We kicked off the week by meeting with our faculty advisors and presenting design documents for both our World War II experience and the pandemic/virus-related narrative experience that our detective game had slowly evolved into. In addition, we presented flowcharts of each of those concepts, which we used to map out their general progression (i.e. what happens when participants enter the room, how we break them down into small groups, how we represent each of those groups as an online entity, et cetera).
Once we had done that, we decided to divide our work amongst ourselves yet again and have each team member brainstorm at least one new game concept that turned on mechanics other than selecting between binary choices.
Eventually, we settled on a couple of new concepts to pitch to our client: a game in which players must plan a city (while taking relevant news articles that may or may not be fake into account), and a game in which players would fill the roles of “virus,” “red blood cell,” and “white blood cell” (which would illustrate both the viral nature of fake news ability to spread and the fact that people can become “hosts” of that metaphorical virus without realizing it).
Simultaneously, we transformed both our WWII and pandemic into prototypes, both paper and web-based (you can find the web-based prototype of our narrative virus-related experience at https://yanranhan.wixsite.com/newscan).
At the end of the week, we presented the design documents, flowcharts and prototypes we’d made, along with the two new game concepts we’d developed, to our client. Upon discovering that our client really liked the idea of our blood cell game (due to its potential for both surprise and social interaction), we decided to run with it.
Now that we’ve settled on three different game concepts we would all be willing to develop further (i.e. our WWII experience, our narrative-based virus experience, and our blood cell game), we look forward to getting feedback from numerous faculty concerning those concepts during quarters.