We began the first week of our development process by getting our desks situated and making sure that our computers and monitors were working properly.
Once that was done, we had a quick meeting with our faculty advisors, which revealed that we had a lot of set-up to get done before the end of the week: we needed to pick our producers and our team name, decide our core hours, figure out good times to meet with both our faculty advisors and our client, and start digging into our topic of “fake news” (as well as some of the subtopics surrounding that more general topic).
Following this meeting, we set up an internal professional communication channel (using Slack) and chose our producers. We then opened up lines of communication with our client (Games for Change) and set up a formal meeting with them, as well as with our advisors.
During our first two team meetings, we took a look at past Entertainment Technology Center Games for Change projects, drafted a preliminary version of our core hours, brainstormed a list of possible team names, and started to explore both concepts and mechanics that we might want to develop further.
However, it quickly came to our attention that none of the team names we brainstormed really stuck (we will need to continue our search for a suitable team name in the coming days). We also realized that, while we all had gained a solid idea of what “fake news” is, we still needed to do more research on that concept’s subtopics (including propaganda, satire, the effect of social media on the propagation of fake news, and more), as well as seek out other games that have tackled the concept of fake news in some respect. We will continue to conduct said research throughout the remainder of this week and into next week.
On Friday, we met with both our client and our faculty advisors.
Our first client meeting consisted of us getting to know the people we would be working with (and vice versa), and also gave us some insight into the conditions surrounding our upcoming presentation at the Games for Change Festival.
Our first faculty meeting allowed us some additional insight into what our advisors expected of us in terms of both scheduling and avenues we might want to explore further (for instance, we might want to consider breaking our audience into more than two groups, bringing in real-life journalists, et cetera).
We closed out the work week by establishing regular meeting times with our client and our advisors. Next week, we hope to solidify our team name and core hours, conduct more research, and start brainstorming more complete concepts that we might then expand into full-on designs.