Steve’s Declassified Stanford Survival Guide
Overview
Steve’s Declassified Stanford Survival Guide teaches students how to navigate real life twists and turns encountered as a Stanford undergraduate. It helps students recognize the importance of time and resource management, mental health, sexual health, and much more. This game is designed for incoming freshman or reminiscing seniors/alumni who enjoy narrative and storytelling. It is meant for 2+ players and will utilize discovery, fellowship, fantasy, and narrative fun. The learning outcomes of this game are an understanding of the resources on campus and how to use them as well as how to navigate through challenging college situations through presenting players with real life situations. Steve’s Declassified Stanford Survival Guide also encourages collaboration and the Stanford culture of helping and supporting others.
As seniors looking back on our undergraduate experience, our team (Medha Verma, Steve Weyns, Ryan, and Kally Zheng) wanted to create this game to help students learn about the many underutilized resources at Stanford University. From our personal experiences we have found that there are a lot of situations we wish we had been informed about before encountering them and that there were a lot of resources we wish that we knew existed. Furthermore, we have found that there are a lot of resources we did not know how to gain access to. In addition, our team has recognized the importance of prioritizing mental, physical and social health and balancing this with coursework. Steve’s Declassified Stanford Survival Guide is a very digestible and contextual way to retain a lot of info in a fun way.
Photos of Game:
Rules
Objective: In Steve’s Declassified Stanford Survival Guide you try to graduate from Stanford by reaching 180 units while balancing your life between social, health and educational activities. You will be presented with many real-life decisions and have to learn to prioritize the things that matter to you most as well has handle difficult and uncomfortable decisions.
The Cards: In this game there are two types of cards: Shit Happens Cards, and Resource Cards.
- Shit Happens Cards: Each of these cards represent a week at Stanford. There are three types of shit happens cards. However, all of these cards present you with a simple binary choice. Some of these cards also have an element of chance mixed in. Each player in the game will play this card in a round (week) of the game. For each Shit Happens card, once everyone has made their decision on the choice and knows their final outcome, flip over the card to learn the “consequences” of your choices.
- Resource Cards: These cards represent a Stanford Resource on Campus. They can be used on yourself or to help a fellow teammate out. They can be played at any time, but can only be played once.
Set Up:
Mix the resource cards into the Fall Quarter Deck. With the resource cards face down and the fall quarter cards face up.
Place this deck of cards in the center of the table where everyone can easily reach them.
Additionally place the Poker Chips and die in the center of the table where all players can easily reach them.
Game Play:
Choose a starting player.
Draw the card on the top of the pile. Read the card out loud for everyone to hear. Make your decision if it is a shit happens hard and then pass the card to your left.
Once every player has made their decision and knows the outcome of their choice flip the card over and tell everyone how many units they have earned.
Distribute the correct amount of chips to each player. Each chip counts for 5 units. Red chips represent social units, blue are health, and green are education units. After distributing and removing chips from all the players, discard the card next to the center deck of cards.
If you drew a resource card then read it out loud. Play this card at any point during the game. Move on to the next players turn.
Repeat this process.
Once the discard pile of cards contains ten shit happens cards, the quarter is complete. It is time for your quarter check-in.
Quarter Check Ins:
Fall Quarter: Each player should have at least 10 units in each of the education, social and health categories. Otherwise the player loses the game.
Winter Quarter: Each player should have at least 20 units in each of the education, social and health categories. Otherwise the player loses the game.
Spring Quarter: Each player should have at least 30 units in each of the education, social and health categories. Otherwise the player loses the game. Each player should also have at least 180 units.
Story Telling:
A huge element of the game Steve’s Declassified Stanford Survival Guide is the narrative. It is important that when it is your turn you read the cards out loud for everyone and explain your decision making choices.
Game Bits:
Poker Chips: Each poker chip is worth 5 units. Red chips are social units. Blue are health units and green are educational units.
Die: Used to determine the outcome once a player has made a decision for a Shit Happens Card.
Assessment
Our game strives to teach to incoming and current Stanford students about the challenges of balancing your education, health, and social life in a college environment. In our game, we also strive to teach this target audience about the resources that they have available at Stanford that can help them balance these important aspects of their life that are or will be competing for their time. In addition, our team has learned that in college you can not do everything that you want to do and because of a limited amount of hours in a day, sometimes we need to prioritize one aspect of our life over another. Therefore, we want to reflect this reality in our game and force people to think about what their priorities are in particular contexts.
We assess how well we achieve these learning goals by asking our playtesters how the game made them feel about the choices that were laid before them, how their imagined priorities matched with those reflected in the game, and if they feel more exposed to the resources that we have on campus that can help with difficult aspects of college.
We found from our playtests that the resource cards that we added to the game were extremely helpful in teaching about the many resources that we have on campus. We also found that by hiding the amount of units that people would receive from certain decisions people were more likely to look at the situations that were presented to them from the point of view that they would actually take as opposed to what would get them the most points in the game. The aesthetic of looking down at your chips and seeing that you were way behind in some aspect of your life was also a powerful and relatable part of the game.
History
Ideation: Our team started the process of coming up with our teaching game by discussing the areas that we were interested in teaching about. After coming up with many ideas, the areas that interested the most were wellness, creativity, and self confidence and imposter syndrome. We then decided to do a large, individual ideation phase where we all came up with several ideas for games in within these areas. We each tried to come up with 5 game ideas for each of these categories. This process of ideating apart and coming together brought us two a lot of great ideas. We then tried to use a “Yes And” technique to combine and build off of each others ideas. This lead us to a lot of ideas that we didn’t want to let go of, but we decided to go with a game that taught how to navigate some of the challenges that we and others have faced in college.
MDAO: We then moved into developing the MDAO for this game. We already had a rough idea of what we wanted the outcomes of our game to be and how we wanted to teach them. As talked about above the outcomes that we were trying to leave our players with a sense of what college is like and the challenges that it holds, in addition to the resources that are available for us to use at Stanford. The reason that these outcomes were important to us is that we didn’t discover a lot of resources that we have available to us until very late Freshman year and are still learning about more even in our fourth year. We thought that it would be valuable for incoming students to have an easily digestible and fun way of learning about these resources much more effectively.
In terms of aesthetics, we wanted the game to be engaging, fun, and invoke curiosity and conversation about the events, decisions, and resources talked about in the game. We imagine this being the type of game that could be played in dorms between RAs and freshman.
We decided that we would start out with simple mechanics and playtest to find out which direction we would need to go in order to achieve our desired aesthetics and outcomes. Our original mechanics were as follows. There were 3 types of resources players could collect: social, health, and educational. The players would collect these resources by drawing a card that had a decision on it and depending on what decision they made, they would receive some outcome of positive or negative units.
Playtests: Over the course of the last week our team ran 5 playtests with various groups of Stanford students. We also found that it was incredibly helpful to run countless playtests of our game from within our own group in order to work out minor kinks and come up with ways to improve the game. Through our playtesting we made multiple major changes to our game, each of which took incredible amounts of time and testing in order to perfect. We were surprised by how these larger changes in the game can be so difficult to perfect because there are so many unforeseen consequences of each change. In the next section we describe the most major changes that we made in the game and the reasoning behind each of those iterations. In addition, you can see the pictures of our multiple playtest below.
Major Changes & Reasoning:
Information Architecture: Immediately something that stood out from this playtest was the information architecture of the cards. One of the feedback that we got from every player was that there was too much prose and very few visuals. Consequently, we decided to remove the paragraphs and instead convey the story using illustrations, icons, and one to two sentence descriptions.
Adding Excitement to Game Play: Another feedback that we got after this round was that there was too much consistency within the game which made it boring predictable. To add excitement to our game, we decided to add Resource Cards as a way to add more learning to the game, but also add a layer of complexity and excitement to the game. There would be very few resource cards to create an element of surprise.
Goals and Points are not defined:
One of the immediate issues with the game was that we had not clearly defined how a player could win the game and our points system lacked consistency. We noticed that players were gaining points to easily, making the game too simple to capture their interest. To tackle these issues we made two main changes:
- Balancing: We spent hours refining and multiple game plays amongst ourselves trying to define the points system. It was a challenging balance to find because we want to find the sweet spot between being too hard and too easy to get points. An additional layer of challenge was added because of the probability of every situation.
- Defining exciting goals. To address the issue of lack of motivation, we decided to create the rule of quarterly thresholds. After every quarter, a player had to have an x amount of points in all areas: wellness, education, and social. We believed that this would incentivize players to more intentionally try to gain points and ensure they are living a balanced Stanford career.
Link to Printable Version: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_wcdZLDVLMgCJTSxynP_EL46MFcjFFmp