On Game Design with Youth: The Hexacago Health Academy Workshop (Peter McDonald)
Our blog series for the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab’s summer workshop, the “Hexacago Health Academy,” continues with University of Chicago English PhD student and game designer Peter McDonald who is also entering his third year as a graduate fellow at the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab.
Tic-Tac-Toe is one of the easiest games to learn, and one of the first games with formal rules that children learn. It is also a broken game. Specifically, it is easy to map out all the possible moves so that the first player either always wins or at least ties. So playing Tic-Tac-Toe becomes boring once you have mastered the basic strategy. On Tuesday of this week the youth of the Hexacago Health Academy program began experimenting with game design by taking apart the basic elements of Tic-Tac-Toe, putting them back together, and adapting them to something new. It is a process that they will be repeating in the coming weeks at increasingly complex scales, as they learn the basic components that make up games in general (rules, play, physical components), find their individual aesthetic and design sensibility, and use these skills to talk about complex social topics related to sexual and reproductive health.
Each step of these activities was meant to provide a window in miniature on the game design process as a whole, and walking through them alongside the students will, I hope, offer some insight into the learning process. My co-teacher Keith Wilson and I began the workshop with some of what makes a rule, a game mechanic, and a goal. These are the basic building blocks of games, but their simplicity belies the difficulty of grasping them clearly either for design or for thinking critically about media consumption. For instance, game mechanics are the things that a player can do within a game world, which can be summarized as a series of verbs. A game might include running, dribbling, jumping, shooting, dunking, passing, and blocking—a list that might describe more games than basketball but goes a long way to describing the kind of action that makes basketball fun. Within the first two days of the workshop each team had already played seven or eight board games, giving them a repertoire to draw on in addition to their knowledge of sports and video games, and in discussion we drew out some of the differences that separate these styles of play.
Life really came into the classroom, however, when we broke into smaller groups and started to put these ideas to use analyzing Tic-Tac-Toe. We began with a prompt: imagine that you are describing the game to a Martian who not only hasn't played this game but who also doesn't know the social conventions of games generally. After the teams of two had written out their rules, we read them aloud and tried to play the game as it was written down, purposefully mis-interpretting ambiguous wordings whenever we could – particularly when the goals and actions were unclear. Sometimes we would draw the board in a strange way, sometimes we wouldn't wait for each other to take turns. The exercise had several goals: it showed how important and difficult it is to write clear rules, let teachers appear more foolish than the students, show how rules are also a pervasive part of our ordinary social experience, and open up a flexible way of thinking about an ingrained style of play.
Making explicit the rules of Tic-Tac-Toe led naturally into our second exercise, one drawn from game designer Eric Zimmerman, in which players came up with their own variants of the game. Most players began by expanding the board to a 4x4 grid, producing a game that doesn't suffer from the determinism of the original. But with a vocabulary of game terms in mind, we could push students to design versions that only changed the goal, or added a new mechanic. Several of the designs were surprising and elegant. There was, for instance, reverse Tic-Tac-Toe where the object was to avoid creating a line of three, a version where each player had two chances to erase a symbol from the board, a version where the role of a die determined whether you could play on odd or even squares, and a modification so four players can play at once. We were just beginning to know the players, but each group's games clearly expressed different viewpoints and interests—ranging in complexity, strategy, invocation of chance, and speed. While many of these were unplayable at first, we encouraged teams to exchange games, to begin playtesting them, and to continue tweaking. The exercise repeats on a micro-scale the process of learning from a successful genre of game, adding a novel element that can alter its meaning in minor or radical ways, and testing how the whole system holds together in an iterative fashion.
As this blog post goes to press, Keith and I are about to begin the second game design workshop, where we will expand on these game design skills and use them to examine a topic surrounding sexual and reproductive health[4]. We will be continuing these kind of design exercises until the players are designing and building games of their own from scratch, influenced by but no longer copying other games. In a larger sense, these workshops participate in the broader philosophy of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, which sees practice intimately tied to the knowledge gained through research, and doing as a form of learning that reveals all sorts of unexpected outcomes. By taking part in these workshops the youth move from participants in a program and recipients of knowledge, to equals in a larger process of understanding what kind of effects games can have. I personally can't wait to see what they come up with.
