Who Painted It? — P4 Process and Printable

Print-at-home link: https://tinyurl.com/cs377g-who-painted-this

Intention

Our goals for the P4 iteration of the project were:

1. Give people opportunities to learn from play, rather than testing what people knew before the game.
2. Integrate the building/scoring system with the art theme.
3. Create a sense of urgency and player interaction throughout the game; prevent players from being in their own “lane” the entire game.
4. Improve the craft of the game, and make the game components both more beautiful and more useful in design.

Our learning outcomes were:

• Recognizing artists, their paintings and art movements that they were involved in.
• Identifying characteristics of paintings from different artists and movements.
• Becoming more interested in art history.

Rule/Mechanics changes

To support learning from play, we kept all the artwork relevant throughout the game by making them stick around either on the game board or the player’s collections (see the rules for more details).

Additionally, we used the building mechanic to create player interaction, by making the players quiz each other on their collection whenever someone landed on someone else’s exhibit.

Finally, we added long term goal cards that gave people sudden boosts to their reputation (score) in the late game, creating a sense of urgency.

Card Redesigns

Overall, our goal of redesigning art cards was to make the cards easier to read and more visually appealing.

• Designed the back interface. The previous back design did not meet the aesthetic standard that an art game was supposed to adhere to. We wanted to add an harmonious yet modern touch to the cards without overpowering the painting.
• Increased size of card, painting and font to make content more readable (see Figure 1). During play testing, players had a hard time to see other players’ art cards as the paintings and text were too small. So we enlarged paintings and text fields (including title, artist and fun fact).

Figure 1: Design changes of art card from P1 to P4

• Moved artists’ portraits to the Word Bank. On back of art cards, we had artists’ portraits as well as fun facts in P1, as a way to flesh out artists with a sense of personality and personal story. The goal was to reduce the gap between exalted artists and players who do not have prior knowledge in art history. But portraits took up too much space and seemed a little redundant, we moved portraits to the Word Bank.
• Color-coded art cards. In the Word Bank, the three art movements are indicated by different color schemes. We applied the same color schemes to art cards, so that players can associate color with corresponding art movements (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Current art card designs for the three art movements featured in the game

• Printed on matte card stocks for better printing quality and less flimsiness.

Word Bank Card

Figure 3: Word Bank for artists and art movements

Instead of having multiple choices on the front sides of each of the cards, we made a word bank of artist names (see Figure 3). We selected four artists from each art movement (Impressionism, Post-impressionism and Surrealism), and curated three paintings for each artist. This solved the problem of each card being too cluttered with both the painting and the choice of possible artist names. It created enough room to fail, and also encouraged players to think about the artists works in the context of their movements.

Goal Card

We replaced the resource system with the reputation system. In P1, players needed a certain amount of art cards and resources to build museums. They gained resources by landing on resource slots, which was an output of pure luck. We wanted players to focus more on the content of art cards, rather than the quantity; through the goal cards, players can choose to collect paintings from a specific artist, collect paintings from different artists, or collect paintings from an art movement.

Figure 4. Long term goal cards

Board Redesigns

Figure 5. Our P1 board (made in Google Slides)

In redesigning the board, we focused on:

• Simplifying the types of spaces from art space, location space, and resource space to one space type. Each space both has a location and a card on it.
• Matching the aesthetic to the looks and colors of the newly designed cards.

Figure 6. Our P4 Board (made in Figma)

• Simplifying the types of spaces from art space, location space, and resource space to one space type. Each space both has a location and a card on it.

Figure 7. Space on the P4 board

• Each space has an hand-selected background artwork associated with that location; it either is a response to that location, or the artist of the piece is from that location.
• The space has a slot that creates an accordance for placing the art cards.
• We built in slots in the middle of the board for the remaining art cards and goal card decks.
• We printed the board onto cardboard board-quality material.

Showcase Playtest

This playtest allowed us to make some quick fixes to the rules and the cards:

1. We made the cards 28% bigger and also rotated the images to match their aspect ratio, since people were having trouble reading both the text and the cards.
2. We made it so that instead of rolling one die to see how much you would move, you could roll two and choose which one you wanted to use, since people felt like their movement around the board was completely random.
3. We added some goal cards that interacted with the locations on the boards. This was a bandaid on the fact that we didn’t have time to change the board itself to make the locations more interesting in the context of the game.

We noticed that it was only logistically possible for us to change the cards and the rules, since the cards were generated using the nanDECK card-making software using a common template linked to a Google Sheet, while the board was a static Figma file. We learned about the importance of having a scalable process.

Conclusion, Next Steps, and Limitations

Throughout the design of this game, we battled with the question of: how do we balance fun and learning, especially in a pedagogical game? Many of the design modifications we made had to do with making the play more educational than merely fun. However, we could see people were having less visceral fun in playing the game, and we wondered if it’s worth the sacrifice. After all, wouldn’t we need the fun to keep the players engaged with art even after they leave the game table? That said, we believe we have ended up with a solid game that leaves the players more engaged with and educated about art than before playing it.

We did an informal survey of players’ knowledge about the paintings after they finished playing the game in the final class playtest (see Figure 5). It was was interesting to see that at the end of the game, across 17 cards, the players could remember the artist 80% of the time, and the artwork title 30% of the time.

However, our survey does not constitute very trustable evidence because:

1. We did not conduct a pregame survey.
2. We were not able to finish the survey completely due to participant time constraints.
3. The players had access to the word bank while answering the survey.

Figure 5: After playing the game, Dennis tested if players could recall artists, art movements, and titles of the painting

Players were able to remember a fair amount of information, though we cannot guarantee the learning outcome of the game for long-term memory. We would like to look further into whether this could be an effective study tool for people learning about different artists.

There are definitely quite a few limitations we would like to address should we take this further. Having diversity within the pool of artists was something that we lost in the process of cutting down from 50 different artists to 12. The game doesn’t currently give an accurate depiction of the art world.

We want to make the locations on the board much more relevant to the game play. As one observer noted, the locations add an important narrative to the game, so it wouldn’t make sense to take them out. One idea we had to make them more engaging was to make the arts on the cards be from these specific locations on the game board. This would solve the confusion of one art being on the board for that location and another art being on the art card on that location. Additionally, this focus on geography would help guide us towards diversity in the artists and artwork.