P3: Reflection on “State of the Union”
I really enjoyed building a game based on a real-world system for this project. Our team chose to model immigration — a topic fraught with political discourse. We had to account for all the different factors involved in having someone enter the United States, from government policies to the motivations of different political officials. Figuring out how we wanted all the pieces to fit together was quite challenging and a process that took extensive play-testing/iteration. To start with, we had to break down the system into its pieces and distill the most important aspects. We realized that what we really wanted players to take away was that immigration isn’t just about one policy or the immigrant’s background; rather, there are many motivations that go into sponsoring different kinds of immigrants. In particular, we wanted people to realize that political officials do play a large role in sponsoring different kinds of immigrants and that there is a large amount of red tape in doing so.
What I found particularly helpful during the process was visualizing the different interaction loops and arcs in our game. We ended up having the arc of our game center around sponsoring immigrants to enter the United States; game players assumed the character of officials who had to meet certain objectives by sponsoring immigrants who met different criteria, e.g. diversity, helping with science/technology, etc. One interaction loop involved having officials work either in collaboration with or in opposition to other officials when attempting to sponsor immigrants via the policy action/rule cards we had. Another was constantly attempting to gather the necessary resources to sponsor the needed immigrants, i.e. money.
It was interesting to see the reactions playtest participants had to our game. It was certainly a steep learning curve for players to get the hang of our fairly complex game, but once they did, they started empathizing more with immigrants and also interestingly enough, with political officials. They understood that sometimes officials have to act against what they truly would like to do in order to meet their political agendas, i.e. objectives in our game. It was rewarding to see that after the playtest, participant were much more interested in learning more about immigration policy and in the social responsibility that comes with regulating immigration. Building this game also prompted me to think more deeply about immigration policy and has sparked my continued interest in the field.
