Cumulus conference paper submission
This is a paper written jointly with Charles Yust about the iterative design process used to create a PETLab game called Re:Activism. The paper has been accepted by the Cumulus Conference in France and we will be presenting it there in November.
SUBMITTING FOR
Design and Social Innovation
PROJECT AND PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION
TITLE
Design Through Play: A Case-Study for How the Iterative Game-Design Process Promotes Learning.
ABSTRACT
PETLab is a research laboratory for interactive media comprised of members from Parsons The New School for Design and the non-profit organization Games for Change. The collaboration was made possible by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of the foundation’s digital media and learning initiative. The initiative was established in 2006 to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. The driving goal of PETLab is to develop new games, simulations, and play experiences that encourage experimental learning and investigation into social and global issues. The lab draws on the expertise of scholars and designers from the fields of digital media, education, and social sciences, as well as people of all ages who just like to play. Playing a well-designed game can be a powerful learning experience for people of any age. Games and the notion of “play”, have the capacity to delight, captivate, and educate. People inherently like to play and creating a game that simultaneously educates and entertains isn’t about tricking the player into learning, but immersing them in the experience. This is an especially important concept to consider when designing a game with the explicit goal of education. A game has to be fun to be truly successful and it is the designer’s role to elegantly weave the educational components into an enjoyable interaction. Educational games have had a notorious history of being dull and disengaging, it hasn’t been until more recently that the tide has begun to change. Games like World Without Oil (http://worldwithoutoil.org/) and Ayiti (http://www.unicef.org/voy/explore/rights/explore_3142.html) are examples of popular games with a social message. They have helped to reveal the potential games have to educate and entertain on the same level as traditional games. Combining the energy that surrounds games and social issues creates an effective tool for social change and awareness. With this goal in mind, PETLab has partnered with non-profit organizations and youth activist groups to create cause-specific games. All the games created by PETLab have a technological component, but not all of the games are played in the virtual realm. For example, some of the games are referred to as “big games”, which incorporate the use of a large space and/or a large number of people. Often a big game will use an entire city as its game board and incorporate interaction with the general public into the game-play. At PETLab we find the incorporation of unpredictable interaction in social games particularly enriching for the game-play because it not only allows the player to guide their experience, but encourages them to tap into the collective knowledge of the people around them.
Aside from the social interaction that occurs while actually playing a game, the process of designing a game is a socially innovative experience in itself. There is a vast amount of observation, ethnography, and research that must occur to create a game. Most often a game is not designed by one person, but a team of people, calling on expertise from various fields. In the past PETLab has collaborated with an anthropologist, a political scientist, architects, and arborists, each bringing not only unique subject knowledge, but a unique perspective as a potential game player. Anyone on a design team becomes a game designer, regardless of their prior experience with games. Game development in PETLab focuses on an iterative design process where rapid prototypes are developed, moving from ideation to testing as often as possible in order to evaluate and refine a concept’s potential. The iterative design process is especially important to game designers because it is impossible for the designer to fully anticipate the play that will occur in advance. The designer aims for an ephemeral moment of play, which can only be anticipated and guided by the rules of the game. By play-testing games early and often throughout development a designer can begin to predict how a player may act and refine the game based on these observations. Through the iterative design process, the game designer becomes a game player and the act of play becomes an act of design (Salen). The constant play-testing of a game also prevents the designers from letting their isolated concepts and assumptions drive the development of the game. When a game is tested and the observed interactions are not satisfactory, the designer is forced to redefine the proposed solution. By developing many rapid solutions a number of possibilities can be explored, and in this space creative ideas can be identified that are unexpected and unique. Iterative prototyping as a research method is rewarding and effective in this sense, but rigorous due to the constant evolution of the core concepts. RE:ACTIVISM, A CASE STUDY Re:Activism was a big-urban-game designed and launched for the Come Out and Play festival in New York City. The game revisited locations of historic protests and taught game participants about the events and related social causes. In order to progress through the game, the participants raised awareness of protest events by creating present day interventions and public interactions. Teams of game-players raced from location to location to complete challenges and use activist tactics to increase their score. The teams also used mobile phones to send and receive text messages as they progressed through the game and completed challenges. The game was a built around a participatory model, which provided a structure through which spontaneous or directed interactions could occur in the public realm. This meant that the game-learning experience could be designed to a certain point, but then had to be play-tested in order to continue the iterative design process. Design and play-testing of the game were rotated over the course of eight weeks preceding the official launch of the game. Each iteration contributed toward advancements in the design and added to the overall learning experience. This method of design has been referred to by Come Out and
Play co-founder, Nick Fortugno as a “second-order” design problem, meaning that the design is not complete until the game has been played.
RE:ACTIVISM, PLAY-TESTING An essential part of the iterative and participatory design approach was play-testing, which allowed for early game-play using rapid prototypes. The game needed to be played and tested early and often in order to make sure the design was conceptually sound and learning would be facilitated. Utilizing this method of iteration early in the design process revealed inadequacies in the mobile communication setup and scoring. It also raised important design questions such as: How much time was needed to travel from site to site? How many sites should be included in the final three-hour version of the game? How many challenges should be included at each site? Experimentation with content and public interaction? What was an adequate team size? Did participants learn about social causes and protest events as they played the game? The use of text messaging and mobile technology provided a metaphorical link to activist tactics used in the past. Text messaging was used by protestors during the 2004 Republican National Convention protests to coordinate actions and avoid arrests. As teams moved from location to location throughout the city text messages were sent to relay scores and record challenges. Early game text-messaging setups were overwhelmed by the high-level of communication required for relaying scoring information to multiple teams simultaneously. The need emerged for a custom software solution which would allow for an increase in communicative capacity, regular scoring updates, and a more rapid reply-rate as teams played the game.
It would have been impossible to determine the amount of time the game took to play had it been designed without regular play-testing. A Google Map was utilized to plot out all of the sites of protest that could potentially be used in the game along with their corresponding historical research. The sites originally spanned multiple boroughs across New York, but were eventually pared down to just Manhattan. As further game-testing began to reveal more accurate travel times, the “game-board” was eventually limited to sites south of 14th Street to fit into the required three-hour window. As testing progressed players also suggested that the game was more engaging if participants were given more choices and had greater control over their strategy. This led the development team to create challenges of varying difficulty for each site and allowed teams to determine for themselves the most advantageous path to various locations. The game content was also altered throughout the testing process. The challenge concepts were all based on the historical events that occurred at each site. Some challenges required the players to interact directly with the public by documenting interviews, while others required the teams to temporarily alter public space by writing in chalk or reenacting a protest. The final version of the text-messaging application, the total number of sites, the issues the game covered and the final locations chosen for the game were all
the result of the iterative play-testing process. RE:ACTIVISM, GAMEPLAY When the final version of the game was run on June 7, 2008, over 30 participants were divided into five teams and outfitted with backpacks, mobile phones, chalk, water, and other materials needed to complete challenges and create public interventions. The design process succeeded in crafting an overall structure through which unanticipated interactions and engagement with the public occurred. One of the sites that game participants could visit was where the “Stonewall Riots” for gay rights occurred in 1968. When the “Yellow Team” visited this site, they met two pedestrians who had actually participated in the “Stonewall Riots” and recorded an interview on their mobile phones with the former protesters while trying to complete one of the game challenges. The “Yellow Team” came in last place in point accumulation, but had perhaps the most engaging interaction of the entire game. This occurrence raised the future consideration of how to account for qualitative and highly-educational public engagements in addition to the quantitative scoring system. The game development process resulted in three main areas of learning about the game content. On one level the game developers who researched the sites where the game would be played learned about the content in depth. On another level the game participants learned about historical events while reading plaques and engaging in actions related to social causes. The public who encountered the game participants during the game also learned about the events as they were asked to be interviewed about social causes for certain challenges.
CONCLUSION
PETLab designs social games by utilizing an iterative design process and rapid prototyping methods to move game concepts from ideation to testing as often as possible. The iterative and participatory design process is ideal because it is impossible for the designer to fully anticipate the play that will occur. This methodology was applied to the design process of Re:Activism and resulted in a highly engaging and educational experience. The iterative design process consisting of regular design and play-testing resulted in technical enhancements to the game, the most engaging ways to learn the historical game content, and that the game should provide a structure within which unexpected public interactions could occur.
Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. London: The Mit Press, 2003.
