In week1, we met each other and clarified our positions.
We are a team composed of one artist, Joy Jingyi Liu; one game designer, Beck Wolfinger; one programmer, Tyler Thompson; and two UI/UX designers, Shanshan Yuan and Xinxiu Zhong.
Our project is an ETC client project working with IGNITE, which is a non-profit organization focused on addressing the lack of women in elected office by building a pipeline of next-generation leaders who are poised to flex their political power. For most of us, this is our first-time experience working with a client, and none of us have a lot of knowledge about politics, which made this mission a challenge for all of us. We met each other on Slack before the starting of this semester, we noticed that we have a strong background in design, and we are having multiple skills that allow us to achieve our ideas.
Know more about our client: https://ignitenational.org/
With curiosity and excitement, along with a lot of questions, we had our first client meeting. Since this is also our client’s first time working with ETC, we showed some previous ETC projects and introduced our team, and asked our clients about their expectations and requirements for this project. Along with a basic understanding of what amazing things our clients are doing now and what direction they want this project to go, we started brainstorming and prepared some questions for them at the next meeting.
In week2, we shared our semester timeline to our client, also had some question to help us target our audience better, and then, we presented the ideas we had so far.
1-The questions about the product
-The age group of target audience
-Narrow topic or broad topic
-Focus on a problem/situation about an individual or a group
-Showing from first person perspective or third person perspective
-What kind of story will fit the central theme best
-Which kind of platform/media are we using
-The experience is one-time or repeat
-How long will it takes for per experience
-What do we want to show/link at the end
2-Potential Criteria
Based on our skills and our knowledge about our client, our potential criteria is:
-Target Audience: College aged women who are interested in getting involved in politics, but may not be sure of where to start
Platform: Web/browser-based so women can access it directly from the ignite website OR Phone App
Experience Type: A 5 – 30 minute one time experience with a call to action at the end to help them know where to begin
What we want Players to Feel: inspired, motivated, ready to act OR empathetic, educated
3-Our ideas
a- Interactive roadmap based on web/browser
- Interact with to roadmap learn more about the growth path to become political leaders.
- Helping people to find the programs, events, and conferences that they can participate in at different stages.
- Also can show the path of Ignite’s alumni (what kinds of Ignite’s programs that they attended or political campaigns that they developed) to provide more insights.
- E.g., a college freshman is interested in politics. The map can be a starting point to search for some events that may fit for her, like joining one of Ignite’s college chapters or attending some virtual events, to build her political career step by step.
b-Information introduction app with simulation mini games inside
- Help college students who are interested in politics to gain more useful information and understand how to effectively speak for a group/ social phenomenon or solve social problems during play simulation mini-games based on visual novel format.
c- Online scavenger hunt based on web/browser or phone app
- This would be more of an event, where the scavenger hunt goes live for a few days
- Solve riddles and questions by learning about women in politics and US history
- Would probably need some sort of prize to encourage participation
d- Mobile app- What Politician are you?
- The App will match users with female politicians of the same type based on their preferred field or direction
- When a user matches a similar female politician, they begin to learn about her by exploring the map. Once users have finished viewing a piece of background or historical material about the female politician, they need to take a picture of the politician doing something similar to her based on some information in the video to unlock the next part of the journey.
- This App not only allows users to better understand how they become political leaders, but also encourages them to become political leaders
e- Visual novel style game with a story showcasing the challenges women face when trying to get politically involved, which can be a downloadable pc game or a browser/web game
- The game would star a young woman trying to get involved in politics. However, she will face additional challenges that are common to women in politics than most people without that lived experience would not consider.
- The story should present ways to overcome the challenges faced. This could be especially impactful if the ways to overcome certain challenges is by relying on other women (women empowering women).
- This experience would target college-aged people. Women would benefit from the lessons taught about how to overcome common challenges to entering politics and from the theme of women empowering women being a powerful force. Men would benefit from being shown experiences they are unlikely to experience on their own, hopefully teaching men the importance of supporting their female colleagues.
f- Play as famous politically engaged women from throughout modern history to directly experience their challenges and how they were overcome by making a downloadable pc game or a browser/web game
- The game could move through history, switching perspectives between famous politically engaged women to show the audience the challenges these women were faced with and how they were overcome.
- If the focus is on women in American politics, we could spend time further researching some of the women from this list.
- Because this idea focuses on famous politically engaged women who succeeded in making their mark on the American political landscape, we think this idea could be angled to be more inspirational than some of our other ideas. This leads us to believe that college-aged women would make for a good target audience. The game could focus on inspiring these young women to get engaged in politics instead of on educating non-women on the challenges faced by women in politics.
g-Play as a woman who is a member of a minority group getting politically engaged specifically to pass legislation relevant to that minority group by making a downloadable pc game or a browser/web game
- Using the Crown Act as an example, it would star a young black woman who gets politically engaged after facing discrimination due to her hair. After showcasing the challenges specific to black women in politics and showing our main character overcome those challenges, the game would culminate in her being elected to office and drafting a bill to protect other black people from similar discrimination (a Crown Act).
- This idea does not have to be about black women and Crown Acts. It could work with any marginalized group of women, whether that be transwomen, Indigineous women, Latina women, etc.
- This game would be more focused on educating people who are not aware of specific issues related to discrimination. The people who would benefit the most from an experience like this one are people who are not a part of the marginalized groups being focused on.
4-Feedback from client
Our client wants a product that targets high school and college-age young women who are outside of IGNITE community, and focuses more on IGNITE organization, and lets the product link to one or more of their current program(s). They want something more like a buzz quiz, which can attract our target audience, and also web-based, and mobile/tablet friendly. Also, it will be better if we avoid specific political issues or figures but go broad and general. And always remember to show sisterhood and support when creating the story. Since they already had a great website and accounts on major social media, the best platform for this product is a visual novel game.