WK4 – Getting buy-ins

Summary

Goal: Getting the faculty informed of our vision.

Challenge: We did not have enough time to flush out 3 design directions.

Did we fulfill this week’s goals: Not quite.

Process

Our team had Quarters review with the ETC faculty and we were told that our process (on the walls) was great, our design mechanics sounded exciting and not just “a game”, but we still needed to deliver meaning for our experience.

Jessica Hammer helped us refine our problem statement to “turn Games For Change members into active citizens within the Games For Change community.”  What does that mean?

I contacted the client to ask for his opinion. He was not sure. Dave told our team to not get caught on the lack of information.

Played games and paper prototyping for research

Our team decided to play a couple of games to learn some art technique for group engagement. Everyone was enthusiastic in the activities; however, we did not end up with any solid results, so people eventually played Nintendo Switch instead. That was me being unprepared as a producer! I did not have a clear evaluation method for these games, so our team was not sure how applicable these games to the project.

Our team arrived at creating a workshop-style experience with mini rounds to show that art is a process rather than a product. Our team learned that 1 hour is a short amount of time to facilitate 100 people to do multiple activities together.

Finding backend architecture solution

Meanwhile, the programmers successfully tested Firebase as our online server and connected multiple phones to enable a collective output shown on our TV screen. We decided to use Firebase since it is easy to use, secure, and networking seemed to work fine for our experience.