This week we had a small playtest session (3 teens). They played the Empathy and Growth Mindset games.

When playing Growth Mindset they mentioned that the clay in the game (which you collect whenever you hit a “clay” tile) loses its value since there is so much of it.

They started with avoiding the monsters they couldn’t beat, however, that means that they gave up on “losing” to those monsters and in this game failing gives you extra resources. That eventually led to them losing at the final boss and having to redo a portion of the game again.

However, as that was happening they were able to strategies better and eventually win the game. Them failing made them think of how they could have won the game and realizing that failing is an important part of the process.

Here is a 17min “short” video of the playtest.

Empathy:

 In this version the player can guess the character’s emotions based on their facial expropriations. If they guess it right they get an extra dialogue option.  Having the teens guess the facial expression seemed to add another dimension to the game.

An additional change was to the way the game is played,: the teens played it in groups of two what made them talk about what choices they want to make and why it made sense. This can be useful in two ways:

1) It can help tackle one of the barriers of male teenagers developing empathy much later, by pairing them with female teens and creating a discussion regarding the choices made.

2) It allows a moderator insight to why the players are making the choices they are making and to create a discussion.

We still have a few minor improvements that needed to be added to the plot but the major thing we noticed was that when they work together they “correct” each other and discuss the logic behind their choices.

Curiosity:

The game itself still needs work and currently it is like this:

The player is a ship roaming the sea looking for treasure guarded by sea monsters. The player can access the treasure if she can distract the monsters by “throwing” other monsters at them. The monsters react differently to one another and the player can explore the different reactions and combinations. The goal is to encourage the player to explore the different unknown combinations and to encourage the player to take risks in order to experiment.

You can see a short video of the current version here:

In general it seems that both Empathy and Growth Mindset also encourage key principals of co-operation, another construct we left behind when we scoped down.