Note: from now on, we will be referring to our main deliverable as an experience, as we have come to the realization that we are constructing an entire show, not just a game.
We kicked off the week with a playtest on Carnegie Mellon University’s main campus, during which we ran through parts of our experience with undergraduate students who were taking a course on fake news. While we were only able to have our testers play through our experience’s first phase (in which players create misleading posts), we found that the vast majority of those students were able to understand what they were supposed to do (although several students were a little unclear on context).
The next day, we discussed our playtest (as well as feedback we’d received from it) with our faculty advisors, and we also took them through our experience. We found that both of our advisors weren’t sure what to do during the final phase of the experience (in which players must utilize distraction to take the public’s attention away from their faux social media company/troll factory). This confirmed our need for a presentation at the end of our experience to explain exactly what happened during its gameplay-driven sections. Our advisors also voiced the importance of re-recording all of our dialogue with professional actors, as the scratch dialogue we currently had in the build wasn’t working.
Right after that meeting, we set to work addressing those two points of feedback. We continued work on the presentation we’d be giving at the end of our experience, we re-recorded all of the dialogue for one of our experience’s two characters, and we set up a recording session for our experience’s second character (which will take place early next week).
A few days later, we playtested with a large group of around fifteen Entertainment Technology Center students. We found that, while everyone understood the general story surrounding the experience, not everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing, especially during the experience’s final phase. However, we also found that within the audience, there were several people that did understand what to do, and once the final phase kicked off, those individuals formed small collaborative sub-groups (which is exactly the kind of behavior we hope our audience exhibits at the Games for Change Festival).
After the playtest, I talked with one of our testers for a bit, and he related that he loved the fact we’d turned the act of posting schlock on the internet into a mechanic. To be sure, the fact that I’d finally been told that our experience was enjoyable to play (without needing to ask) was elating.
On Friday, we presented our experience to ETC guests. The process of doing so was a little challenging, as we were both located in a remote corner of the building (due to our need for an auditorium-like venue with a large screen/projector setup) and had specific showtimes that limited our guests to trying out our experience in fairly long 30-minute blocks. While we were not able to get any testers for our first show, we stepped up our game for our next two shows, making sure to have several team members standing in and around the ETC main lobby/hallway, both notifying guests of our project’s showtimes and guiding them to our presentation space if they were interested. Overall, our last two shows proved very successful, and we got a good amount of feedback from guests that we will take into consideration for finishing up our build for final playthroughs.
Going into next week, we aim to complete our final presentation, as well as finish recording dialogue, finish off our experience and completely archive our project.