Florence: Perspectives & Patterns
We came across Florence when it won the coveted Apple Design Award last year. Soon after we started playing it, we realised it wasn’t a typical game. It felt somewhat like a graphic novel or a comic book, yet so different from it. It seemed to be an interesting and novel method of storytelling. We were particularly excited about that since another team at UNESCO MGIEP was creating an original way of storytelling for their Global Citizenship course. Playing Florence was an emotional journey for our team, even though the story was predictable. The immersive-ness of the graphics and the music made us genuinely invest in the game and its story. A few days later, we played it again, and this time we played like we were Krish. Next iteration, we played it like Florence. This allowed us to look at the game’s story from different perspectives, understand the characters better, and make meaning of the story.
At our institute, we want to challenge the norms and break the patterns. As an organisation working in the Education sector, we have always valued the importance of Games as learning tools, in both the formal and informal space. However, we struggled in embedding ideas that we care about in games, keeping the fun part of games intact. For instance, our game World Rescue. It’s a fantastic game which embeds an understanding of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but it may not seem as fun as a popular game such as Angry birds or Pokemon Go. This balance between learning and fun is the key to what we do in the Games for Learning Programme at MGIEP.
While there are multiple ways of bringing games into the classroom — many of which educators have already been doing — we have picked up a specific approach. We are utilising well-designed games (educational or otherwise) and creating courses around the same. Simply put, we take an existing game and break down its narrative to build a course enriched with learning outcomes around themes relevant to the game as well as to the SDGs. How does this help? We see a two-way benefit in this. While the game offers a new approach and challenge to create a course around, the course enhances and further develops the educational/learning aspect of the game.
Take walking simulators as an example.
Every walking-sim has a story and a set of characters. Each of these characters in the story has a history, motivation and a layered personality. They work in a certain setting and environment. We use all of these factors to create a course on relevant topics such as Identity, Migration, Climate change and so on. This allows us to go much deeper into these topics, without making the game boring or dull. Right now these game-based courses might feel like a supplement to existing games to some users, but our design process in the course creation ensures that these game-based courses bring a newer kind of audience to these popular games — those who have long considered games to be a ‘leisure activity’.
Florence cannot be termed as a Walking simulator, but its interactive story and lack of dialogues keep it open for interpretation, hence offering an exciting opportunity to design a course using the game. We also felt that the journey of Florence is something that most young people would resonate with and therefore decided to build a learning experience around the game and the themes it touches upon.
After playing the game multiple times, two themes stuck out for us — Identity and Gender Roles.
Identity
The game subtly but beautifully brings out the concept of Identity — as perceived by oneself, by others, how it may change in relationships, and how it may change over time. The idea of Identity is something we all explore, engage with and may even get troubled by several times over our life span. While developmental psychology tells us that the period of adolescence is where we start exploring and questioning our Identity, we also know that it is never static and keeps evolving throughout life. As students navigate through middle and high school, they go through various phases of self-discovery, self-awareness, and identity development. This is the time they start associating more with a particular social group, identify themselves as part of a cohort, and may even grapple with gender and sexual identity.
Florence’s journey from when she used to work as an accountant, burying her real aspirations of becoming an artist to coming to terms with who she is and following her passion, was an excellent example to discuss the concept of ‘Identity’. The idea of ‘Identity’ and how it influences our lives is rooted in the core of the game. We see Florence looking at her ‘box of memories’ to recall how she enjoyed ‘art’ but gave it up because her mother seemingly wanted her to study mathematics. The same is revisited when she speaks with Krish about his dream of becoming a cello-player only to realize how dearly she wanted to become an artist. And, in the end, we find her truly achieving her aspirations and becoming who she always wanted to be.
Other aspects that we tried to explore through the course include self v/s social perception, as well as our ‘social media’ identity. In today’s day and age social media often plays a huge part of many of our lives- influencing how we see ourselves, how others see us and how we portray ourselves to the virtual world. In the game, you can see how Florence is showing her interests/disinterests while browsing through some of her Instagram-like photos. We thought it might be interesting to ask the learners to design a social media profile of Krish/Florence based on their understanding of each character’s identity.
Gender roles
Gender socialization right from childhood also plays a major role in shaping one’s identity. Often the gender roles and norms governed by the society influence how we view ourselves and others. It may also have an impact on the decisions we take and how we navigate our relationships.
The gender dynamics portrayed in the game offered another starting point to study concepts of gender roles, stereotypes and ultimately discrimination even.
Through the course, we are encouraging learners to examine and question existing roles and stereotypes and how we may break them. For example, learners are asked to identify instances from the game that either strengthen or challenge gender stereotypes. Other exercises include allotment of roles and responsibilities to the two characters, designing gender-neutral advertisements and reflecting on real-world case studies associated with gender discrimination.
By doing this we hope that the learners & game players will be able to look at the game closely and pick up subtle signs of gender inequality and emotional labour in what remains a ‘dialogue-less’ game.
What we did was not a pre-defined process. We spent a lot of time discussing what themes and components to pick and what to skip. There were few boundary conditions that helped us in making that decision:
- No personal bias: We tried to create the course in a way that it will not reflect our personal bias towards any of the game characters or any of the incidents in the game. Throughout the course, we encourage the learners to bring in their own interpretation, and share their perspectives and experiences. There are exercises where we ask the learners to fill in dialogues for Florence & Krish, and possibly resolve the conflict between them.
- Keeping the fun intact: We refrained ourselves in picking themes that don’t fit well within the domain of the game. Random puzzles, math problems & science questions were some of the ideas that we talked about, but we decided against them as they might not go well along with the narrative. We instead picked up themes that seemed to emerge naturally.
The course on Florence has been designed to deliver knowledge and application components around identity, gender, and conflict resolution, with skills such as perspective taking and empathy, embedded. The aim is to offer students and teachers an engaging medium to explore and learn more about these issues, as well as apply the same in real life.
Florence is now live at our platform: FramerSpace. It would take roughly 2–3 days to complete the course along with the game. We would encourage you to take the course and see if it changes anything within you or in your relationship.
We would love to know your take on designing a game-based course, and how we may improve this process! We are always open to feedback. :)
If you found value in the article, please share and recommend within your network, thank you!
Mahima Bhalla & Robin Sharma
Curriculum Designers, Games for Learning — UNESCO MGIEP
P.S.: This article conveys the individual perspectives of the authors and not specifically that of UNESCO MGIEP.
