This week we focused on everything we needed to get ready for Quarters. Because of the shortened semester, Quarters is taking place in Week 4, so our goal was to flesh out the transformational framework to present to the faculty.
We had to answer the first question in the transformational framework: why is it important that our game transform players? We narrowed our field to several high-level purpose options and associated transformations and after voting, landed on the high level purpose of correcting misconceptions about nuclear testing. [purpose picture] A faculty meeting with Dave and Brenda on Friday gave some further clarity to this purpose: we could use nuclear testing as an entry point to talk about environmental racism that continues to affect marginalized communities today. Our purpose that we presented at Quarters ended up as follows: “our project will highlight how some communities are considered disposable, through examining the history of nuclear testing.”
To tighten our transformation even more, we had to also identify even more specific barriers and learn more about which ones applied to our audience. The team brainstormed many different barriers, and Katherine compiled them into a survey for the faculty and students of the ETC. The ETC community serves as a decent proxy audience for the Games for Change festival, since the ETC covers game developers, academics, and people with a personal interest in transformational works, though K-12 teachers are a significant demographic our survey could not capture. Additionally, the survey served as a gut check on whether our narrowed focus on information or empathy barriers to understanding nuclear testing would be effective for our audience. We were pleased to see that most of the top barriers identified by our proxy audience were applicable to our narrowed focus.
The survey also led us to discover the first subject matter expert we were able to talk to! Scott Stevens, an ETC professor, has extensive personal and academic experience in the nuclear threat domain, having taught nuclear physics and visited Hiroshima. He was also the faculty advisor on the previous ETC project, 2012’s Atomic Zone. We were able to meet him on Friday, and he gave us access to some Atomic Zone resources. A paper he shared explaining the experience was very helpful, as Atomic Zone is no longer playable.
Scott did have some concerns about our narrowed focus. From his point of view, nuclear testing seems to be much less of a nuclear threat than other issues such as accidents or security issues, and in fact is less of a threat than chemical accidents or natural disasters. The perceived irrelevance of nuclear threat may end up being a barrier that we target, but hearing this from Scott emphasizes that such a transformation would be risky and difficult. The team will continue to think about this as we move through quarters and after.
We also had the wonderful surprise of an introductory meeting with a second SME, Alex Glaser! Alex is a professor at Princeton University who studies both nuclear science and nuclear policy, and he is working with Games for Change on producing the On The Morning You Wake VR documentary. Our client, Raul, invited him to our weekly client meeting, but due to his European time zone we were not expecting to meet him so soon.
We are certainly glad that we did, however, because in the short introductory meeting, he gave us plenty of information to start digesting before our longer meeting with him next week. Of particular interest was the Nuclear Princeton project, which is a partnership between anthropology professor Ryo Morimoto and undergraduate student members of the Natives at Princeton organization. This project, which is just getting started, aims to highlight how Princeton’s historical and current involvement in nuclear projects affects Native people. He also shared the undergraduate thesis of Ananya Malhotra, a former student of his who extensively researched how the history of nuclear testing’s impact on communities has been hidden. We look forward to having a longer meeting with Alex next week!
At the end of the week, we met with Dave and Brenda to discuss our plans for Quarters. They suggested we come up with some game pitches for further clarity on how we might accomplish our stated goals, anticipating that many of the faculty would have specific questions about this. We met on Sunday to share pitches, which included a social media simulation, a roleplaying game, a collaborative decision making activity, and an exploration/adventure game. One of these pitches was for a direction more focused on an anti-war high level purpose, which could be a more sensible direction considering the risks of nuclear testing seeming irrelevant to most people’s lives. Ultimately, we have two high-level purposes we could pursue- one about the human cost of war, one about the human cost of nuclear testing. For quarters, we will present the human cost of nuclear testing purpose and associated transformations, and we look forward to receiving feedback on whether this direction makes more sense than the other.
This week also saw a lot of progress in other ways as well. Clare finished the final draft of the logo and we are all really pleased with the design.
Derek set up the website this week as well, the very website you’re on right now! And Shiva set up a dummy Hopin event that we were all able to “reserve tickets” for. Together, we made the Quarters presentation slides, and await Monday with bated breath.