Doing Things with Games

Social Impact Through Play

Lindsay Grace, Lindsay D. Grace

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138367272
• eBook ISBN: 9780429771309
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

The book provides a contemporary foundation in designing social impact games. It is structured in 3 parts: understanding, application, and implementation. The book serves as a guide to designing social impact games, particularly focused on the needs of, media professionals, indie game designers and college students. It serves as a guide for people looking to create social impact play, informed by heuristics in game design.

Key Features

Provides contemporary guide on the use of games to create social impact for beginner to intermediate practitioners

o Provides design and implementation strategies for social impact games

Provides wide ranging case studies in social impact games

Provides professional advice from multiple social impact industry practitioners via sidebar interviews, quotes, and postmortems

Provides a quick start guide on creating a variety of social impact engagements across a wide variety of subjects and aims

II

Application

chapter 5

Changing the Body and Mind

Games have been employed to affect people’s thinking and cognitive processes for years. After reading the previous chapters, it should be clear that play does some really interesting things to a player’s brain. It triggers a special mental state—the play state.

The play state is an exceptional mental space that allows players to focus, to be creative, and to engage differently than the everyday state. Historically, the play state has been described in many different ways. From some perspectives, it’s similar to the concept of the magic circle, commonly associated with Huizinga (2014). Biologists note that the play state is an important part of development, encouraging animals, including the human animal, to take risks and experience life differently. Others, like play anthropologist Brian Sutton Smith, emphasize the many ways players engage. In the domain of mental play, Sutton Smith reminds us of the ways that we play with an idea or engage in mental play games like word games or name calling (1999). These multiple perspectives inform the sense of games as a mental activity.

Because we often witness play as physical, such as playing with a ball, we forget how much of play is mental. Sports are playful experiences that often engage the physical body. However, people who engage in sport will also emphasize the mental demands of those activities. Whether it is focusing on the challenges of the sport or keeping the drive to practice and improve, there is a clear interchange between mind and body in all such play. The motivations for engaging in the activity, the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards player seek, and the kinds of feedback players seek are all tied to who they are, where they’ve been, and what matters to their own minds and communities.

Game designers largely work to get and keep people in the mental state of play. This is why understanding players, their needs, their wants, their desires, and their motivations can make game designers more effective.

5.1 Demographics, Technographics, and Psychographics

When thinking about design, many people involved in human-interaction design consider three factors. These are demographics, technographics, and psychographics. These are shorthand ways of understanding players from distinct characteristics.

Demographics describe basic characteristics like the player's age, gender, and background. Clearly designing an experience for a 2-year-old means that, on average, they will have limited abilities to count and communicate. This is because, on average, the human brain has not developed those skills particularly well yet. For the demographics of 2-year-old players, certain design constraints will inevitably be present because of the characteristics of that population. Some of these constraints are mental (e.g., counting and language skills), some are physical (the height and weight proportions of the average 2-year-old), and some are a combination of both. Gross and fine motor skill development for a 2-year-old child are different from a 10-year-old, and different from a professional gymnast or concert pianist.

Demographics can aid in making some assumptions about the needs of the player. If designing games for 5-year-olds in Mexico, it is likely that players will speak Spanish, for example. It would be safe to assume that some instructions in Spanish will be understood. If designing a card game for players in Asia, they may be more familiar with the rules of Mahjong than Old Maid.

This is in part because there are many cultural and community elements to the games we play. Some games are largely universal, such as versions of tag; others are much more distinct to specific communities of players. Old Maid has a Victorian history traced to the British Empire, while Mahjong is a Chinese card game from the Qing Dynasty. Even references change in culture and language, as people who play Old Maid may only know it as Schwarzer Peter (German language) or abanuki (Japanese language). New designers often make the mistake of designing from their own demographics instead of understanding their audience’s (Figure 5.1).

FIGURE 5.1 The game Schwarzer Peter. (Courtesy of Ji-Elle [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Ji-Elle] through Creative Commons.)

There is nothing wrong with designing with your own demographics in mind. It can, however, limit your design. The trick with design, any design, is to recognize your proximity to and your distance from your intended audience. There are some universal tendencies between players, and there are some that are very distinct. Building the perfect game for yourself does not guarantee it will be at all interesting to others. Understanding your audience helps you prevent the mistake of designing for the wrong people.

This mistake is particularly easy to make when considering the language of image. Symbols are often localized in their meaning and are rarely universal across cultures and communities. A careful examination of the image depicting the Schwarzer Peter game illustrates this point. The characters depicted are likely to be offensive and uncomfortable in a contemporary context in this vintage version of the game. Before the game is even played, its images conjure meaning informed by a player’s history with similar images. This is a history the designer may or may not recognize, which is why it is important to get feedback on a design frequently and well before it is released.

As a more contemporary context, the two vertical lines, | |, refer to absolute value in mathematics. In computer programming, they mean the logical “or” (as in this or that), containing an entirely different meaning. Even among people who come from the same culture, their professional background may change their understanding of game rules, relationships, and goals.

Demographics, then, serve as shorthand for understanding some of the physical, behavioral, and psychological attributes of your players. Five year olds may not have the attention span for long and complicated rules, but 25-year-old players are more likely to accept those terms. Games that offer rules based on capitalism may be more or less interesting to people who have direct experience with capitalism. These prior experiences shape the experience of the game, so it is important to know what experiences the players already have. Those prior experiences can also be used as a shorthand to involve players in a game sooner. Framing the game relative to a game that players have already played means they will typically spend less time learning the rules of your game. But if only a portion of players in your target audience have played the game, it could result in a disproportionate advantage for those who have played similar games to those who did not.

Of course, with all demographic considerations, it’s also important to avoid stereotypes or other incorrect assumptions. The easiest way to do so is to do some research. This research could come in the form of personal interviews, advice from subject matter experts, or through co-design. Co-design allows the designer to work directly with the audience it is intended for and can do a really great job of unearthing biases, cultural differences, and nuances that may not come through in a traditional interview or discussion.

Demographics provide a broad lens that can be used to form an archetypal view of players. This includes some information about their mental state and capacities. All people go through developmental stages as they age, and those stages have distinct characteristics. The research of developmental psychologists involves understanding these phases. It is of course important to note that these phases are not only about moving from childhood to adulthood, but also part of the many phases of adulthood, from early adulthood to old age.

5.2 Technographics

However, demographics are just one lens. The way people process information and how they are or are not excited about something is also shaped by technographics and psychographics. Technographics are used to describe the technical characteristics of their interactions. Technographics segmentation is relatively new, introduced in about 1985.

Technographics can be used to describe and understand groups of people by their access and history with specific technologies. Instead of understanding players by common, readily identifiable characteristics like age and gender, technographics seek to identify people by the technologies they use. Frequent mobile device users may be more comfortable with certain interactions than those who rarely use the technology. Likewise, someone who has 20 years of history using a rotary phone, may have different expectations and interests than someone who has always used a smartphone. The technologies with which a person is familiar help shape their expectations of future interactions. In this way, technographics are like demographics for a person’s technical identity and history.

But familiarity is not the only technographic consideration. Access to technology can also factor into technographics. Designing games for mobile devices makes sense only if player communities’ technographics include easy access to mobile devices. Knowing technographics helps to shape design constraints as well. It also affects player psychology.

Imagine, for example, the cognitive challenges of reading small print on a small screen. Or the challenge of trying to hear instructions on a device that is not loud enough. These are cognitive challenges introduced by technographic limitations. The more good designers consider the many ways in which an idealized design is influenced by both demographics and technographics, the more the designer recognizes the interplay of these factors into the success of their game.

It is also tempting to think that technographics only apply to digital games. This is not entirely true. A technographic history plays into all sorts of understandings. The language in your game might be confusing to someone with a different technographic experience. Mentioning a smartphone, telling people to go online, or referencing common technical parlance may be more confusing than helpful.

While these things may be the result of demographics, there are lots of ways designers can unintentionally alienate players with technical references that do not meet their personal experience. As an example, we created a game that was labeled Tinder for News. To understand what that means, you would have to know what Tinder is (a dating app for mobile devices). To give it more meaning, you’d have to know that the game involves swiping right for people you like and left for people you don’t. While Tinder for News means plenty to those familiar with the app, it means very little to those who don’t. It’s especially confusing because tinder is the word for anything that burns easily. Now also recall that if Tinder is not available in your country or that older people don’t use it, you fall out of the group who understands the reference.

These types of mistakes happen more often in subtle ways that people don’t recognize until they test their game with audiences. They happen in question cards that seemed smart at the time, or interface elements that are informed by interactions outside the technographic range of your players. It is easy to misunderstand player experience and make mistakes by failing to recognize the specialty knowledge in your target audience’s experience. Designing a game for sailors, that references the left and right sides, instead of port and starboard, would likely be a mistake. Designing a simulation game for surgeons and oversimplifying the language is another way to quickly alienate your players. It can be very problematic to use the wrong technical language because of a misunderstanding of technographics.

5.3 Psychographics

The last category to consider is psychographics. Psychographics are typically used to describe the interests, activities, and opinions of individuals. In their most basic form, they can help match the subject to play preferences. A digital game about skateboarding is more likely to appeal to people who have skateboarding in their psychographic. Psychographic data in marketing research is often referred to as IAO data—interest, activities, and opinion data. This IAO data is often used as a way to link content in ways that will immediately encourage interest from distinct psychographics.

Designing a gam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Author
• Section I Understanding
• Section II Application
• Section III Implementation
• Index