a major, triple-A release, but so much effort was put into a compelling experience that I walked away from it feeling, in a visceral way, that war was terrible. It’s easy to romanticize battle in first-person shooters, but I think they did a great job of drawing in a human element and conveying the sadness of war even in moments of triumph.
Michael: Foldit for sure. Not only does it put the internet to work on meaningful questions that have helped generate significant medical breakthroughs, it’s also a teaching tool, and a lot of fun. It’s a great example of the potential games have to exist as more than just entertainment. This medium provides a fantastic opportunity to bridge disciplines in unique ways, and to grow in otherwise inaccessible niches.
What do you think of the current state of games for social impact?
Games have reached nearly the same level as movies as an art form, and any sufficiently disseminated art can create major social impact. It’s amazing that in our lifetimes, games have gone from very simple, stylized narratives like Super Mario Bros., to emotional experiences that can make you cringe from racism like in BioShock Infinite, or contemplate your own mortality like in Passage.
Pictured right: A photo of Rose Schneiderman (Photo credit: Library of Congress). Pictured left: The Chronometer Time Machine, mid-time jump (Illustration by Liza Singer).
Get ready to put on your reporter’s hat and enter Jewish Time Jump: New York, an interactive story and place-based augmented reality game created to teach players a part of Jewish and American history.
In Jewish Time Jump, available on iPhone and iPad, players work as a reporter for the Jewish Time Jump Gazette and travel back in time to the early 1900s in Greenwich Village, New York, where they investigate key events surrounding the Uprising of 20,000. Developer ConverJent, a resident organization of Clal: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, launched the game in May.
Rabbi Owen Gottlieb, the director and founder of ConverJent, produced, wrote, and co-designed Jewish Time Jump with co-game designer Jennifer Ash. Games for Change had the chance to ask them both about the creation and inspiration for the game.
What’s your background in making games? Rabbi Owen Gottlieb: I have been designing games since my childhood in the early ’80s – in elementary school, on the playground, at home, and at camp. My tools ranged from tag-style rules and Nerf toys to home computers. My oldest friend, Chris Alfieri, and I loved digital games and analogue games — both playing and designing. Before we had computers to work with, Chris and I would use markers and paper to devise our own arcade games and illustrated game levels. Chris had introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons and went about designing our own role-playing game based on the original sci-fi mini-series V, complete with full designs of the mothership.
It wasn’t long before Chris and I were designing arcade games using The Games Creator by David and Richard Darling on my new Commodore 128. We designed some arcade games with complex and intricate sprite patterns. Chris would compose the music in MIDI. I still think The Games Creator software was one of the coolest toy and toolkits I have ever used.
In college, many of my closest friends were gamers. They were among the first to play Magic: The Gathering and numerous other strategic board and card games. I was in a gaming community of practice and continue to be a part of that community. I also interned for documentary filmmakers including Ken Burns and made my own documentary and narrative films and videos. Working in documentary was critical for the kind of research, writing, and designing that went into Jewish Time Jump.
Prior to the rabbinate, I worked in internet software development, and then in screen and TV writing. These different fields have given me the opportunity to hone my skills in both technology production and narrative storytelling that I find so valuable to game design.
Through the Education and Jewish studies Ph.D. program at NYU, I have had the privilege of learning with learning scientists like professors Jan Plass, Ricki Goldman, and Chris Hoadley, and also from classmates and colleagues at the CREATE Lab and at the Games for Learning Institute. Professor Plass taught us to incorporate current learning sciences research into our designs. We developed cognitive, affective, and narrative design rationales for our projects.
I designed a number of games in Professor Plass’ course. It was in that class that I met the person who I would eventually invite to join me on ConverJent projects including Jewish Time Jump, Jennifer Ash.
Jennifer Ash: I have been designing and playing games my entire life and have fond early memories of hours at the library playing Museum Madness. As an undergraduate, I dove into learning game design and user research. In terms of game mechanics, I draw from experiences in board, tabletop, and video gaming as well as having GM’ed theatrical-style LARPs. I have interned as a game designer for Club Penguin DS at 1st Playable Productions and as a user experience designer for z/OS at IBM.
For my master’s thesis at NYU, I designed a dungeon crawler to enhance mathematical fluency. That game was part of a larger suite of games as part of the MFDC project. In 2012, I became an IGDA Scholar. Currently, I am a games user researcher at Bungie.
In the process of growing as a designer, I have studied a wide variety of topics from engineering and computer science to 3D modeling and psychology. I find the interdisciplinary nature of game design both challenging and rewarding.
How long has Jewish Time Jump been in development, and what tools were used to make it? How did you come to partner with The Covenant Foundation, who funded the game? Rabbi Owen Gottlieb: It’s wonderful to be nominated for a Games for Change Award, especially because it all began in the summer of 2010, when I attended a talk by Kurt Squire at my first Games for Change Festival and saw the work that he, Jim Mathews, and David Gagnon were doing with ARIS and in the situated documentary Dow Day. It was at that lecture that I connected with Kurt. I eventually met David Gagnon, a key partner in this project, and got to meet and work with Jim Mathews and the rest of the ARIS team, which includes educational designers Phil Dougherty, Jacob Hanshaw, and Chris Holden.
I knew that ConverJent could build something great for Jewish learning in the ARIS platform, and began grant writing for the project. ConverJent received a Signature Grant from The Covenant Foundation. The Covenant Foundation staff and leadership understood the potential impact of such a project.
The team began research and design once the grant was awarded in January 2012. We launched this May (2013), finishing up our grant, and I continue to iterate the game based on data from field play.
Our game required additional functionality in the ARIS system and ways of using ARIS that hadn’t been done before. We wanted to use the haptics of the iPhone, and needed to have access to the vibrate function during some key moments in the game. Sometimes a simple functionality addition allowed us to do all kinds of new designing in the game.
One example was a new ability to hide location markers on the editor side. We have the park densely packed with events and in order to go in and work on them, we often had to hide many of them from the screen. This kind of development in ARIS allowed us to build a much denser game than had ever been built before. We also worked to take advantage of just about every aspect of ARIS, some of which had not been used often, or in the combinations that had not been used. I particular enjoy the way we used certain scripts to animate moments in the game, such as combining Liza Singer’s beautiful illustration work with script tags that allowed us to effectively animate The Chronometer in the game.
How did you choose the events and locations? Rabbi Owen Gottlieb: In developing the game narrative and mechanics, we did a great deal of research and reading, working with professor Jonathan Krasner, our historical consultant, and I met and corresponded with a number of other historians. Four archival researchers scoured archives for the right photos, articles, fliers, and ephemera.
I knew I wanted the game to be in Washington Square Park and the NYU environs — a great play-space and, following the on-campus nature of Dow Day, an important model and benchmark for us. The Uprising of 20,000 is not well known, has a fascinating conflict, and is a moment of important labor and women’s history in addition to incredible Jewish and immigrant history.
The game has a sprawling narrative, and I had to choose the historic figures and events very carefully in order to develop game mechanics that would lead to learning: What was the work experience like? What did organizers face? What were the perspectives of owners and bosses who themselves worked their way up as immigrants working in sweatshops? Though centering on Jewish characters, what were the intersecting histories of other immigrants?
Professor Annelise Orleck’s research on Jewish women organizers, including Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, and others, was influential. Professor Richard Greenwald’s research includes details of the uprising that gave Ms. Ash and me ideas for some of the game mechanics we developed. Professor Hasia Diner reminded me that Jewish history is always intertwined with the history of other peoples, and so Italian and Irish immigrants play into the story as well as other historic figures like Anne Morgan and Frances Perkins. Professor Ben Jacobs and Jim Mathews provided key pedagogical insights in teaching history. Professor Robert Chazan helped me to wrestle with questions of how to best express multiple perspectives.
Jennifer Ash: Like a good film, games require editing as they progress. We had many factors to take into consideration when creating an augmented reality game for children and their families, such as keeping the locations within certain lines of sight within the park, carefully limiting and warning of road crossings, and understanding the game would need to be completed in a period of time that would be achievable in a supplementary classroom time frame. While these provided constraints, they also forced us to evaluate the truly important mechanics and points of history we wanted to present.
Rabbi Owen Gottlieb: One favorite reaction is when I watched a learner demonstrate a cool game move to his rabbi. The learner showed the rabbi how he was going to avoid an attack by strike breakers. The player had figured out how to use a technique available in the game that I hadn’t yet seen used to avoid attacks. It was a total rush to see the player use the game’s own tools to solve a problem in a new way.
What motivates you to make games for social impact? Rabbi Owen Gottlieb: By asking probing questions about history and considering multiple perspectives, which the study of history demands, I believe we can also ask challenging questions about ethics, dilemmas, and problem solving.
I love learning and culture, and I want to help nurture and encourage love of learning and passion for culture through today’s primary medium – the game and game design. I am particularly interested in my own research and design in the question of promoting cultural futures. How might games help people hand down tradition and cultures while also helping develop new, vibrant cultural expression?
The community of people making games for learning and social impact is inspiring to me — many of us are passionate learners and teachers.
Jennifer Ash: I was always encouraged to explore hobbies and topics that were of interest to me, and this provided me with a sense of curiosity that I want other students to find — subjects that they can be passionate about, but maybe haven’t look at from a positive angle.
Games provide a great foundation in which to build upon to encourage learning about various subjects. They have the ability to often simplify even the most complex systems into something that is challenging and frustrating in a motivational and inspiring manner.
Is there a game for change you wish you had designed or want to design? What is it and why? Rabbi Owen Gottlieb: I would have loved to have been a part of the team that designed Cosmic Encounter. I love that game. Today, I’m particularly excited about designing games based on Jewish sacred and wisdom literature and the halachic, or Jewish legal literature.
By playing amid those great ethical systems and modeling the many hypothetical cases and the most fair means of deciding cases, we can transmit the treasury of Jewish communal ethics and problem-solving systems. By introducing new generations to the wisdom of our tradition, we can plumb strategies for living better, ever-more caring and fair communities, listening to and hearing multiple perspectives, and seeking a more just society.
What do you think of the current state of video games for social good? Rabbi Owen Gottlieb: What an exciting time we live in and what an exciting community of educators, artists, engineers, designers, activists, learning scientists, policy makers, visionary foundations this is – all passionate about the engrossing nature of games and the potential games hold for learning and positive change.
I’m consistently excited by the new games, new research, and by seeing young people and not-so-young people playing, designing, learning, and engaging. Times are good!
Edited by Anne E. Peng, Games for Change volunteer.
While a plant’s life cycle may seem static and slow moving to the human eye, Reach for the Sun transforms the process of understanding how plants grow and photosynthesize into a dynamic and engaging experience. The player’s goal is to grow a plant across a season, span producing as many seeds as possible before winter strikes. Water, nutrients, and starch are the resources players must make use of to expand the plant into a network of roots, leaves, and flowers.
By the end of Reach for the Sun, players have learned all about photosynthesis, plant anatomy, pollination, and more. These learning processes are embedded in the game’s interface and aesthetics.
We recently reached out to Abby Friesen, game designer at Filament Games, to ask some questions about Reach for the Sun, which is nominated for Best Gameplay in the Games for Change Awards. The Filament Games team shared with us the following responses.
What motivates you to make games for social impact?
Games have the power to impact lives, and as a company, Filament wants to explore this to create games that give back to society. Educational and serious games give players chances to experience things they never would in real life and to make mistakes with no consequences. The benefits of hands-on learning are many and we believe that schools need more of this.
How long was Reach for the Sun in development? Reach for the Sun was developed in a couple of separate sprints, where we focused on key functionality, gathered feedback, implemented feedback and features, and finally released. All told the development time was about six months, but it took place over the course of a year.
What was key for securing funding from the U.S. Department of Education? What advice do you have for other developers pursuing government grants?
I think the key to receiving funding from the Department of Education is pretty similar to any other funding organization — be prepared to have an application fail, take their feedback to heart, and then use it to improve your idea for future submission or development. If an organization sees that you’re willing to respond to their feedback, that goes a long way in showing that you take their role and responsibilities seriously, which makes you a better candidate.
How did you come up with the mechanics for the game and decide to make it resource-oriented?
From a learning objective standpoint, it’s a pretty straightforward mapping: plants wage their own resource management wars every day, prioritizing growth based on their own internal clocks and reactions to seasonal stimuli. Having the player make those decisions themselves exposes them to the system-thinking approach of understanding plant anatomy in a very intuitive and enjoyable way.
Is there a game for social impact you wish you had designed or want to design? What is it and why?
I am personally interested in games that touch on non-academic subjects that can help us be better humans. These are difficult to design for because they aren’t things you can really test in a classroom or have a right or wrong answer, but I feel they are just as important. It would be a wonderful opportunity to make games that teach how to be a better human, games that give people tools to deal with tough life situations or simply raise awareness on the taboo life topics schools don’t like to discuss.
What do you think of the current state of games for social impact?
We seem to be scraping at the tip of an iceberg. Games for social impact are just starting to make their appearances in more and more classrooms and households. We learn new things about how games teach players every day, and one day there will come a time when games are a staple in all teaching environments.
Data Dealer‘s popularity is spreading like… well, a rising social networking site or rapidly expanding data-mining company! And it’s effectiveness in raising awareness about privacy issues is why it was nominated for Most Significant Impact in the Games for Change Awards.
In this online game, players take the role of a shady data dealer who collects, collates, and sells personal data. They get all the details on their friends, neighbors, and the rest of world while learning how to trick their users and make cash out of others’ personal info.
Data Dealer aims to raise awareness about online privacy by teaching digital literacy and safer internet usage. It is made for players 11 years and older, and is free to play online here.
As schools have increasingly begun to use Data Dealer in the classroom (an audience the game reached unintentionally), the developers are now working on an educational toolkit for teaching lessons about digital literacy. They’ll hear in July on whether they’ll receive funding for this through an EU Grant Proposal.
The Data Dealer team also plans on launching a Kickstarter to finish Data Dealer’s multiplayer mode.
Games for Change contacted co-creator Wolfie Christl about the development process of Data Dealer.
How long has Data Dealer been in development, and what tools were used to make it? What’s your team’s background in making games?
We’re a small group of web developers, game designers, artists, researchers, and digital rights activists mainly based in Vienna, Austria. We’ve been working on the game since 2011. We started out as a team of four. Since last October we’ve become a bigger team. We’re more than 12 people now. Some of us already have some experience in the games sector, but we also learned many things using a more DIY approach.
As we’ve been doing open source web app development for more than 10 years, it was clear for us to base our game on open-source technologies. As a result, we’re using HTML5 instead of Flash. And as there was no fitting open-source game engine, we’ve built our own. Those two parts have been especially tricky. But the upcoming multiplayer social game version is about 80 percent finished, so we’ve already got a lot more than you can see in the current online version. And we have developed a technology stack which allows scalability, 100,000+ players should be no problem at all, ha!
Which government agencies funded the game? How did you establish these partnerships with them and how did they react to the idea of the game?
The release in German-speaking countries in 2012 was a huge success. It received outstanding media coverage and awesome feedback from young people, teachers, media educators, and the general internet community. In addition, Data Dealer has won several prizes and has even been part of some exhibitions. We convinced some partners to support further development of the game – mainly the Creative Agency of the City of Vienna and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture. We’re also supported by the Internet Foundation Austria – the owner of the Austrian domain registry nic.at.
They really loved our ideas, they believe in the innovative character of our approach, and they enabled us to continue development. Sadly, that money is running out at the end of June. As a consequence, we decided to start a Kickstarter campaign really soon, so we can finish the multiplayer version and finally bring it online. Keep your eyes peeled!
How did you develop and balance the information brokering system?
It was not easy to translate our rather complex topic into a simple game design, and we’ve been hard at work on that. We didn’t want to develop a hardcore information retrieval simulation, but a casual game that is fun to play and enables users to understand the central questions: What kinds of personal data exist? Who is collecting this data and what are their intentions? What could this data be used for and what are the possible impacts on individuals?
To be honest, the current version of the game isn’t perfectly balanced yet. And even though the current version already transmits our topic quite well, balancing will only become really exciting in the full-featured multiplayer version.
In our internal development version, there are over 20 data-gathering ventures including mobile and self tracking apps (i.e., Tracebook and Smoogle). And we’ve got many additional data sources and clients — as well as close to 100 attributes attainable for each profile in the database. That will be real fun!
What’s been the most interesting reaction to Data Dealer so far?
What really surprised us was that in German-speaking countries we received very positive responses both from high-profile media, as well as the yellow press. And from young people and adults as well as teachers. And both from consumer rights and privacy advocates as well as big data, web app, and marketing people. I think our topic is quite explosive.
The most interesting thing, however, is that we keep on hearing that Data Dealer is already being used at schools even though we didn’t plan for that at all.
Is there a game for social impact you wish you had designed or want to design? What is it and why?
The game we want to design? We have many ideas! For example, we’d love to see a game about the food industry. The concept of taking on the role of a bad guy could be used similarly to Data Dealer. Working title: Food Industry Manager! Various scandals show that something is rotten in the current state of industrial food production. Another alternative would be the Drug Industry Manager. The pharmaceutical industry also has massive influence on us and our lives. Generally, we like to combine a critical perspective on certain areas of social life with the communication of knowledge and the question for possible individual consequences.
What motivates you to make games for social impact?
We’ve been involved with digital literacy and the sociocultural impact of information and communications technology for a long time. Today virtually everything we do is recorded, monitored, or tracked in some way. Most users reveal a lot more about themselves online than they think.
Now there are quite a few initiatives operating in the fields of teaching digital literacy and safer internet usage. But most people are quite bored of all that preaching on what to be careful about. So we came up with the idea to create a fun game where players take on the role of a bad guy and collect and sell data themselves. Data Dealer is based on lots of research and we’ve compiled a background report.
What do you think of the current state of games for social impact?
I think that there already are a lot of awesome games in that field. But one of the fundamental problems is that game development is very demanding and the budgets of games for social impact are usually light years from the usual budgets in the gaming sector. Then again, simple but clever games can easily beat million-dollar productions. It’s all about having good ideas! Austria has several creative studios in that field, like Ovos (Ludwig) or Three Coins (The Cure, a game about financial literacy). And we’re really looking forward to meeting everyone at the Games for Change Conference!
Frima Studio, developer of Half the Sky Movement: The Game
Since its debut less than three months ago on March 4, the Half the Sky game has seen more than 780,000 players, who in total have contributed more than $321,400 in donations directly or through sponsors. Players have already unlocked 179,700 free books and $110,500 worth of life-changing surgeries.
While we’re proud of this incredible success, there are some important lessons that we can draw from our experience on Half the Sky Movement: The Game — making a game to those who care, a game that seriously wants to reach as many people as possible and present them with the issues women around the world are facing right now.
This part, written by Gabriel Lefebvre, game design director at Frima Studio (pictured above is the team from Frima), concentrates on how to deal with the more day-to-day constraints of production and development, while crafting something that had never been done before in the realm of games for social good.
What Was Great?
1. We nailed the art style on first pitch. When Games for Change (G4C) approached us as a potential vendor, we developed a possible art style for the game. We hit the bull’s-eye on the first proposal, which is one of the reasons a partnership was struck so quickly. It also meant that the preproduction phase could focus on other elements, such as defining the environments and the overall setting. The character art was already solid, and we already had a strong cast of potential main characters. We just had to breathe a bit more life into them.
2. The multinational setting was perfect. In the beginning, we couldn’t decide between a global village (a fictional area where a bunch of cultures coexisted) and a multinational setting. After thorough discussions, we opted for multiple countries to provide deeper roots in real life and avoid what we call the “pizza effect,” or too many disjointed visual elements on-screen at the same time. It also offered varied narrative contexts and provided a basis on which to convey a feeling of progression by having the players unlock countries one after the other.
(Pictured right: Shown above is the behind-the-scenes, branching dialogue system. Below shows a screenshot from the game and how this dialogue is displayed.)
3. Unique client relationship. G4C are our clients… Well, technically. In reality, we developed a close relationship with them, one of mutual trust. This endeavor is not one for the usual pursuit of profit, but one to change lives for the better. Working on this game changed our lives as well. It created a connection between Frima and G4C. Whenever we communicate with each other, every time we meet, it’s obvious we share a special bond.
4. Our relationship with Zynga was warm and candid. Zynga.org was also involved in the project. Third-party involvement always makes developers wary — they don’t have our production constraints. As advisors, they don’t even have the usual constraints of their own projects. In this case, however, this was not an issue at all. We had open, cheerful, fruitful discussions with Zynga. We exchanged best practices and discussed our goals in depth. Their extensive experience and metrics to back it up were tremendously helpful and allowed us to set priorities and fuel our own arguments when bringing forth design elements.
5. Great support from upper management. Frima is a big company (over 350 employees), where a lot of projects are being developed simultaneously. But this one was special. We got great support from upper management, which was instrumental in making this project possible. They were infected by the same caring attitude about the project that we had. It made us proud and motivated to work even harder.
6. Our social engine made the game possible. Frima has its own social game engine, which was honed on previous projects. Without it, we would not have been able to deliver a game of this quality and scope within the allotted timeframe. Better yet, our tech proved its dependability when it was able to support the load of players without any performance issues. This is not mere boasting: for a developer, being able to depend on its own tools and technologies is one of the most important instruments of success.
7. A strong, flexible dialogue system. On top of our social engine, we built a robust dialogue system. Since dialogue is the heart of this narrative-based game, we had to create something what we could change easily and build tools that the content designers could use to create and integrate the dialogues. We did, and it worked great.
What Was Challenging?
1. The focus on written content reduced the accessibility of the game. We had the right tools to create lots of dialogue, however, as a result, the game focused on reading. Text reduces the accessibility of a game because many players do not want to invest the time and effort required by reading. It is also a challenge to accommodate non-English speakers (we launched a French version on April 4, and plan to launch additional languages in the future).
2. Balancing fun gameplay and serious issues. The situation of women around the world is an incredibly difficult topic to address. Text is one of the few ways that can attempt to convey the subtleties of the issues. Our journey was one of compromises and concessions as we attempted to balance fun with realism, drawing from the “Half the Sky” book’s content. There’s a French expression: “Ménager la chèvre et le chou.” By trying to meet two opposite goals, you run the risk of missing them both.
3. The time required to produce quests. We had many sets of stories to produce and great tools to integrate them. You may think that because it’s mainly text, it’s fast to produce. But because our dialogues are interactive and branching, this means creating much more content than any one player actually gets to experience. Moreover, any change in setting, character, theme, or branch requires a round of rewriting and reintegration. We tried to plan and minimize these changes but still underestimated the scope and had to increase the size of the design team late in production to catch up. 4. The mini-game was not prioritized. Because we had to focus on creating content and implementing donations into the game flow, other elements slid down the priority list. That meant that we couldn’t give as much love to the mini-games as we would have wanted to. We had big plans: how to make them more varied with new game modes, how to better implement power-ups and provide more feedback. We believe that this would have increased the stickiness of the game, and stimulated donations and revenue. Our priorities were on other things — and for valid reasons.
5. Post-launch content strategies. We put so much effort on delivering a solid, well-polished and large-scale game for launch that we ran out of resources to fully address post-launch development. For a Facebook game to thrive, it requires as much effort after launch than before, with new content and special events to keep the player engaged, in addition to addressing the issues that come up along the way. As more players reach the end of the game, we risk losing hardcore fans who have explored all the narrative content.
6. Focus on virality. Our efforts to improve virality based on players’ feedback and metrics were also limited. We came up with a great set of features at launch and following the beta phase but lacked the resources to turn some of them into reality.
7. Maximizing conversion from media. In the first weeks of launch, we received unprecedented media attention. We knew from experience that converting this exposure into players on Facebook was difficult. Nonetheless, we were hopeful that the half of billion press impressions (!) will drive many more players. Looking back, putting resources aside to facilitate this conversion with rewards, exclusive content, or other design initiatives could have resulted in a higher conversion rate. But it’s not too late! If you’re reading this and haven’t played yet, log into Facebook and see what it’s all about: http://apps.facebook.com/halftheskymovement.
Developer: Learning Games Network / Platform: Mac, PC
