Organizing an old binder yesterday and found a playset of Faithless Looting being back support for Exodia. You dont know what you got till its banned. BONUS: Cringe knock off anime sleeves I used in college to tilt Magic players #MtG #cardboardcrack #magicthegathering #yugioh #tiltfactor https://www.instagram.com/p/CHdCZq_lMID/?igshid=1i4qrsav7g0it
Diversity in Design: POX and designing for promoting dialogues
Ok, so I stopped writing due to some real life stuff, but also because I was stuck trying to wrap things up with this week’s Roulette.
So let’s not waste time, let’s get right into it.
Yesterday, my wife and I attended the keynote for the Different Games Conference, which was all about building games for diversity. The keynote speaker was Mary Flanagan of Tiltfactor.
Mary is super adorable.
Truth be told, I found her talk a bit scattered, but there were quite a few things to take away from it. Today, I want to focus specifically on her experiences with designing and testing POX, a iPad/board game about fighting a highly infectious disease. If I recall correctly, the idea came to her after she asked a friend in the medical sector what the biggest problem is in America today, to which they surprisingly replied, “vaccination.” POX was designed to raise awareness about the value of vaccination, especially given the recent anti-science, anti-vaccination attitudes that have cropped up recently in first-world nations.
It's like Pandemic, except it doesn't feel like work.
Mechanically, POX most resembles Go, and if you have a firm background in Go, you’ll probably find that similar containment strategies apply. However you are hampered by the people that are unable to (or refuse to) be vaccinated, and if they contract the disease they will immediately die. You will learn to hate these people.
Seriously, Jenna, please just take your pseudoscience protest and go away.
Tiltfactor did actual scientific testing of players to see if the underlying “message” sank in. I think the most surprising lesson that they found was that the more the design distances and abstracts itself from “message,” the more effective it is.
POX comes in three flavors, regular board game, iPad app, ZombiePOX. Perhaps not shockingly, players actually internalized the ideas behind the game most strongly when playing the zombie flavor. I wish Mary had spent more time dwelling on this, but she presented two theories as to why this is.
One, being too explicit with the message doesn't inspire critical thought. How many of us have played “educational” games that were ridiculously on-message like Captain Novolin?
It’s the videogame equivalent of a very special episode about drug abuse. Tiltfactor’s games, to their credit, mask their message in gameplay instead of wearing it on their sleeves.
For example, Buffalo is another game by Tiltfactor, where players draw two cards and are challenged to name a famous person matching the combination, like “optimistic soldier” or “glasses-wearing heartthrob.” The beauty of Buffalo is that it’s a stealth drone targeting the public’s general lack of knowledge about certain populations. By sheer chance, eventually you’ll come up with combinations like “female scientist” or “asian-american sports star.” If we can only name one, or even worse no celebrities at all, what does that say about us? Would Buffalo be as thought-provoking if players were told up front that they were playing a game about bias and stereotyping? Probably not.
Two, adding flavor elements for the sake of engagement helps players think critically about the message, even if they have nothing to do with the message. Mary recounted working on another public health game, and deciding, “this game’s setting is just not very fun.” After prototyping a number of alternate designs, they found that a variant set in the 16th century involving buckets of leeches and plague masks was much better received.
How could this not make a game more awesome?
Unfortunately, they had difficulty convincing their sponsor that this was a valid design choice, and the sponsors actually refused to continue supporting the game development unless they continued with the sterile, boring, “on-message” design. In the end Tiltfactor decided to continue developing without sponsorship because their experience showed that they were making the right decision.
You can download POX for free for the iPad
