Week 2: Moving to Mobile

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.