P3 Reflection: INCarceration
I think we might have had our work cut out for us, starting P3, when our team decided to focus on the american private prison system.
The prison system is complex and well-integrated with american society. There were so many aspects of the system we wanted to convey with the ultimate goal of getting people fired up: minimum occupancy laws, which motivate the government to lock up more citizens; prison wages, all of which are pennies on the dollar; recidivism-focused lobbying, where private companies push for laws that keep released prisoners from re-integrating into society. We tried to incorporate a little of each while focusing on the big picture: prisons benefit from profit over people.
Through brainstorming we envisioned a board game much like monopoly to impress upon players the scale and flow of money in the prison-industrial complex. We built a prototype of this game, decided that it no longer needed the game board, and created a card game with Events, Contracts, and Programs. Though the game felt fine to playtest ourselves, by the end of the first class playtest of this we realized something fundamental might have to change.
This is where we made a critical shift, and one that I think resulted in a better game. We discussed as a team the idea of a different mechanic base that would still satisfy our main goal, and quickly discovered we were way more passionate about this new game. This meant we were at a disadvantage, pivoting so late in the week, so we wouldn’t have as many opportunities to playtest (especially with other students in week 9). Nevertheless, the team worked extra hard to make a game that felt playable and numerically balanced with totally new mechanics like score multipliers.
We made time for an outsider playtest and a final round of changes. Overall, it seems as though the feedback we incorporated from this playtest was effective in the final class playtest — but the changes added additional new problems we hadn’t predicted.
If I had chosen to continue work on this game for P4, there’s a couple different approaches to improving the game that come to mind:
- Refocus on the original goal: getting players fired up about private prison’s cyclical negative effect on american citizens. This might involve adding flavor text, changing the lobbying mechanic, heightening the value of secrecy in the game, or making the economics more tangible.
- Streamline the rules. I think the rules might have benefitted from examples and a more precise setup plan. The final playtest had some confusion with setup and the responsibility of each player that needs clarity.
- Embed the game more strongly in the real world. Though the concepts are real, I fear players might lose sight of the analogous personal impacts of choices made in the game. Increasing the sympathetic connection between player’s choices and effects on human life would probably aid in the effectiveness of accomplishing the game’s meta-goal.
It was really interesting to work on almost two entirely different games under the same topic — it really showed me that the possibilities are limitless and that this can let you go astray. Systems are too complex to totally encapsulate in a single game, but this means there are always opportunities to put your own spin on it.
