Personal aims and objectives
At the start of this May, There was a piece of news spread and soon got discussed worldwide, saying the victory of Roe v. Wade in 1973 might be overruled by the supreme court of the U.S.A., which means American women may lose their abortion rights in the future.
This, combined with the recent policies published in China to highly encourage each family to have three children, with some arguments to wish women to go back to the family from career, structured the initial inspiration of me and Xintong Ye.
As females, we usually have our fear and anger toward these policies, proposals, and the thoughts behind them. But what we would like to do with this game (we discussed and both agreed with that) is not complain or criticise, but to ask how can we the human beings make things better and sustainable, and try to build a social model to discuss different possibilities about the future of the society, with the situation of focus specifically on the birth rate.
This is a game with a political lens. By making this game, I was also trying to apply my sociology and anthropology backgrounds to games design.
Critical Reflection
The message of the game
While writing my research paper, I kept thinking about what players would get as a “message” from our game. It is very possible for me that they think of something other than what we would like to deliver, as the real message we have for the game is general and more a question than a piece of exact information to be expressed. I assumed some of them might regard the Tech Ending as a good one while the Revolution Ending as something bad, then draw a conclusion that the designers are trying to tell the others the best things to increase the birth rate is to develop new technologies and build a new structure for human society. In consideration of that, I planned to ask all the playtesters what message they thought the game is containing to verify my conjecture. Unfortunately, two endings had been cut due to time management problems which caused some change on what can be actually delivered to the players, also we don’t have enough time to arrange playtesting with multiple players at last. But the only player who tried our final version mentioned he thought the game was trying to talk about the topic of balance in managing human society, which was, amazingly, not that far away from the message we were trying to display.
Besides, I also realised game-making might be beneficial to academics in the field of social sciences as well, as they can build a social model in a game, let the players play a certain role, and see what the players’ choices are to check and improve their theories.
Sometimes it’s hard to control the workload and cut some brilliant ideas, especially if the designers are holding a strong wish to deliver a message through it. For me, it touches on one of the core concepts of games design- to find the best proper way to express, show, or give guides, with a game, on a suitable scale and let it make sense. That’s what I’ll take my life learning about.
The project management
As we believed we knew each other’s thoughts and abilities very well, we didn’t manage to have a periodic meeting but only discussed whenever we think we need to, which was inadvisable. We did not realize we had some misunderstandings about each other’s ideas until seeing some of the half-finished works, and it caused a mess at the end few days. These will not happen in our further collaboration or my own project management with the others.
The game itself
1. The game mechanic
The biggest problem with our current game is the lack of interaction while the main content is long paragraph texts which can be boring and stiff. Although we’ve tried to improve it with different methods, such as localization to reduce reading problems, adding in-game character dialogue to make it funnier, etc., the fundamental thing is the mechanic of the gameplay. If we process it again, different prototypes in delivering the same message will be tried and playtested, to find an effective as well as interesting enough way for the gameplay before moving on.
2. The numerical logic
Due to the deficient quantity of the policy proposals, as well as the weak rationality of the numerical logic, the feedback of the line graphs shows a kind of haste and is not completed successfully simulating a running society with the social model that has been raised as mentioned in the AimsIt might bring some improvement if applying more controlling rules or even pre-settled paths. Things should be much more better if we can find a professional economist to join us.
3. Line graph drawing
For drawing the line graphs, linear functions were applied. For example, the initial birth rate is y = (-0.02)x + 1, and if the players approve a proposal to apply a policy limiting the freedom of abortions, the function will be changed to y = (-0.02+0.005)x +1. That is a convenient way for a short-term game-making project, though, a finer numerical plan could be applied in further development, as the influences of policies should be varied at different time spots after they are brought into force, furthermore, different policies that apply at a similar time could influence each other and bring a more complex result.
which is a linear function of one variable
4. Limitation on players’ choices
As there is no limitation with approving a policy, for instance, the government’s financial situation, the players can easily pass only those which could make effects while not disobeying morality, like funding new research on relevant technologies. But the strategic content could be more playable if the players, except controlling the birth rate and crime rate in a certain range, also have to approve some immoral policies to improve the government’s tax income for raising funds to approve a better policy.
5. Localisation
During processing localisation, I realised localising this kind of game is never limited to simple translation. Different political cultures surround people living in different countries. People’s identifications, their attitudes toward their government, as well as the current social situation of the countries, are not the same too. All of these should also be considered and arranged accordingly in localising games.
In localising this game, I tried my best to execute this. For example, in the detailed content of the policy “Equal Rights”, I wrote “Introducing a package of policies to support equality and promote equal pay and equal working right for all genders.” But in the corresponding Chinese version, my description changed to “Introducing a package of policies to support equality and promote equal pay and equal working right between men and women.” Because in the context of Chinese, the legal rights of gender minorities have not yet been guaranteed officially, and there won’t be a phrase like “all genders” appearing in a written document from the government. Similar changes in the usage of phrases were also applied to fit the exact situations, such as “general practitioners” to “departments under hospitals” or “march demonstration” to “sit-in”. But these were not big problems. The hardest contents were those relating to the political and economic system. Something may not be possible to happen under one system while in the other one it is probably the daily routine. I had to try to avoid this kind of content in designing policies.
For the reason above, as English is not my mother language also I’m not 100% familiar with western culture, except for grammar issues, there could also be cultural issues left in the game which may make the players confusing. In the future in making games with heavy texts, if possible, a native speaker should be found for polishing and improving the content to avoid these problems.
6. Feedback especially regarding policies
In the real world, a policy’s influence will not show up immediately. In simulating games, this situation should not be changed as well. But that causes a problem, in which the players can not get seasonable feedback after they do something. Multiple ways have been applied to try to give the players rewards to let it seems to be more relative to what they have done, such as shortening the time between policies dealing and the new pieces of news and people’s stories appearing, and containing the same keywords to build a stronger connection. But still, there might be some other ways which are more effective to let the players realise the relationships between the actions and the rewards, and there should be more striking ways to show the feedback which could also benefit building the relationships.
7. The two different visual styles
Left: the later one; Right: the first one
Although we had to move the game to the later scene because of that accident, both of us, as well as all of our playtesters, prefer the first developed one with a screen as its background board. For the reason that screens allow more possibility of interactions than paper, thus it can be more playable and the players can get better involved. For example, according to our initial plan, there should be a huge map settled in the background and the players click on the new appearing glowing spots on the map to check the emerging news and people’s stories. In addition, real-time feedback matches better on a digital screen as well. The line graphs can be made continuously growing over time if they are shown on a screen, but on paper, it can be weird. Besides, a whole screen looks tidier than a mess of paper, and from my observation, people can tolerate more complex content on a screen than those on some paper, also a glowing object in darkness is more obvious than an average illumination, all of which listed above can help the players concentrate more into the game and less easy to make them feel boring.
8. Subjective content
It’s hard to say whether it can be improved, but the fact is, though we tried our best to avoid unconscious bias by researching sociological and historical literature, it was inevitable that some of our unverified thoughts were added indirectly and thus brought some less rigorous content.
9. Future development
During the whole process of making the game, we had discussed loads of the things which “can be added if there’s more time”, for instance, showing the whole life storylines in the forms of important events of the individual people as time goes by, to let the players see how their policies have influenced the NPCs whole lives, as well as some Easter eggs, like “someone has found his losing son from the city news”, to make the people stories more abundant and lively. Another instance is an achieving system. We even arranged the content of each achievement and the visual style of the panel. Indeed, these could improve our game in the future, but we might have spent too much time thinking about the after stuff, while the current stuff was paid less attention. Within the time constraints, how to refine what is already there, and polish it better at the scale that it already has, it’s more needed to be given priority.