Week 4 was a primarily reflective week given Quarters. Besides Quarters, the team also did a first round of pitching game mechanics to our client Raul. Based on that discussion, we narrowed down to a single mechanic/game concept to begin paper prototyping.
Starting with quarters, feedback for the team fell into 3 broad categories:
- Imminence of Nuclear testing as an issue: several faculty expressed a belief that nuclear testing was largely a resolved issue of the past.
-
Unclear call to action: assuming the issue merited attention, what are prospective guests supposed to do about it? Faculty raised the issue that if the experience successfully convinces people of the significance of nuclear testing, then how can guests channel their new understanding into action (e.g. Is there a new piece of legislation that people can call their senators about)?. One comment we as a team found useful was to consider self-motivated research after the activity a successful “call to action,” i.e. players of the game subsequently google the issue as a result of our game’s call to action.
- Unclear mechanics/rundown: besides grappling with how we narrowed down the topic from Nuclear threat in general to nuclear testing specifically, faculty expressed a desire to better understand the specific mechanics/rundown of the experience itself. What would the script of our experience look like? What are people expected to feel within the first 10 minutes vs. the last 10 minutes of the game?
Hearing such critique and doubt directed at the ideological core of our game was disheartening. Were we going in the right direction? Would a different subdomain of nuclear threat be better? Was the work of the previous weeks useless?
In response to this, our faculty advisor Dave recommended that we set aside the more theoretical/research questions in favor of brainstorming pitches. By grounding our ideological discussion in more tangible terms, he argued that we might find clarity in our direction and find what the team found most attractive to build/design.
We therefore brainstormed and refined specific mechanics/concepts until we had 3 pitches, which we unpacked with our client Raul. The pitches in brief are as follows:
- Design a Museum that chronicles the complex legacy of the Manhattan Project.
- Experience and survive the fallout of a Nuclear test site.
- Explore and investigate an abandoned nuclear testing facility. Not everything is as it seems as you work to uncover the truth.
Raul appreciated these specific mechanical implementations of our high-level purpose and by the end of our discussion the whole team agreed to follow the third pitch.
Goals for Week 5 were therefore to shore up research, take a first pass at developing the narrative background for a paper prototype, and creating materials to run a paper prototype with the team’s roommates. Clare will also develop posters and half sheets for the team.
