We attended a fascinating panel at Orcacon today; Caroline Pitt, a University of Washington postdoc, and several graduate students (Runhua Zhao, Lane D. Koughan, and Michele Newman) discussed their work on a TTRPG designed to teach digital civic engagement skills to teens. (“There’s no definition of that term. We polled the youth we worked with to figure out what would be meaningful to them.”)
They’ve previously done some really interesting work on misinformation education games, including escape rooms and a Minecraft server designed to be an educational resource for elementary school kids. This all apparently informed their current project.
Mostly they wound up talking about the design process. The game isn’t finished yet; they want to build a system which allows for librarians and educators to write more scenarios, etc. Looking forward to seeing it.
It was interesting hearing them talk about their co-design process. Lane sounds like the primary mechanical designer, and Michele is the project lead — she brings expertise in learning styles. That’s a particularly big deal because they had to solve for players with no TTRPG background or context. (“How do I win?”) They mentioned that grounding the experience in the physical world was important both for the purpose and for the benefit of newer players. I was sort of surprised by this, but theater of the mind was apparently difficult for some new players.
Also, the setting wound up reflecting the purpose. They wound up with a world somewhat like Snow Crash, at least insofar as there’s a physical world and a digital world and the boundary between them is fluid. This obviously mirrors the idea of teaching digital literacy skills via physical games.
But co-design isn’t just two designers. In this case, it means that when they had design issues, they brought them to the players. Michele had a great example from their Minecraft project: when they were having trouble getting players to interact with NPCs, they asked the players for ideas and the solution — moving some gameplay elements into the physical space to ground the engagement — ultimately came from the players.
They grappled with a lot of familiar issues. One of the first design principles was keeping facilitator/GM load as light as possible, since facilitating this kind of game requires both educational skills and GMing skills. Tough combination. That wound up driving them towards a more “board game” approach, and in the end they sacrificed that design principle. I’d love to see those iterations; they do sound like they’re fairly versed in the range of TTRPG designs. When they talked about playing TTRPGs with the faculty, to show them what the project design would mean, they mentioned playing The Quiet Year.
They also talked about debriefing. This is crucial for their academic and design work, because you’ve got to have evaluation criteria. But they built in debrief points during the sessions themselves! Apparently they figured out how to build diegetic debrief moments, such that progression through the scenario requires reflective moments or maybe choices that speak to what the players thought of a plot beat? Again, can’t wait to read about how this works. That seems immediately relevant to non-educational tabletop play.
Like… I’m thinking about a party scene for my Feng Shui campaign. I should conceptualize the guests this way and notice which ones the players interact with more as signals about what should come next. Formalization of reincorporation. Brindlewood Bay comes to mind as a game which de facto does this.
On this topic, they also had to design for 90-120 minute sessions. Libraries, schools, right? They broke scenarios down into bite sized microexperiences: 30 minute components that could even break out into shorter sessions as necessary. This is my interpretation but it sounds as though each of these is a scene, which is also a plot beat. I think that kind of strong framework is powerful — back to Feng Shui, in which the second edition explicitly lays out a single game play session as a couple of fight scenes with a well-defined methodology for generating interstitial scenes. And it works.
The mechanics are designed around actual digital literacy skills. For example, there’s a skill called System, which is the technology skill. Apparently that’s a term of art for one literacy skill? A quick Google tells me very little here. Perhaps I should read their papers.
Finally, they had some very interesting things to say about the need to design for sense of agency — it’s too easy for the target young audience to feel and act helpless in the face of the unknown and the confusing. I think maybe we all have that problem right now. Ensuring sense of agency was one of their explicit design goals; this speaks again to the importance of physically grounding the play experience. I think this, too, is extremely relevant to any tabletop experience. Sense of agency generates engagement which contributes towards good play experiences. I expect to mine their work for my own purposes.
Great way to start the convention; full credit to S. for noticing this one.