A 5-step guide to build your next board game for behaviour change
Are you a development practitioner who is interested in using games to change behaviour? Whether it is because you think your target group will respond better to games than traditional approaches or you think this will be a self-sustaining process to impact, I have some advice for you!
In my work at the BRAC Social Innovation Lab (SIL), I’ve seen quite a few experiments with gamification in learning. In 2020, when we were working as a part of the Hygiene and Behaviour Change Coalition (HBCC) with the WASH and Communication Programmes, we saw the latter commission renditions of snakes-and-ladders and pac-man with COVID-19 hygiene messaging. From a bit of a distance, I felt that these were examples of low-touch, but exciting adaptations that could quickly break a communications monotone that had existed during the pandemic worldwide.
But in 2022, as a part of SIL’s “Innovation Fund for Mobile Money” project, I had an opportunity to go a step beyond and co-design a whole board game with behavioural nudges, with my colleague and friend Durdana Mahfuz, and a professional board game design organisation, Kraftz. The game we conceptualised was মাটি থেকে মুঠোফোন (Clay2Cell), which was designed to increase digital financial literacy and inculcate good habits in the same realm for adolescents of classes 6–10 in peri-urban and rural areas.
Later in 2023, a separate team within the Lab repeated this approach in order to build wellbeing knowledge and habits in much younger children in BRAC’s schools.
What can we tell you about these experiences? Here are 5 quick tips:
1. Understand why you want to gamify your approach
Gamification is a buzzword. Everyone wants to gamify, or fund gamification. Why then, do we see so few cases — if any — of learning-based games scaled up?
Often, we rush into gamification without much thought of why it’s necessary. The result is poorly designed products that fade into obscurity because they fail to address the root problem that needs solving.
When conceptualising মাটি থেকে মুঠোফোন (Clay2Cell), we responded to the problem of women in hard-to-reach areas being resistant to using digital financial services despite our concerted efforts, thinking it the domain of their husbands or children. So instead, we targeted these adolescents with a board game reminiscent of ones that they already play with parents (eg, ludo). We saw gamification as an opportunity to equip these would-be users with knowledge and habits, who could transfer the knowledge to their mothers as ambassadors if they later played the game at home.
Understand the case for gamification, specific to your problem and audience.
2. Find the right competencies in your team
A successful board game needs designers who are equipped with the principles of game design. It needs subject matter experts to ensure we are nudging the right things. It needs behavioural researchers who can extract and analyse the audience’s habits and aspirations for the designers to design based on. Finally, it needs communication experts to present the game in a way that attracts it’s intended audience.
Each of the two times that we have attempted to create games, we have analysed gaps and onboarded resources accordingly.
Do you have these competencies on your team? If not, please hire them, find external partners, or borrow expertise from other departments in your organisation.
3. Build a fun game first, then iterate the content
One of the biggest reasons educational game design can fail is a singular focus on the education.
Most games we’ve grown up with have something in common: they were fun, short and repeatable, with competitive as well as collaborative elements. Games target “want-to-do”s as opposed to “need-to-do”s. Education often feel like the latter, and therefore “not fun”.
Adapting a tried and tested existing game, like the HBCC games mentioned above is one quick fix. Here, designers must only ensure that the messaging incorporated doesn’t ruin the fun or clash with the gameplay.
When working with a new concept, however, it’s worth prioritising game mechanics over content. This doesn’t mean one has to be done before the other- in Clay2Cell, we were building game mechanics along with subject matter. But the focus was on the game and a majority of the messaging was carefully added later.
Simply put, a game that if fun but has minimal behavioural nudges is still more effective than a tedious one chock full of teachables. The former will at least get repeated playthroughs that teach a few things very well. The latter wont be played and therefore will have no impact whatsoever.
Focus on building an interesting and repeatable game first, and incorporating the nudges and teachables second.
4. Prototype, test, iterate and evaluate with your audience
Testing a prototype may lead to minor tweaks- like changing the examples and iconography and concepts to be more relevant and recognisable for our target group, which happened in মাটি থেকে মুঠোফোন (Clay2Cell). It can also reveal the necessity of a complete overhaul, like in case of our wellbeing game.
When we first ideated a board game about wellbeing, we built a prototype where four players would answer questions regarding four aspects of wellbeing to progress. But as soon as we tested it with our target audience, we found out that the questions were too “academic” and the game was not as interactive and fun as we hoped. Worse still, we realised it wasn’t going to be repeatable in our absence. The facilitation skill required was a fair bit beyond what the grade 4 students we were targeting were capable of.
So we went back to the drawing board. We asked ourselves- if these children do not find this fun, what do they find fun? We remembered the playground games they invited us to play with them. We realised that these games should be the basis of what we design.
This was just the first of our iterations. Later the team went through a few more and even as I write this article a few more may be on the way. In the end, the game may look nothing like what was initially conceptualised. Or we may revert back to something very similar to it. The important thing is to never shy away from iterating on your work when the context demands.
What’s next is to evaluate. Evaluations are unavoidable tools to understand the impact and future potential of a design project, if sustainable change is the goal. Make sure you consider all options for evaluations. It’s best if you can find an external evaluator with an expertise on running the kind of trials you want.
Don’t have deep pockets? You can always get clever and circumvent barriers. When we had to run a rapid-evaluation by ourselves for মাটি থেকে মুঠোফোন (Clay2Cell), we got an amazing idea from our colleague Raiya Kishwar Ashraf who used to manage the mobile money portfolio at SIL. Upon her suggestion, we ran tournaments in schools to get a lot data in a very short amount of time. This allowed us to get a set of players who’ve played the game different numbers of times and allowed us to test impact against number of playthroughs, which otherwise would have taken much longer.
However, its important to know your limitations. For our case, we are well aware that to truly understand behaviour change requires a longer evaluation. As a result we are following this up with a longer term evaluation in schools now.
Be quick on your feet, pivot when needed and always evaluate your work.
5. Find any and all synergies possible to multiply impact
So you have built a good product that works exactly the way you envision it. Congratulations! Is this the end of the journey?
I would think not! There are so many brilliant ways to carry your work forward and find synergies in the ecosystem
For মাটি থেকে মুঠোফোন (Clay2Cell), we are distributing the game to secondary schools with the help of the BRAC Education Programme. The plan has been the same for the wellbeing game once it is completed. But depending on your objective, your distribution strategy may be very different.
Multiply your impact by collaborating with the right partners and ensuring maximum possible access and impact.
So these were my experiences in my small exploration of behavioural game design. I’m sure some of you have much more to share! Feel free to reach me anytime at huq.kaziashfaq@gmail.com.
