Month: January 2019

The second week of this project continued much of the research from last week, but there was also a lot of work done to finalize the direction of the game’s transition from board game to mobile game. We also made an effort to document the game as it stands now and figure out what parts of it were most essential to include in the mobile version we’re creating and started to create posters and logos for our team.

Like last week, we continued to research both what it’s like to live in poverty and the best methods for creating a transformational game. Much of the research done for learning more about the condition of poverty was done through reading relevant articles, literature, music, games, videos, and photographs. We also plan to interview people who have/do live through poverty, so as to answer some questions we have about living through the condition of poverty that either aren’t as explicit in our research or we want more personal answers to. We also hope to include recordings of some of these interviews in the final product, so players can see real people whose daily struggles are represented in the game. We’ve also gone deeper into Sabrina Culyba’s Transformational Framework, and outlined how to reflect the different aspects of the framework in our game.

A couple of us have also had the chance to try the game Frostpunk, a game where in an alternate future, London becomes inhospitable due to extreme blizzards. The player plays the role of the captain of a group of refugees who start to found a new city. The game’s presentation of a harsh reality and difficult decisions made it appear very relevant, and we found the game to be very engaging, even if there was some frustration that came from the events of the game. The game also had a progressing story throughout, which kept it interesting. However, some people criticized the game because many of the decisions took the form of saving one person or working to stop the entire city from freezing but in a slightly evil way. Some players said this was a very easy decision, since saving many people seemed much better than saving one. This led us to realize that like many of the other games we studied last week, there was still a space between the player and the characters; while the game gave everyone in the town a full name, face, profession, and dialogue, the player character had no relationship with anyone else in the city individually, which made the emotional impact of the decisions weaker. This further proved to us that establishing a strong relationship between the player and the characters is essential.

In order to figure out what parts of the game would be more important to the mobile version than others, we really had to break down the existing game. A lot of that went into the situation cards. We scanned them all into the computer, categorized them, made detailed spreadsheets about them, and analyzed them in a number of different aspects, like the broad nature of the decisions, what kind of player characters it applied to, which non-playable characters were affected by it, and the importance that each decision would have on the characters’ futures (e.g. not having a library card is much less important than not having a home). We also made a list of every single mechanical element of the game and presented them to our client in order to figure out what elements of the game were the most important to her. In general, she put a lot of importance on the aspects of the game that were made to reflect reality and making sure that every player character was exempt of assigned race or gender, so that any player could project themselves onto their character. The aspects she were the least attached to were those that existed mostly because the current platform was a board game; she definitely understood that playing to the platform of mobile devices was very important, and wanted to embrace the mobile platform as much as possible. We will definitely take her decisions on this matter to heart once we start creating the final product.

To figure out exactly what we would do going forward with the mobile platform and what kind of game we would be making, we presented two pitches to our client: A Virtual Phone, and The Relationship Spiral. A Virtual Phone has players take the role of someone in the condition of poverty, and gives them a phone with different apps. There would be a texting app, where friends and family would text the player the situations, and they’d have to respond to them (e.g. your daughter says she needs sanitary products, and you either tell her you’ll get some or not get any to save money), which we thought would seem more intimate than the way the situation cards currently play. There would also be a mobile banking app that would show the player’s current position on the spiral. A news app would function like the social impact cards. The Relationship Spiral was the same as the existing game, but with an additional element to motivate players to maintain their relationships. Players would be able to see a table with framed family photos on it. The photos would contain all the player character’s family members, and if the player made too many decisions at their expense, they would frown in the photos. If they made an egregious number of decisions that weren’t in any given family member’s favor, they would leave the player, fading out of the photos. Of the two, Dana preferred the first pitch, A Virtual Phone, since it fit the mobile platform better, and could still leave the player character’s gender and race more ambiguous. Thus, we will likely create A Virtual Phone.

This week really helped us learn exactly what aspects of The Poverty Spiral we wanted in the final product of our game, and made our direction much more concrete going into the development process.

The majority of our first week on the project was spent figuring out where the current, physical version of the game stands, and how we can bring the best possible version of it into the digital space.

Before we get too far into those specifics, let’s first acknowledge that this is a new project at the ETC, and thus requires some introduction. The Poverty Spiral is a board game developed by Dana Gold, a teacher who realized her students had a lack of understanding of how hard it truly was to live in poverty and to escape that condition. Drawing from her own experience growing up in the condition of poverty, she created The Poverty Spiral, a board game built to help people understand better what it was like to live in the condition of poverty. The game has players take on the role of one of six people living in poverty with their own struggles. The players go through a series of situation cards, which contain some issue (all of which are true stories) and two choices of how to react to it. Some situations have a right answer, and some force the player to discern the lesser of two evils. Many require decisions between earning money and maintaining relationships with friends and/or family. Others require deciding between saving money in the long term or the short term, or deciding between keeping money necessary for survival and obeying the law. Depending on each player’s response to the situations, they either move deeper into the spiral of poverty or move further out of it, towards the precious, albeit temporary, stability space. Our job this spring is to transform this game from the physical space to a digital platform, so as to increase its reach and efficacy.

We met our client, the aforementioned Dana Gold, and played The Poverty Spiral with her for the first time. We were impressed with how well the feeling of frustration was communicated to the players, accurately representing the great weight behind the decisions that people in the condition of poverty have to make, and how seemingly impossible it is to truly leave the spiral of poverty and enter the world of financial stability. The game’s main purpose is to invoke empathy in the players, and the game currently delivers on that front. Our main complaint with the game is that there is untapped potential for emotional impact in the times when players do choose in-game strategy over being a good friend or family member, since there is no representation of your friends and family in game; for example, if you choose to let your sister’s kids enter the foster system rather than take care of them yourself, you never see the suffering that your decision caused. Improving on that emotional impact is one of our key focuses of design going forward.

One other area of improvement we saw in The Poverty Spiral was the potential for interaction between players, since it was very rare for one player’s actions to affect another’s. The amount and nature of player to player interaction is something we definitely want to tackle, even if the answer of how best to do that could be any number of potential solutions we have.

At this point, most of our work revolves around research, specifically research on what it’s like to live in the condition of poverty, how best to create an engaging transformational game, and how best to pack the players’ decisions with emotional impact. The former two areas are widely covered by various authors and academics, particularly Matthew Desmond, David Eggers, Valentino Achak Deng, Jonathan Kozol, Jacob Riis, Mary Jordan, and Kevin Sullivan, who have all written about different sectors in poverty, including refugees, healthcare, homelessness, tenement living, and housing, thus helping us to reflect the diverse cast of characters that players may embody in The Poverty Spiral. We’re also looking at Sabrina Culyba’s Transformational Framework, a tried and true guide for how to create games that change the players in a desired way.

As for researching emotional impact in the decisions players make, we’re studying two games that have famously done that very well on that front: This War of Mine and Frostpunk. This War of Mine functions in a very similar way to The Poverty Spiral, in that the game is all about making decisions as a character with very limited resources, even if the player takes the role of a civilian in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, rather than an American in poverty. This War of Mine is famous for making players feel absolutely awful if they choose strategic choices over helping friends and family, which we absolutely want to learn from and emulate in The Poverty Spiral. Frostpunk also involves making decisions with heavy weight behind them, as players take the role of the captain of a large group of people who fled London due to extreme blizzards and were forced to found a new city in a frozen wasteland. Both games give us a lot to learn, but not all of us can access them just yet. In the meantime, free games like Spent, Cart Life, and Third World Farmer also revolve around trying to escape poverty. However, in playing them, we felt they also lacked the emotional weight that we hope to give The Poverty Spiral, since the player is a step removed from the NPCs that the player is aiming to help.

The main decision that the team made this week was the new platform for The Poverty Spiral: mobile devices. We wanted to make the game as accessible to the masses as possible, which meant that AR, VR, and gaming-specific consoles were out of the picture. This narrowed it down to PC/Mac or mobile devices. Dana told us that one of her dream features for the digital version of The Poverty Spiral included notifications about real-world current events that would affect the characters in the game. These notifications would likely either take the form of emails for PC/Mac or push notifications for mobile devices. Since we thought push notifications were less annoying than emails, we decided mobile was the better option. Also, one member of the team, who grew up surrounded by poverty, pointed out that it was more common for people in poverty to have a mobile device but no computer at home than the other way around, thus strengthening the argument for mobile devices as opposed to PC/Mac.

Going forward, we’ll continue to do more research in the same areas we have been, decide whether we want a 2D or 3D art style, and figure out which features of the current version of The Poverty Spiral are the most important to our client while transforming the game into the mobile version. The game has a lot of potential, and we’re excited to see how we can make the game improve in the coming months.