Designing Games to Convey Scientific Concepts
Organised by -
Annika Stechemesser
Abstract -
Working in an interdisciplinary environment, communicating our research to a non specialist audience is one of the daily challenges. We might not only want to explain our thoughts and results to fellow university researches from other disciplines, but also to partners in industry and to the wider public. Thinking about ways in which we can break our work down into smaller, approchable steps that relate to other peoples experiences and interests is therefore cruical. Ideally, we don't just want others to just understand, but to feel inspired and keen to learn more.
This warp projects invites you to think about how you can communicate your research in a way that makes people with no prerequisites feel excited about it. One method of conveying simplified scientific concepts to the public is through games.
Some examples:
(1) In the Village (http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/in-the-village/)
In the card game In the Village, players must cooperate and use limited resources to ensure their survival against the threat of malaria. In the Village was originally designed as a challenge: Could a game demonstrate to players the basic ideas behind malaria prevention, and foster a reliance on community-based health care solutions?
The game is designed for five players (or, in smaller groups, one player may take on more than one character). Each player tries to keep his or her character(s) alive through nights of mosquito attacks, with the caveat that if even one player dies, the game is over.
While the game’s five players are given the agency to act as individuals, the victory and loss conditions apply to all players equally, suggesting open and selfless cooperation as the optimal strategy. Despite this, playtesting found that many players would guard their own resources and try to protect their perceived individual interests. Winning the game requires overcoming this instinct towards selfishness. Players end up sharing resources to make sure the group survives. The game offers a compelling model for community caregiving while offering fun, engaging gameplay.
(2) Zombiepox (http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/zombiepox/)
ZOMBIEPOX® has reached your town and turned two people into full-blown zombies! ZOMBIEPOX spreads as the zombies wander through town biting people! Help the humans escape the wrath of the flesh-eating zombies by vaccinating them against ZOMBIEPOX. Cure those in the most dire situations and protect the vulnerable who cannot be immunized. We don’t want zombie babies! Win the game if the deadly ZOMBIEPOX can no longer spread. Lose if too many people become full-blown zombies and the town is overrun!
(3) The Trap (https://copyrightliteracy.org/resources/the-publishing-trap/) (This one was even designed to educate us...)
The Publishing Trap is a game about research dissemination and scholarly communication in Higher Education. The game follows the academic career of four characters who at each stage in their career, from PhD submission, through to Professorship, are presented with a series of scenarios about which they have to make choices. The characters make decisions about how to disseminate their research at conferences, in academic journals and in monographs or textbooks. Ultimately the game helps researchers to understand how money, intellectual property rights, and both open and closed publishing models affect the dissemination and impact of their research. Through playing the game in teams, players get to discuss the impact of each character’s choices. The game ends at the end of the character’s life, when players sees the consequences of the choices they have made in terms of money, knowledge and impact.
In this WARP project, we will have a go at designing our own games to explain our research!
More inspiration: http://www.tiltfactor.org/
Aims and Objectives -
The final aim is down to the wishes of the people participating (and also the number of people participating), I could see two things working well:
1. everyone gives designing a game based on their own research a go, possible stepts could be:
- come up with a general concept (WHAT do I want to communicate, to WHOM, in which WAY)
- create a set of rules, identify possible resources
- start to implement the game, either digitally (for example with PYGAME or whichever suitable language you prefer!) or as a tabletop game (I will bring some crafts stuff)
2. People team up and we focus on one topic, designing one game together. This would probably result into a tabletop game as it is easier to work on with multiple people at the same time. The steps stay essentially the same.
Of Interest to -
Anyone interested in thinking about how to break down their research for others to understand more easily, anyone having fun being creative, anyone liking games.
Resources Necessary -
If you are keen to implement something digitally maybe download PYGAME or whichever tool you prefer to write games in. If you want to get really far in your game design in these 6 hours maybe go for a head start and watch some tutorials etc.
References -
https://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2017/170720/pdf/nj7663-369a.pdf
http://news.mit.edu/2011/vanished-smithsonian-0415