Project:Filter Design and Experimentation
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A presentation on the early-stage informed development of Project:Filter, a game about the ecological and environmental impact of water quality caused by human behaviour.
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Project:Filter Design and Experimentation
- 1. DESIGN AND EXPERIMENTATION ANDREW REID @AJREID93 1
- 2. MEASURED AWARENESS MEASURED BEHAVIOUR PLAY SELF- REFLECTION PERSONAL BELIEFS (IN)DIRECT ATTITUDE PERSONAL DISPOSITION RHETORIC THE APPLICATION OF SERIOUS GAMES TO RAISE AWARENESS AND CAUSE BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE MEASURED ENGAGEMENT DESIGNABLE INFORMED 2
- 4. Create a game that… … is suitable for young adolescents and a school environment … addresses cause-and-effect of micropollution, and challenges associated with this … incorporates elements of empowerment and narrative 4
- 5. (1) Identify Hypothesis (2) Informed Development (3) Design Experiment (4) Conduct Experiment (5) Collate Data (6) Validate Results publish revise 5 What idea, concept or theory is being challenged? How does the hypothesis inform game development? How will the hypothesis be tested through the game? How does the results compare to the original hypothesis? What type of feedback has been gathered? How is data being collected?
- 6. SCIENCE DAY AT KELVINGROVE SMARTSTEMS WORKSHOP SERIOUS GAME DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP Reflection Reflection Reflection What elements of Sewer Sweeper, Polluted and Project:Filter encourages early signs of behaviour change? KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE THEORIES METHODS EXPERIMENTS 6 HYPOTHESIS
- 7. SMARTSTEMS WORKSHOP Play + Co-Design Three 45-minute workshops Female schoolchildren (aged 9-10) Play noPILLS games, then design own health-based games Knowledge and context derived from experiences in play 7
- 8. SCIENCE DAY AT KELVINGROVE Play (in Situated Environment) Two-day science exhibition Children and families (predominantly young) Polluted, Sewer Sweeper and Project:Filter demonstrated Filter simulation set up alongside the games 8
- 9. SERIOUS GAME DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP Co-Design + Co-Creation Two 90-minute workshop 50 schoolchildren (10-11 years old) Ball-catching tutorial (learn fundamentals of Scratch) Adapt game to relate to noPILLS 9
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon. My name’s Andrew Reid, I’m a PhD student at Glasgow Caledonian University and my interest is in so-called “serious games” as a method for public intervention. Today, I want to talk about how game design and experimentation work together and inform each other. I’ll be briefly discussing a research project called noPILLS, which I’m basing my work upon, before discussing the game I’m developing and a few pre-studies that have informed its development.
- I’ve been looking to address this topic of applying serious games to raise awareness and cause behavioural change. Essentially, I’m looking to uncover ways in which to design and develop games intended as a public intervention method, and how we can measure things like awareness and behaviour through games. This model is something I’m playing around with at the moment, which considers elements of the game experience that are both designable and informed. When I say “designable”, I refer to things that can be controlled by the developer, like mechanics. What I mean by “informed” is those parts that cannot be controlled, and generally refer to the player’s sense of “self” which affects their experience of the game. Developers can attempt to create an intended experience, but I would argue that experiences are individualistic because of the player’s disposition, their beliefs and so on. I thought it was important to consider this at first, and I think there’s something relating to haptic experience there, where perception of content rather than the content itself informs action; that’s something I’d like to look at later on. These words (awareness, behaviour, and engagement) are very loaded and vague terms, even within their own domains. It’s been quite tricky to talk about games as a method of intervention without at least trying to define these terms, and highlight what and how I want to achieve certain things. I would consider this an end goal to my PhD, to define what these terms mean to us as developers, and so I’d love to discuss this with you.
- As I mentioned, my work is based on noPILLS, a pan-European research project that highlighted the challenges and severity of micropollution. The games on the screen are two examples made from the noPILLS Jam which Glasgow Caledonian University hosted in 2014: Sewer Sweeper is a rail shooter that has players shooting pollutants within water pipes; And Polluted is the adventure of a fish that must hide from its aggressive peers in order to escape the polluted waters. These games have been really useful to show off to the public and gauge what it is they like about each game, but it hasn’t really helped me in understanding the holistic process design and development of serious games for public intervention. This has prompted me to develop my own game, drawing upon these examples for inspiration.
- What I’ve come up with is Project:Filter. It is designed for schoolchildren at the Formal Operational learning stage (from Piaget’s learning theory), so around 12-13 years old. Players control a small drone that has been tasked with collecting micropollutants from pipes within the filtering system. Project:Filter highlights the causes of micropollution, and the knock-on effects from associated challenges through small anecdotes that players unlock. Filters spawn periodically to help the player clean the waters, but over time these filters become less frequent and micropollutants spawn more often, adding a scaled element of challenge similar to that of Tetris. This is also intended to give the player a sense of empowerment, as they become less reliant on the filters. The game ends if players lose all their lives, or the filter loses all of its health. The game is intended to be a launching pad for discussion about water pollution, and I’m hoping to work with schools to incorporate this into a wider curriculum project. I have a little book here that I would ask you kindly to leave any comments you have on Project:Filter – because, unfortunately, I have a memory like a sieve…
- I mentioned at the start of this presentation that I’m interested in how experiment design informs serious game development. This is the model that I’m looking to follow. I took a lot of inspiration from Mary Flanagan’s Critical Play framework, which has had a major influence over my work. To generalise it, it’s a fairly straightforward framework that cycles between ‘Develop’ and ‘Test’, there’s nothing overly-complex. But it’s been useful to follow and to focus efforts in one area at a time.
- I’ve conduct three pre-studies using the games from noPILLS and my own. What I wanted to uncover was whether each of the three games could encourage precursory exhibitions of behaviour change. I’ve identified two stages of behavioural traits to test: Knowledge Acquisition and Linguistic Competence. Basically, I wanted to find out if players learned enough about water health from the games to then be able to design and develop games of their own in the same context. I conducted three pre-studies that looked as specific parts of the overall experiment. This was essentially a trial run to test the logistics of the experiments and make changes before running this as a full experiment.
- The first pre-study was a design workshop as part of our SmartSTEMs day at Glasgow Caledonian University, where female schoolchildren were invited to participate in STEM-related subjects. There were three short workshops throughout the day: the schoolchildren played each of the three games, then were put into small groups and challenged with designing a water health game. The games that were designed were expected to show knowledge taken from the games, as well as the ability to take this knowledge and apply it to a specific context, in this case game design. My rationale from this is that game development engaged the schoolchildren in understanding the complexities of a fairly-challenging topic, and we can see as a result the variety of their designs. Most commonly, games went along the lines of very popular games among the groups, such as Subway Surfers, with the context of water pollution embedded within the design, which was a successful outcome in my opinion.
- The second pre-study was a public demonstration at the Glasgow Science Festival at Kelvingrove Art Gallery. This was a two-day event that highlighted play within a situated environment. It allowed me to test how well each of the games would do within a public environment such as a museum, particularly as digital curation and interaction has become a rapidly-developing area for public galleries and museums. The audience was predominantly young children, and I’d say that Sewer Sweeper and Project:Filter was too hard for most of them. But Polluted did really well, mostly because they could follow the story along with it. What made this more interesting was the filter demonstration set up with it. The children moved round the tables anti-clockwise, so by the time they got to the games they already had a demonstration of why filtering is important, and what micropollution is. So when it came to playing the games, the children and parents were pointing out these things to each other, relating their in-game experience to the live demonstration. It helped the players to comprehend the issues and challenges associated with the topic of water health.
- The third and final pre-study involved Scratch development. Two workshops were run with 50 schoolchildren aged 10-11 learning how to make games. Pupils were put into pairs and had assistance from various student helpers. The workshop was set up to follow the ball-catching tutorial as part of the resources with Scratch. Afterwards, they were challenged to change the look of the game and add new features to relate the game to water health. It was relatively successful, but not too many games were made with water health in mind, these being two of very few. As this was the first time these pupils had used Scratch before, they were more eager to learn how to do different things with the block-code, rather than think about the “serious” aspect of making a serious game. I think the workshop would be better-supported when it’s run with other aspects of the experiment, which is the next stage of my research – to bring each of the workshops together into a full-day experiment.
- This research is still ongoing, and I’m always relatively anxious to find out what others think, but I’m always open and eager to any feedback and comments. I wanted to shamelessly plug my blog for this stuff too – Games For Studies – which I’m using to highlight key development stages of Project:Filter. My email is there, Twitter is there, I have business cards, we can use smoke signals if you so desire – I’m very keen to connect with as many of you as possible. Thank you!