Find the Right Flow — New Tabletop Role-Playing Game Addresses Youth Employment in Bhutan
Work Flow is a tabletop card game that incorporates role play and strategy elements, and is designed to engage players in reflecting on the issues driving youth unemployment in Bhutan, while facilitating the emergence of peer-networks to encourage entrepreneurship, social support, and idea generation. The project emerged out of a previous Engagement Lab project in Bhutan, also done in collaboration with the UNDP, using the online game platform, Community PlanIt. In Youth@Work Bhutan, players, mostly centered in the capital city of Thimphu and Paro, gave input to the UNDP about the issues surrounding youth unemployment and deliberated over ways that the Royal Government of Bhutan — in particularly the Ministry of Labor and Human Resources — could better address the relatively high unemployment rate among youth in the country. That 3-week project — which engaged nearly 2,000 youth — was such a success that the UNDP sought to bring it to the more rural regions of the country, where connectivity is limited. In order to engage this section of the population, we developed Work Flow, a table top card game (the materials are easily printed from .pdf files and accessible via elab.emerson.edu/projects/workflow). UNDP Bhutan received a hard copy of the game, along with 10 USB flash drives loaded with the printable files needed to play, and the game facilitation guide, which they could disseminate to schools and community centers in rural towns, targeting 16–24 year olds outside the capital city.
Although the development cycle for creating a game, especially with an international partner, was extremely compressed (October — December 2015), we had a good amount of data from the Community PlanIt game and the participatory workshops the Engagement Lab facilitated in the country in late 2014.. One of the key insights that drove the design of Work Flow emerged from observing these workshops: namely, for the youth the topic of unemployment was socially difficult to discuss candidly, but once surface tension was breached, participants readily opened up, shared experiences, and offered support and ideas to one another. We wanted our game to emulate that experience, since robust peer-to-peer networks are one of the key factors to finding new employment opportunities or building start-up ventures. Also, we wanted players to think critically and strategically about the costs and benefits of moving to areas where high concentrations of people are competing for the same limited resources and opportunities. Bhutan, like many developing countries, has seen a significant influx of youth from rural to urban centers in the hopes of finding employment. In Bhutan, college educated youth are particularly drawn to public sector jobs, which are seen as secure and prestigious, but supply outstrips demand by a factor of about 4:1. We wanted to make sure the game brought this issue into the strategic play of the game. We wanted to understand if this game could 1) strengthen peer to peer networks, 2) break down social barriers about publicly speaking about the personal and family burden of unemployment and 3) create greater awareness of other opportunities that might exist outside of public sector work in Thimphu.
The scope of the project was face-paced and circumscribed mainly by time to complete within grant funding constraints. Although we hope to see the game piloted among youth in rural areas, for this cycle of funding, success was mainly determined by our partners satisfaction with the product. We developed the game using an iterative design process, beginning with fast prototyping of possible games among lab staff, iterating on the most viable of the concepts, and then sending a rough paper prototype (.pdf files) that were playtested by UNDP in Bhutan with local youth. Feedback from playtest sessions, include survey response questions, and video recordings of the playtests, provided our team with clues about how to adapt both the structure of the game and its content. We were particularly interested in creating characters whose identities players of the game would inhabit that seemed relevant and resonant with their experiences or those of their friends and relatives, while getting at the intended extra-lusory effects of the game described above. Also, we wanted a game that wouldn’t be too difficult to produce and learn without a facilitator, since we wanted the game to offer stand alone experiences, outside of the need for a facilitated experience. Finally, of course, we wanted the game to be fun. Based on survey responses and iterative process that the game went through, we feel we achieved success in terms of each of these goals. Although no formal evaluation was built into the project for this phase of funding, there is the possibility that our partners at UNDP Bhutan will be able to secure additional grant funds for such an a study during a pilot phase of the game. Until then, we can track success according only to anecdotal reports we receive from our partners in Bhutan and monitoring download of the game from our website.
Phase 1 of the design process was carried out internally among lab staff. Using player data gathered from the Community PlanIt: Youth@Work Bhutan game, we cycled through a number of approaches to enframing the players’ input from that game, where we had over 20,000 comments and responses to work with. We quickly determined that in order to alleviate the social burden of sharing personal experiences around unemployment, particularly in face-to-face setting, we would build role-playing into the game. The data from Youth@Work Bhutan provided us a vast number of source material from which to construct representative narratives and situation for roles in the game. An early version of the game involved players in a wide array of challenges — acting, drawing, trivia, reflection — that took them through the process of collecting points in order to hit a target goal. This version of the game, wherein role-play constituted only one facet of the game (in acting challenges) was playtested in Bhutan, and found to be too complex and players also wanted more role play to structure their immersion in the fiction of the game. Also, we found from the playtests in Bhutan that there was not enough dramatic tension, since any number of players could win, and rounds also were unevenly paced.
In phase 2 of the design process, we doubled down on the role play elements, creating 30 unique character cards (allowing up to that many players to participate at a time, with a minimum of 8 to make the game playable among small or large groups). Players would be tasked with attaining opportunities and resources specific to their role card, and also moving between game locations (tables / rooms) in order seek out those opportunities. When this version of the game was tested with youth in Bhutan, it was much more successful. We received a positive response to the game. In the final iteration, we strived to streamline player actions even more, so that actions between the rounds of the game were stable and further reducing the need for a game facilitator.
The final phase of the design process involved creating the card decks and resource tabs that players would need to play the game, along with designing and writing a facilitation guide. We relied heavily on creation of past table-top game projects at the Lab (such as @Stake and Handwashing with Ananse) for templates of cards and resource tabs. Our art team — consisting of in-house art director and one graphic design lab assistant — created the logo, visual aesthetic and layout for the game materials. We produced one hard copy of the game to ship to our partners at the UNDP Bhutan, along with 10 USB flash drives loaded with the print-and-play materials and facilitation guide in December 2015.
Our major take-aways from this project have mainly to do with design process. At the Engagement Lab, we are in a constant experimental process of exploring the way we collaborate with partners to do research and create products that live in the world beyond the research. The outcomes of this game design project reinforced lessons we already have learned in other contexts:
- Scope a game design project with ample time for meaningful design research with partners and target audience. We had a significant repository of data for this project which in other contexts we might have had to gather from preliminary research, field interviews and other ethnographic inquiry. We experimented in this project with fast-tracking this piece of a design process — what we might in other contexts call an “inception workshop” — where we work closely, in loco when possible, with international partners to make sure we have appropriate buy-in to the concepts of the game and its goals, as well as sourcing “raw material” for game content. Because we had essentially done a great deal of this part of the process during a recent implementation of another game project dealing with the same subject, we somewhat underestimated the timing for playtesting and the back-and-forth exchange of results and iteration during the design phase of this project. While we were able to produce a game that underwent some playtesting in Bhutan, we could have benefited from more iterations during playtesting and also sought more feedback on the visual design of the game.
- Allow room for experimentation. Experimentation has implicit within it the possibility for failure and room to assess, adjust, and re-design. When project timelines are overly ambitious, the design process suffers, because there is little room for error and iteration. In fact, Work Flow went through at least 2 versions of iteration in-house before we came up with the prototype for the current form of the game. That left us with about a month to cycle through two more iterations of that game with our partners in Bhutan, using playtesters there. Simultaneously, the art team assets are contingent to some degree on defined aspects of the game, so fully designing the layout for game resources was again pushed through very quickly, leaving us virtually no time for consultation with our partners on this aspect of the project. Our standing relationship with the UNDP allowed us to proceed on this accelerated schedule, but from a collaborative design perspective, it was not ideal.
- Build piloting and evaluation into the project timeline. This may seem obvious, but when a partner asks for a tool, it’s easy to fall into the mindset of producing a thing rather than facilitating an experience that produces knowledge. In every case, it is a good idea to build pilot-testing and evaluation of a product into the scope of the project timeline and budget. It is incumbent on the Lab to make the case for this early on in negotiating the scope and terms of the relationship and to convince the partner of the mutual benefit and value of such a phase in the process. Again, because of a standing relationship with the partner in this instance, both parties were willing to operate in good faith on this accelerated timeline. We delivered a strong game product, but without pilot-testing and evaluation built into the timeline, due to fiscal year constraints. To ensure the deployment of our projects beyond production, we should strive to find ways to work with partners through piloting and initial evaluation that goes beyond the design phase and delivery of the civic tool — in this a card game — so that both parties can come away with learned outcomes that extend beyond production and into implementation. We hope to be able to continue this aspect of the Work Flow project in the months ahead, either with additional funding for local testing or at very least through long-distance consultation with the UNDP in Bhutan to assess and report on outcomes.
