Table 3. Transformational Game Design Model
Steps
Decisions
1.
Describe the Change: Identify a desired change for the audience, such as in physiology, emotion, behavior, skill, and or knowledge.
• Clarify common misconceptions, such as those about GMO products.
• Understand that labels are valuable, but marketing may cause misconceptions.
• People have different opinions, needs, and priorities: labels try to help all of them. It is up to me to determine what I need and where I want to spend money.
2.
Define the Doing: Think of likely activities to create that change in the audience.
• Allow game users to prioritize their own shopping goals: for example, saving money, buying organic, or aligning shopping practices to “what I care about.” • Clarify what makes a product GMO or what can’t be GMO, and connect that with the user’s shopping practices. • Allow users to practice reading labels and applying what they learn about GMO crops and what can’t be a GMO crop. • Give users opportunity to experience surprise at misleading labels.
3.
Design the Engagement: Work through ideas for creating the game, articulating the changes and the activities into an experience.
A sleuth-themed shopping game in which a player solves mysteries about labels by getting source information from growers, nutritionists, and other science-based sources.
On the first day, the combined team met for three hours to go through the design process. The smaller team of developers met for the remainder of the day. The subsequent schedule followed a similar pattern: Each day, the combined, larger team of developers and content experts would meet for a couple of hours, and then the smaller team of developers would work eight to 14 hours to discuss and develop.
Tuesday | Activity 3: Produce Prototype
Designers met to discuss and refine the idea before pitching it to the larger group. They improved the initial script (Table 4), fleshed out a few sketches (e.g. character, product – see Figure 2), and curated a mood board with visual references supporting the idea. In the second meeting of the day, content team members joined developers for their pitch presentation. Content experts provided feedback (e.g. positive and negative aspects of the idea, concerns) and approved the idea. With content experts’ approval, designers met again to discuss, incorporated the feedback, and started working on the game art assets and programming, which represent “Activity 3: Produce Prototype.”
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