Every child is a game designer
How to turn young people into game makers, even if you’ve never designed a game before.
To teach a subject, at any level, you need to be a subject expert, right? Well, I’m going to argue that you can facilitate a powerful learning experience, without having a theoretical or practical expertise in the subject of games.
Here is how myself, the mighty Chris Blakey and a small team of teachers, with no prior game design experience, helped 150+ teenagers become game designers during the Jamie Bone Challenge Cup week at Passmores Academy, a secondary school about an hour from London, UK.
Why games?
What’s the value of making games? Shouldn’t students stick to “noble” subjects like maths, science, or languages?
Young people are avid consumers of games, especially video games. Whether we like it or not, the average UK teenager spends more than 10 hours a week gaming, in their free time. There’s a whole “movement” devoted to pouring game mechanics into non-game activities and to spark some “fun” and “engagement” in dull subjects or inconvenient tasks, but this is not a story about gamification. At Passmores, our aim was not to make maths (or any other subject) fun by turning it into a game. Instead, we asked young people to become game designers: to pick a game they play and hack it with new rules, new goals and new messages.
Making (as opposed to consuming) games is the key. To make a game you need to research the subject of your game, you need to conceptualise a system of players, resources and rules, and then define how they all interact. The process involves planning, testing, evaluating feedback and iterating your prototype. And once you’ve made a game, you’ll start playing other games critically.
Children design games all the time, without anyone teaching them how to. You may have memories of this practice from your own childhood, and you may have observed kids negotiating rules among each other, tweaking games to compensate for uneven teams, for the lack of space, or just for experiment’s sake. Through games, children establish shared rules to socialize with their peers. If you ask them to hack a new game, they won’t need any induction.
What children (and many adults) may lack is the ability to look at games as vessels of cultural values, messages and ideologies. We are quite used to reading the morals behind linear storytelling media, such as novels, comics or films. However we are not so literate when it comes to understanding the meanings of games, both explicit and implicit ones. By making games we can promote this kind of literacy.
The formula
Where do you start making a game? From something we’re all familiar with: verbs. Whether it is running or collecting, shooting or trading, games are driven by verbs. Verbs determine what you can do in a game, how you can interact with its characters and other players, what you should do to win it, and what you simply can’t do. Think of a game you’ve played recently. What actions does the game allow you to do? And what does the game not let you do? What if you tried to talk to an enemy in a shooting game, instead of shooting it?
We kicked off the week by asking teams of students to pick a game they like, list all its verbs and discuss the messages and values that these verbs may convey.
Then we asked them to change the verbs so that their new game expresses their own messages and values.
The whole workshop could be summarised with this formula
existing game + new value(s) = new game
I learned this method from Una Lee and Paolo Pedercini’s workshop at AMC 2012, which was loosely based on Grow-a-Game. Before Passmores, I tried it myself at Mozilla Festival 2012.
At Passmores, the teams of young game designers could choose a game and a value from two lists I prepared, or propose their own games and values. They would then spend three days prototyping and play-testing their ideas, either as board games or video games (made with Scratch). At the end of the week, they would vote the best game in each category.
Here is a selection of new games that students designed and (some) prototyped.
Refugee run
The endless and aimless running of Temple Run becomes the purposeful and slightly more realistic running of an Iraqi refugee, trying to bring clean water back to her family and avoid being caught by the *ahem* terrorists.
Passmores-man
Inspired by Pac-man, you play a student dodging ghost teachers in the school-maze. Perhaps these kids see themselves as unrealised heroes, fighting daily against evil adults. In this workshop, they took the opportunity to overturn the established teacher-student relationship with a cheeky humour, translating an everyday situation into a meaningful gameplay.
Escape the bullies
In this board game one player is a student and a bunch of others are bullies chasing her around the school. At each turn both the “nerd” and the bullies need to answer a question related to the area in which they landed. A wrong answer means going back to the previous position. Knowledge gets you one step ahead (of your bullies, or your prey). With further development, this game could potentially foster a conversation around bullying.
Pac-food
Pac-man with a healthy message. Ghosts are fast food chains McDonald, Burger King, KFC and Dominos, friendly-looking in their normal state and evil (abusing the planet, animals and their workers) when you eat fruit. Unfortunately this game didn’t make it past the (brilliant) concept stage.
Healthy snake
Based on Snake, in this game you get points for eating fruit and veg, whereas fast food fattens the snake, quickly leading to game-over. A simple and effective concept, which the team prototyped as a playable video game with Scratch.
Givenopoly
In this spin on Monopoly, greed is replaced by generosity. It is worth noting that Monopoly itself was based on The Landlord’s game, which was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private hands. Instead of exposing a negative system by allowing players to be “bad”, Givenopoly takes the opposite approach and encourages them to be charitable.
Pacmanocracy
Pac-man hacked with democracy, there isn’t a single hungry player but a handful of them, each representing a UK political party stocking up on votes. The ghosts are historical dictators: Hitler, Stalin, Saddam and Colonel Gaddafi (interesting insight into the young game designers’ World view).
Sustainable Dungeons
Based on Dungeons and Dragons, this game is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where resources are scarce and collaboration is more effective than warfare.
Grand Family Auto
A twisted, board-game version of Grand Theft Auto, aiming to expose the not-so-glamorous sides of being a criminal (for example, going to rehab) and posing moral dilemmas to the player. Whilst in GTA criminal deeds don’t yield social consequences (as long as you don’t get caught) in this board game you have a choice to either commit crimes or earn points and boost your reputation through community work.
What could be improved
Language
Young people understood very well the game part of the formula. Many stumbled on the value(s) bit, which they found confusing: “What do you mean by values?” Talking to them, I found they related more easily to the term messages. When challenged to change the story, the characters or the goal of a game, rather than its values, they suddenly grasped the point of the workshop.
Examples
I bet you probably didn’t figure what this workshop was about until you read a couple of examples. Likewise, most students were puzzled when we explained them what they should do in theory, but as soon as we made an example they understood.
Super Mario + responsibility = Princess Toadstool is in debt, and you have to bail her out. The more time passes, the bigger her debt grows. You set out to gather money and keep up with repayments, while the game throws ethical challenges at you: to mug turtles for a quick buck, or to slowly earn money with hard plumbing work?
Scaffolding
A few teams worked independently from day one. Others drifted off after a few hours, or just settled on the first tame idea they came up with and didn’t consider any alternatives. For them, it may have been good to break down the workshop in short focused activities, for instance one to progressively change all the verbs of a game, another to try different goals or missions, one to change the story, or to invert the roles of the main characters, and so on. After each activity teams could have enriched their ideas pool, or produced forks from previous activities.
Board vs video games
Teams who chose board games generally came up with more thoughtful concepts than those who went for video games, the majority of which were mere re-skins of existing products. The process of designing a board game appears more collaborative and accessible, as all team members can throw ideas on the table, move pieces of paper around and think together. Making video games instead revolved around a single computer, controlled by a single person at a time, and it required a certain level of coding ability, which many young people didn’t have (yet?). From first-hand experience, I know how easy it is to get side-tracked by technical problems while writing code, and I observed talented students getting trapped in purely code-related challenges (“I can’t get this sprite to jump..”) while missing out on more important steps in the design process.
Game design is not gaming
Throughout the workshop week at Passmores we spread the idea that “making your own games can be more fun than just playing games that others made”. In other (buzz)words, we turned game consumers into game makers. The practice of making games can empower young people, offering them the conceptual tools to dissect the medium, and to use it to express their own views.
If you enjoyed this, go ahead and download the workshop materials from my GitHub repository, read this article by Molleindustria (Paolo Pedercini) about it, or buy yourself a deck of Grow-a-Game cards.
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