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G4C 101 Workshop Roundup
Posted by Mark Smith on 05-27-09Posted by Emily Kornblut
The Games for Change Festival kicked off today with its second annual G4C 101 Workshop. The day began with introductions from Suzanne Seggerman of Games for Change and Allyson Peerman of AMD, the sponsor of the G4C 101 Workshop, who spoke about AMD’s Changing the Game initiative, which supports game development programs to build students’ STEM skills and announced three new grantees.
Speakers throughout the day emphasized several keys to designing a good social issues game:
-know your target audience
-iterate often and rapidly
-choose your platform and development team well, as they will impact many other factors
-consider existing platforms and social media for the audiences they connect your game and issue to
-when there are multiple strategies available to execute your game project, pick one, not all.
G4C Board Chair Alan Gershenfeld led the first session and walked through a publishing approach for games with impact. Distinguishing between game publishing and developing, he emphasized the importance of doing both audience and impact analysis in order to understand who the audience is, and narrow down the target: what do you want the audience to do? Take action? Be aware? Change behavior? He also focused on the organic alignment between social impact, what makes a game fun AND the financial/impact objectives. Using his current game in development, Talkers and Doers, as an example, Gershenfeld walked participants through decisions around marketing, distribution, execution, and assessment.
Jimmy Tom, the Manager of Bibliographic Services at the Foundation Center and Michael Levine, the Executive Director of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative
-HASTAC competition
-Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Health Games Research initiative
-Changing the Game
-Institute for Educational Sciences: National Center for Ed Research
A question from the audience asked where the funders are for games for change being made in the creative/cultural space, not just the education space, i.e., the equivalent of independent film investors. Levine responded that we’re not there yet, but there is hope for a new generation of funders who are trying to be innovative.
Mary Flanagan of Tiltfactor Lab got everyone talking to each other with her Grow-A-Game session, demonstrating the work of Values at Play and the importance of design proficiency for making sure ideas translate into the core of the game, so that the game embodies the social value, rather than just being “about” the social issue. In small groups, participants drew cards from the deck to select a value, a game, and a social issue and brainstorm a new game based on all three.
Barry Joseph of Global Kids closed out the morning with an overview of assessment and measurement of the social impact of games for change. After reviewing a recent post on assessment by James Paul Gee, Joseph shared evaluations of ReMission and Ayiti as examples and offered three pieces of advice:
1. Don’t try to measure everything.
2. Don’t plan to measure something you can’t deliver.
3. You say what the project is; the evaluator says what the findings mean.
After lunch, Eric Zimmerman and Tracy Fullerton gave a crash course in game design, distilling it to the idea that every single game is its own set of problems with its own interesting solutions and exploring the concepts of mechanics, challenge, and balance. They also launched the room into a massively multiplayer game of rock-paper-scissors to demonstrate the role that rules play in game design. Their advice for marrying the activity in the system of the game with the content/issues you want people to learn or care about? Do one of the following:
-simulate your subject (PeaceMaker)
-illustrate your subject (Hush)
-make the player the subject by focusing on the call to action (G4C-Parsons PETLab and Brenda Brathwaite of Savannah College of Art & Design walked us through the scale of game production, from “Microscopic” to “Xtra Xtra Xtra Large,” in terms of budgets, team size, timeline, and platform, with multiple examples of games that fit each size. Brathwaite also outlined the elements of the production process: funding, pitch, scheduling, risk management, external relations, team relations, triage, and approvals.
The final panel of the day focused on exposure, with journalist Heather Chaplin giving great advice on approaching the press: “we’re no longer at a place with games that you can get press just because you made a game, so you need to make it in a way that is newsworthy.” She advised game developers to pitch the unique story behind their games and think carefully about target audience when deciding whether to focus on industry or mainstream media outlets. Jason Rzepka of MTV shared best practices in gaining visibility for social issues games such as Darfur is Dying, PosOrNot and Debt Ski. He attributed the success of these games to factors such as unique opportunities for exposure and strategic partnerships. (Download his presentation slides.) Ian Bogost built on the morning conversation about distribution by talking about devices, channels, scarcity, methods of innovation (technology, content, and distribution: choose one), and will, explaining that an organization’s will to carry out an idea for a game and do something different from its traditional work is the most difficult part of game development.
After all the presentations, participants took a turn at game design, dividing into nine groups and each brainstorming a game concept within a social issue which they then had five minutes to pitch to a panel of judges. The winning concept was “Flush!”—a Flash based game for middle school students to learn about deteriorating water systems and how to prevent urban flooding & water contamination.