Advocacy Microtalks: Cultivate Your Karass

[Music] thank you thank you for coming my name is Mark Delora I'm a GDC Advisory Board member for the advocacy track the software engineer background uh worked in the Obama Administration as a senior advisor for digital media many moons ago and mostly do edtech cross with games these days um I wanted to explain to you what the heck of harass is does anybody know what a carrass is a couple of folks here awesome um well I was really lucky to spend a little bit of time at the at the White House and I met this guy Jake Brewer and Jake was one of those types of people you don't meet very often in life he's like brilliant kind everybody wants to be his friend he's pretty much befriends everybody unfortunately he tragically passed away

in a bike accident in a charity bike ride which was super on brand for Jake doing something for somebody else and he got hurt um so when his co-workers came to help clean up his office space they found this sole Post-It note on his monitor and it said cultivate the carafe and people were like the hell does that mean I've never heard that word before if you look it up you'll find it in a Kurt Vonnegut book and and roughly speaking it talks of um a group of people in life who are distributed around the world doing something for the common good all kind of running down the same Lanes of the highway but probably people you just meet once in a while in life and you really need to like Embrace those people and run forward together there are people who will help you in your quest to do whatever it is that you're seeking to do so I think of all of you here and all the people in this panel as being part

of our crass so if you think that games are they should be able to be more the games to be able to do more that we should get better at the way that we make games you're in the right place you should meet other people around you in this room and your crafts uh and I implore you afterwards to come to the Q a space we'll have which will be in the Alcove 305 and I have a chat with all of us um because they're only going to have like eight or nine minutes at most to talk about the work they're doing which is really just so far from barely enough kind of insane so you're gonna get a little snip and um and then please follow up afterward with the people who you resonate with most uh and I'm gonna get out of the way but before I do I want to make sure to tell you to silence your phones and I'm sure you've heard this already but you're going to get a little email about reviews and please do those because that lets us all come back the

next year if we did well or vice versa and uh and that's it so I'm gonna get out of the way we're gonna get going um with cat Park thank you Mark my name is Patricia watts and I'm the director of Technology engagements at the state department the global engagement Center and I'm delighted to be here the mission of the global engagement Center is to directly synchronize integrate and coordinate efforts of the federal government to recognize understand expose encounter foreign State and non-state propaganda and disinformation so today we will be telling you a little bit about two games that we created the technology engagement division serves this Mission by identifying assessing testing and implementing Technologies against discipline disinformation so let's start with the definition what is disinformation disinformation is the

intentional creation and dissemination of deliberately false information with the intent to manipulate the policies or opinions of those who receive it this is distinct from this information which is false and inaccurate information in its dissemination but without the intent to deceive in some video games are being used to spread disinformation like South Front smash the Nazis which cash Ukraine as Nazis and the crew parody of Fruit Ninja My Hope Is that after hearing the definition of disinformation you're thinking about how you may experience this information in a form of trolling means manipulated media sensation sensation language or click bait headlines my goal is to share our approach to games and to encourage all of you to think about how disinformation is cross-cutting at the intersection of some of the issues we've been discussing

here at GDC generative AI climate change diversity Equity inclusion and accessibility GC developed two media literacy games promotion video games Harmony square and Cat Park both games are designed to build cognitive resilience to form propaganda and disinformation Harmony square and Cat Park expose the player to ridiculous versions of disinformation grounding the storyline and action in a political non-judgmental and empowering environment but real world tactics and techniques like means manipulated media Sensational language click bait headlines and artificial amplification rather than debunking every instance of disinformation increase media literacy skills allow customers to prevent disinformation helping them to analyze the veracity of the media they consume and share online

studies indicate that games are among the best tools that can be helped to build the requests on requests media literacy skills this strategy trains media consumers to identify those tactics in the wild so that when they see a provocative headline or a funny meme they will stop take a breath and ask critical thinking questions like who is the author why did they write this headline or create this funny meme why is the reactions they are hoping to provoke from me this is pre-bucking and Harmony Square you will play the role of a chief disinformation officer abusing social media to spread disinformation using troll emotional language rage amplification conspiracy theories and polarization to magnify Intergroup differences about pineapple on Pizza you

win by sowing Discord and preventing consensus building Harmony square is the freely available on computer or mobile browsers from Harmony Square dot game two social scientists from the University of Cambridge studied the game finding the harmony Square significantly improved the abilities of players to discern between reliable and unreliable information and they after playing the game players were significantly less likely to share unreliable information on social media Harmony squares now playable in 18 languages and has been used to promote media literacy around the world and there's supplemental media literacy lesson plans available also on the website at the end of October we launched our second media literacy promotion counter propaganda and disinformation game cut part in the north cityscape you played a

role of a disinformation agent recruited into a shadowy social media pressing campaign you train with a group of eccentric activists with different media manipulation skill sets creating Sensational headlines means and synthetic media but a common cause to bring down an outrageous Public Works project a park of cat for cats after you destroy the fictional Public Square cat Park challenges you to knit the social fabric back together using the inverse of disinformation skills you learn earlier in the game you educate your fellow citizens about the disinformation campaign and media manipulation meant to Hoodwink them so use so you use the headline features to confess that you were the one spreading the disinformation you use means to point out that it is ridiculous to attack a cat part and you undo previous image

manipulation cat Park leads players with a hard truth it is hard to put the genie back in the bottle it is hard to give convince people that they have been manipulated but also that nothing short of social cohesion our ability to trust one another is at stake the University of Camp Cambridge again then evaluated the efficacy of cat Park finding that it's even more effective at training players to discern between reliable and unreliable information those results were will be published soon in conclusion I want to thank you for your time and your attention myself and my gaming expert Paul Fisher we've been at a 305 after this I hope you enjoy the games please play them and also give us feedback and and can Envision ways in which you might want to use the games

and the platforms to to create Global pro-social impact thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] to sell it all right all right so that was a nice New York City High School student uh playing a game called box pop that we made uh in case you're curious uh 18th century land use policy was what she was talking about so that's what she was so excited about um and today I want to talk to you guys about two things uh one was about voxpop a game that managed to produce such fervor over such a boring project uh

subject and a key lesson that we learned in making the game that hopefully will be of some use to you uh in your own Endeavors so voxpop is a historical LARP where players collectively figure out solutions to historical crises like the Pullman uh strike or the AIDS epidemic uh and our goal with the game though was not to teach history uh it does that sort of almost by side effect but the really the goal was to give students practice in Civic discussion uh so like what are your political stances uh what what parts are open or closed or compromised uh what are our opposing views can you understand them can you come to consensus that sort of thing um so really our goal was to have uh players Flex those muscles for for that kind of discursive practice that is so Central to democracy um and so but if you want to do that why did we decide to take them back to the 19th and 18th centuries right why not do it today um so since the founding and even before uh the American politics has largely revolved around consistent fault lines

uh that the same themes keep coming up over and over again and uh that they have since time and Memorial so tensions between rural and urban like that was around back then that was around during that that's what Shay's rebellion was all about uh who gets the right to vote no that's door's rebellion and many other uh things so this is the same kinds of issues keep coming up so this gives us an opening uh where it may be hard to talk about current events but events in the distant past when like folks were wearing knickers like that's way easier like that's much easier to get folks to uh to engage with that so if you don't feel comfortable arguing about the role of arm resistance the government right now well what if you're an 18th century disgruntled beet farmer from New England uh maybe it's a little easier to do it then it doesn't feel quite as personal right no one will hold it against you so um like within arpg what we do is we slap people into ideological uh into roles we're gonna get players into roles and so what we do is we slap players into our ideological spectrum and give

them a short buy or ground those those ideologies in a relatable person with relatable personal effects so you might end up with somebody's a banker a rich Boston Banker oh and on the other hand you've got a rural farmer who is uh ex-revolutionary uh Soldier and angry about the fact that he doesn't get to vote um and then in the middle you may have some more moderate groups Merchants shopkeepers Etc uh who sort of are in between both those positions both ideologically and socioeconomically um so once we've done that we get you to the hand heads on Pikes phase uh this is where we got to get players really engaged in their positions we can't just have them read it off of a Chromebook that's not going to work so we need to uh really get them in uh activated about what they're going to be discussing so we put all the folks of the same ideology together we pack them in uh and then give them some proposals for solving the underlying crisis uh and uh oh then we ask them to pick their favorites and say why so getting this

chance of sharing Grievances and organizing a solution gets them fired up and into character they start uh really connecting with the underlying thing they're like yeah that's right that's what we're gonna do we're gonna cut taxes we're gonna raise taxes whatever it is though that they're gonna do so at this point you may Wonder like why are we whipping them into a partisan froth it's like isn't that the whole point that we're not supposed to do uh but basically we're polarizing them so that they can have the experience of depolarizing later we want them to be engaged in these things so they can actually have the conversation we don't want them to sort of like nod ahead be like yeah whatever I don't care uh like we want them to engage with their character uh but we also whoops uh well we'll get to that uh though uh but we want them to to experience this process of getting of like detaching from your own views and being able to depolarize so once we've got you really like animated fired up you're enthusiastically sharpening your Guillotines you're ready to go oh and so then what we do is we take even Folger groups are increasingly mixed ideologically oh and we asked to discuss the proposals again so you're fired up but now you're like you're a mixed

company like you want to throw all the bankers in jail sure and uh appropriate all their assets but the merchants are telling you like if you do this then like look the economy goes belly like you can't sell your Beats anywhere like that's gonna be a problem uh and so um then you looked at the banker like they seem like a nice guy they seem to be willing to make some concessions and so you sort of soften up a bit no and so usually by the time that the final build rolls around a compromise usually emerges right people don't stick to their original guns they've gone through that process Okay so during the game we're squeezing people through this code of inverted funnel they start off narrow and angry get increasingly nuanced and flexible ideally uh and that's been modeling the behavior that we want uh but this is still all disconnected from their world right so they've solved the Pullman stripe but that doesn't have anything to do with their current situation um so you may be asking that and that's a good question and that's exactly what we asked them we say okay so as an epilogue to the the experience you just had we try to connect their experience with the modern day so we say like how did your care for as an exam as a possible example like how did your character feel

about violence in protests oh do you agree with them do you agree with them now does as a person do you agree with them in the current day uh what do you think about violence and protests and is there a difference between the position your character had and what you have as an individual now and like in the current context of politics um and usually people at this point like catch on pretty quick they they get the idea and they were able to sort of roll the conversation forward into the present day they start naturally going like okay I see how this connects let's let's take this to current issues so right so at this point success we've solved polarization done um no actually clearly not it's not that simple uh so we're not saying it's that easy to actually get people to cross real political fault lines but letting players experience what effective Civic disc Force could feel like to have an experience of that that is visceral rather than purely intellectually detached uh might seem like a step in the right direction right like they're at least nudges things forward and at the end of the day like that's all we can really do is like nudge things forwards in a democracy like we don't

get to have like a total win we get to just sort of push things in the direction that we want which brings me to the last Point uh which is eating your own dog food um okay so that was the game but what does this have to do with activism uh Vox spot may not seem like a form of activism but in our minds it is as I said we're less interested in teaching history than advocating for open good faith Civic discourse in activism you're often engaged in some form of persuasion you need to convince people to do something that they don't want to do and they feel that they have very good reasons for not doing it uh so to persuade them you develop empathy for your position right like you can't just use logic it disappoints me as a philosophy graduate but you know it just doesn't work uh like you just got to use empathy like that's just there's no other way around it uh but you know you all know this you've chosen uh games as the medium for activism uh at least your mediums and games are about player agency uh and empathy naturally falls out of games that's just like a feature of them uh games actually do things in the world and since we're monkeys with mirror neurons we'll empathize with

whoever is doing those things that we're asking to do in the world right so like what that naturally happens as part of game playing so right so in theory that's the easy part but that being Theory uh it only works in theory uh and in practice players are going to instinctively reject anything that uh requires them to empathize with something that disagrees with their ideological priors right so as we were developing voxpop we would sometimes lose sight of that um in frame positions along our established ideological grooves you know like like middle-aged Brooklyn dudes which is not necessarily the people who are going to be like experiencing this thing but pretty much guaranteed there wasn't going to be middle-aged Brooklyn dudes were going to be experiencing this thing uh so and we weren't looking at the the experiences framing them in the in those of the character or the player right now this is a very basic design lesson focus on the experience of the player I mean this is like the most basic lesson it's not even like design game design 101 it's like Middle School game design right like it's like the most basic level thing but in games that are political or persuasive component it's much easier to forget that right

because like you are so convinced about your your idea like right like it's hard to step outside of it you're like look like I love this thing I'm like if you see me I'm spending uh all this time um making these the this game all this effort uh so like I'm I'm uh it's hard for me to step outside of it I'm being given the the knot to stop so I'm gonna try super fast so what we would just say is that at the end of the day you should you should try to do the same in your games like if you're asking your your players to be open-minded epistemically humble about what the game that they're entering you should do the same thing towards them try to frame things along lines that they will make sense of and not assume they're gonna have largely this sort of background that you are really try to do that process of modeling their own experience with that I'm done we can uh room 305 if you have any further questions thank you hello it's lovely to meet you all I'm Sophie artemiji and I'm a disabled Game Dev

this is me in all of my glory um usually when I give talks and disability I talk to my fellow disabled devs about how better to assert ourselves in the industry however because you can probably tell by my accent I have no clue what it's like to be a disabled Game Dev in the states um I am disabled I am American but for obvious reasons I've never lived in America for long enough for me to experience the full experience of what it's like to be disabled here so rather than sit and tell any disabled Dev that may be here what they should and shouldn't be doing I think my time would probably best be spent reaffirming the importance of disabled people in our industry and then also talking about how we can create structure to better support our fellow disabled peers so I'm going to give you a little bit of context to why I think I'm uh capable of

talking about this last year I released a game called hookup uh it was about a woman who matched with her high school bullying on a dating app and it did pretty well uh we were number one on the paid charts in the UK yay um but while I was making it I was hospitalized five times I had to go through a course of chemo to isolate for five months and I had two internal organs removed two weeks before it became was supposed to be released and all of this was happening during covert um but it led me to do a lot of research into how this would impact my career going forward because I'm always going to be disabled this is always going to be a part of my career the same way any of my other identities impact my identity as a Game Dev and in doing that I learned how to give myself the space to design games and do what I love but also to protect myself and to make sure that I'm never

sacrificing my health in order to make games which to me is really important so according to a study done by Accenture companies that are inclusive of disabled workers had 28 higher revenues twice the net income and 30 High profit margins than their counterparts now I understand that correlation does not equal correlation however based on what I've seen in the industry I believe that disabled people are so used to overcompensating that when we're given the correct accommodations we actually outperform our able-bodied counterparts and so everybody in this room has the utmost incentive to support their disabled peers or if you're disabled to assert yourself and to tell people that no you need to take your disability seriously and it will make everyone's lives better so um a lot of accommodations such as flexible hours the ability to work from

home and physically accessible workspaces are becoming more and more widespread which is great however a lot of the inaccessibility in our industry is very structural and very subtle and so the changes that we need to make are ideological first so that then we have the vocabulary and the mindset to go forward and make big changes that impact everybody in our industry uh so now I'm going to go on to talk a bit about what that looks like and how we can do that in practice so firstly it's important to design games around disability so we already design around platform monetization process and players for example I know all of you uh if you've um make mobile games versus PlayStation games versus switch games versus PC games you're going to design slightly differently from that if you've been to any of the free to play seminars they're going to say from the very get-go you need to have your in-game economy in mind from the beginning also if you're

designing um for a teenage boy versus a 50 year old woman those players are going to have different needs and different wants in their games and we're going to give them to that so why don't we do that for our teams um I'd argue that it's just as important to do that and once you enact these practices it allows you to be much more consistent in your development process um so how does this work well first you need to understand what is the most worst case scenario that's reasonably likely to happen for example I can see a lot of you are wearing glasses what if your eyesight suddenly deteriorates and you have to go through a period of surgery maybe you get a detached retina what if you have a kid and they get ill for months on end and you have to look after them what if you have a colleague who has asthma and they can't breathe properly for a few months and so they have to change their entire way of living to accommodate these new restraints well if you think and list about the worst case scenario of what could happen

to everyone on your team you then ask is my minimum viable product capable if the worst case scenario happens if the answer is no you need to redesign your minimum viable product it's unlikely that everything bad that will happen will happen but that's fine because if things go well you'll have time and you can cope up you can add more things the problem is and I know that every single person in this room has seen this if we scope too high before we decide to scope down we'll always push ourselves a little bit further and we'll always work that little bit over time and if you're disabled that could have really big impacts on your health and even if you just need certain accommodations around child care it does still impact you and your dependence and so it's important rather than scoping down to scope up as and when you feel like you're ready and your team is capable um the second thing I want to talk about is

this cycle of distrust so project include is a charity in the US and it released a disabled Works report which studied disabled workers in the Texas industry in this country and it highlights that that the individual ideological and interpersonal and incessational distraught is distrust is one of the foundations of discriminations within the tech industry and again based on personal anecdotes because we don't have a lot of studies on disabilities in games I found that this carries through very um significantly for example because of societal insecurity most there is a higher proportion of Freelancers who are disabled game devs in our industry then there are Freelancers who are non-disabled and this is kind of counter-intuitive because when you work for a bigger company you get health care and all of those benefits however disabled workers

often do not trust large companies to uphold their rights and so they'd rather risk it on their own then give someone the power to stress them out and withhold something that they know they're deserving of and so by creating these changes that allow us to have these conversations and have this level of trust with our disabled peers we can create more parity within our industry on top of that there's the this trust that comes from poor communication this is particularly true with neurodiverse people most employers don't take the time to figure out how their communication style is and what suits them and then there's frustrations when there's a breakdown in communication and nobody understands what's going on I'd really recommend watching a panel recently that was done by the Charities safe in our world on neuro inclusion in the games industry they had a lot of people who are specialists in neurodiversity in the games industry which I am not and it was really enlightening to see the ways that they

want communication to change in order to make them more effective workers um another thing which I know all of us have experienced is crunch crunch is just really inaccessible even if it's not extreme you need to ask yourself during a busy period do your employees feel capable of taking uh time to go and get a blood test or go get a checkup if the answer is no you really need to reassess your production schedule to make things more uh inclusive here are my main sources I really encourage you to look them up thank you so much for listening to me it's been a pleasure to speak here thank you thank you foreign

a point-and-click adventure game we're making in the Ojibwe language so I want to ask you a question how many of you have heard of the land back movement yeah okay if you haven't watch reservation dogs well what we're going for is the virtual land back movement we're asking you as we ourselves are thinking about making space for our indigenous languages which we are all sitting on top of in our monolingual English and making uh wear of the land that we are all attached to even if your game is in cyberspace it is it comes from us we're all attached to a land and language that goes beyond this generation

I'm just going I'm just going to talk briefly about what reclaim is so where a like Fong mentioned a point-and-click adventure game um kind of the general plot is the sort of Alice in Wonderland or Spirited Away following a young girl who's become lost in this mysterious dreamlike Forest where times and space kind of blend together and it follows her journey to get back home to her grandma um what's really important to us in addition to being in a language emerging game is that reclaim is is Source culturally that it is fundamentally an accurate reflection of us and our people so we're trying to include as much traditional ecological knowledge and as much of our stories that we can in our game [Music] I just want to give a shout out to our all indigenous team Alan Turner who had to leave earlier Renee nijo I don't see you calling you out girl okay well we're all nations there's a lot of ojibwes and

Josh Herron who are borrowing from Bob's Burger is a Texas Nation um AC bun parent and Andrew muldig and myself are all Ojibwe speakers as is Jordan Florida so we're super proud of this this uh kind of special moment Gathering these people together I'll tell you just like this is my 30 second version of the Ojibwe language revitalization which I've been doing for 30 years you've probably also heard that indigenous languages are dying well don't believe it all right this language has made a comeback I've been in this place for 25 years I helped start the first immersion school there I've seen all the elders some of my best friends go on but I've seen the young people take up the language and we're growing s yes be part of this movement know about it yes we're taking something back right

um so you might also heard of Chippewa that's the misnomer where the people all around the Great Lakes three hundred thousand at least two-thirds of native people are in cities so we are really literally all over we're also related to the largest language family in North America indigenous language family which is Algonquin which is what you see here the Miami the Wampanoag all the way to the cree the Narragansett the Arapaho all have languages that have the same morphology so they might be able to use our game too so um we've been working to really understand our place the people want to also Express that we are we are not um exceptional to the place we're in we're part of the web and this is where we really collect connect with the climate change and environmental

movement our stories reflect that deeply but not in a grandiose way you have to hear them over and over again and then you get that feeling that's the feeling we hope to convey in our game part of the web we're just all part of the same web oh and and in terms of language we also think the way language is taught mostly now is very colonized it's words decontextualized who made up this thing about words anyway what are words what what makes a utterance right so we do have a language software which we think is really good you see it here but it only goes so far we need the context and our young people who for for most of them I would say video games is their main storytelling tool they need to have that context of play to use their language to really feel like they see themselves there foreign

[Music] so the process of reclaiming is begins and ends with the community and we've been really fortunate to be from the community that we're working with and the community that we're serving so we've had lots and lots of people to draw on um so we started our our game design phase our pre-production phases by reaching out to the community looking to address their needs and looking to them for ideas about what could be in the game um and hopefully the vision is that it ends with the community as we enter play testing we'd like to start working with immersion students and instructors and ultimately we'd like to see the game in immersion classrooms this is just a little bit of uh just a small taste of kind of what we were up to during our workshop and ideation phases with the community it was really an intergenerational collaborative effort with um all ages recent high school graduates from immersion programs as well as students that were still in

those programs as young as nine and ten as well as Elders in the community and we had them come in and try different Technologies and kind of do some different design activities and ideate um and then as we went on it kind of became clear to us that we wanted to make a point-and-click adventure game so we brought them into the designing design process for that as well we had them ideate on characters and locations and scenarios that would play out in the course of the game and then we took all of that material the recordings of them presenting their game ideas in Ojibwe language and the art and these wonderful like you can see the Ojibwe language is on there very like ideation sheet um and we took all of that and kind of began to kind of uh compound it down into the documents that would become our part our puzzle dependency chart and our narrative design document um yeah so it's a really community-led effort that we're really hoping uh we're just really excited about and really excited about bringing it back to our community

okay and to wrap up I don't know what time it is it's all right oh one minute to go thanks Mark um so we are making our main audience is the Ojibwe language Learners and fueling that movement our young people and we help the young people take the game home and show their parents how to use it and they all get excited about it and then their homes but we want to invite you as human beings also to somehow reclaim and make space for this idea that we are all deeply connected to the Earth as part of it and all the beings here one of our teachings is that a long time ago we all used to speak to everything that was alive on our planet I just want you to think about that and take that with you today we just want to end with a big thank you both to our partners and everyone that

came and Mark for organizing this talk thank you all so much hi everybody my name is Daniela and this is Nick and we are developing a way out game and we are hoping that we are developing something that I ambitiously call a game changer so can um gameplay drive a behavioral change this is the question that we've been asking ourselves uh it's a difficult question behavioral changes are the most difficult to tackle but we were lucky to partner up with behavioral scientists from uh University of Yale and from UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute for education and peace to create a groundbreaking assessment tool to measure compassion and social emotional competency without interrupting the gameplay or story so like the algorithm is embedded

into a game and that's how we can have a scientific data showing this behavioral change so that's cool now what kind of Behavioral change do we want to create so I've been um not shy from tackling the biggest challenges that life gave me so I decided to tackle the biggest public health and safety issue that has no prevention thus far does anybody knows what kind of public health and safety issue I'm talking about nobody can you guess what is the biggest public health and safety issue it's sexual harassment sexual harassment and sexual violence is the biggest public health and safety issue with no effective prevention thus far um uh the problem is much greater than we think and the biggest is because I

always just my not mind the statistic but rather say find me a woman over 30 that hasn't been sexually harassed so let's kind of just give you the beginning of the picture um I've not been a stranger to the issue myself personally and professionally I've been studying causes and consequences of sexual violence from um gaining Trust of child abuser and pedophile to speak for my feature film about healing after sexual trauma to being retaliated by my country for speaking up today is actually exactly two years since I've spoken up uh about the crime I survived so I was an actress and I was a health captive and raped by a powerful politician in my home country Serbia and um I fled and this horrific uh event uh

um kind of uh sparked my mission in life I shared this story to um um sorry um when I arrived to GDC I shared my story too um to one of the GDC attendees to to his immediate interception saying yes this is what happens to actresses and I'm telling you yes for the people like that we really need to make this game because men especially young men have no um they don't know I don't care to know what are the causes and consequences of sexual violence and they don't care to um stand in solidarity or think about like how can I stand in solidarity um yet also no young men will want to play a game about sexual harassment definitely so we decided not to build a game for good we decided to uh build a game that players want to play to meet them on their Turf give them all of the

the candies basically and kind of a joy and challenges of the gameplay and to add a challenge which is competing on compassion we decided to put the player into a support role because when um people kind of really see what is how difficult and some very often dangerous it is to ask for help after after these crimes not only that they will kind of profoundly and innately understand how to um how to be an active bystander but rather also prevent them from making these crimes and um to kind of explain how the gameplay really works here's uh designer Nick Fortuna from climatics to tell about this magic that he created uh hi everybody um so working with Daniella and learning

about this issue it you know this idea of support um was like this really critical piece and the idea that support could be this this Pathway to empathy and that that empathy could be a pathway to change right like to just understanding the position of someone else could do that and finding ways to do that led to like sort of thinking about this kind of gameplay and you know as as Matia did in his talk I want to use this as an opportunity to just introduce a game design concept that I think is useful in these cases um so the core idea is to try to make something that would be commercially viable with that audience level and that means making something kind of core and so Danielle and I talked a lot and I talked to my games on team about like well what are what are positions where you have support and then when you just say that word in a modern gaming context it like jumps out immediately oh that's a role that's like a role in a game right it's a role in a mobo right it's a role in Apex Legends it's like there's a character that plays support and often people play in that role so could we make a game where that's just your entire role but all you do is support so that that reinforces

um the lesson now part of that is coming from an idea that we would be uh you know like like reinforcing the lesson through the gameplay which is like kind of a standard um kind of thinking about games for impact that the gameplay should reinforce and so to do that we're sort of innovating this mechanic where you're a firefighter and you have a firefighting team and the team is going out to sort of like put out these wildfires that are spreading across this island and to do it you serve in a support role while your team actually puts out the fire you support the team as they do it um in a moba-like triangle right where you're last hitting and you know like using Buffs on the players around you um and that's not a mechanic that exists right there isn't a single player support MOBA and that's like the kind of one underline I want to do about this lesson there's a reason why we're doing that and that's because to make a commercial game uh that's gonna do a a kind of impact lesson you have this challenge where if you try too hard to make something that's like another commercial entity you end up just getting stuck being uh also ran in that category it's very hard to differentiate so my approach to

um serious game design has always been to innovate because if you're looking to make a commercial success you have a better chance of doing that if you innovate the mechanic and you can get attention for the mechanic and especially as Daniella said because the target audience will not be interested in the issue um we need to get a game that they would be interested in and the easiest way to do that is to do something new even though that sounds more difficult and the reason why you're seeing very early prototyping is because we're taking a long time protecting this mechanic um it gives you an opportunity to tell another story about the game that could potentially draw on an audience that wouldn't play it otherwise um so you bring your team out and you take care of fires but in in the interest issues in sort of like a traditional um you know level based game you deal with your team and you have to build trust with your team again sort of typical to the games like Dragon Age and Fire Emblem you like have to make your team work and so then your team is going to talk to you um but some of the things that your team talks to you about are are troubling and difficult and then you have to learn how

to navigate them so in this case Anna Adam approaches you after after a battle and says it's hard for me to talk about it it happened many times and I didn't know how to avoid these constant I felt like a toy to him I reached out to higher-ups and nothing that's why I got transferred right which which in a game context of being in an organization should be kind of a shock because no one ever talks about that and another system like that and then uh yeah how would you like to respond to that so you have a um tell me everything tell me what exactly happened you have B uh when did this happened is is it still going on you have C what do you need and you have d Anna that sounds horrible I'm so sorry was it rape um how many A's do I have nobody wants to play this bees B we have one B two B three B Four B how many C's

and how many D's okay great you guys are amazing yes yeah the correct answer is C and so uh way out is basically a game that that revolves around those topics right and and it does that as a way of getting you to listen to someone who's been a Survivor and then deal with the conflicts that come from that whether it be um other teammates who don't agree an organization that will back you down or or just dealing with the vicissitudes of what a healing process can be yeah thank you so much thank you thank you I think I'm next yeah even though that's not me but I wish I looked like that um before I start I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land and in particular the bunarong

people and the East cooling nation which is a place in Australia which is where I'm from which is where I do my work and where I live um my name is Stephen Dupont I run the Institute of games and solution in Australia and there are two organizations that work at the intersection of Youth Development and gaming and uh here to present my project streets of my town um I'm a youth worker from that's my background that's how I came to this I'm not a game developer um and as a youth worker you're trying to empower young people to overcome their challenges right and um look that's not always easy and streets of my town was born out of two challenges that we faced as youth workers one of which is that young people hesitate to seek help I think it goes forever I think everyone hesitates to

reach out for help and for us it's a real problem because the longer young people wait to reach out for help the harder it is to do the right interventions with them um and we've researched why this is and it's it's fairly simple like they usually don't really know about us and if they do know about us they don't really understand how we are going to help we might tell them we're going to do counseling and we've done we're going to do youth support and for a young person a 14 15 year old that doesn't mean a lot it's very difficult to explain that and so uh as a youth worker what we did is we're going to schools and talk to groups of young people and try and explain the value of our services and um you can try and talk to a group of 15 year old boys and talk about counseling eyes just roll back in their heads and they just jump on their phones and you know they're really not interested um and that's really what sparked the

idea like can a game really help us with this can a game explain what we do and show what we do not just Italian people but really be involved in that in that process um so we got together as a bunch of Youth workers came up with this idea is going to be a city Builder um and you were going to run a Youth Organization and help all the young people in your city and the city will flourish it's a great idea like so solid went out to game developers do game development Studios and got some quotes for it and then we pretty much fell over backwards because second problem making games is so expensive um and so I was running a small not-for-profit youth organizations at that time and we just did not even come close to the budget that we needed to build a game um and so I thought that was a real Challenge and the two problems combined

uh really sort of inspired me to start probably about a decade-long journey into trying to make a game um because my project was pretty much shelved just because it didn't have the budget for it but in that time uh I really got to refine the ideas it's not a city Builder game anymore um and also really think through a business model for this because uh given the budgets it would have to be a sustainable model and the idea was then to really like if one small not-for-profit can't afford it there's a lot of youth organizations spread out over Australia spread out of the world and they all have a little bit of budget maybe so if we can just pull that money create a product that's usable for all these organizations and then maybe maybe we get something sustainable from this and so over time that really percolated and um really matured as an idea

and so here are some of the the main key points that I thought were going to be important in our design so obviously low budget and sustainable um the unique selling point for streets of my town is that we localize things not just the way game developers localize we localize to a specific town so we've recreate the people who work in that town we recreate landmarks of that time so when a player starts to play their game they can recognize and they can see that this is a game about their specific environment and it really relates to their unique uh space um it should be really easy to roll out in different towns or different areas so we can build new stories that are co-designed by the people who live there and co-designed by the people who have a lived experience with the issues that

we're trying to talk about and that is very very important for us because as a you know wides a middle-aged male you know I'm not equipped to tell these stories so we have to bring in that narrative and we have to bring in that expertise um it should be narrative based because what we're trying to explain is is complicated so we need sort of the space to do that in and so I'd like to show you what it ended up looking like so this is the trailer I can get it apply here we go [Music] now we in a game like yes [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] let me [Applause] know [Applause] so this is in essence a Unity project that we have and we've got a bunch of tools and AD assets obviously available and we're building on this every time we roll out a new project with a not-for-profit

um some of the case studies that we've done um are big Blick which stands for my place which is built with local Aboriginal people in Melbourne and just we worked with the center for Multicultural youth for example as well and that was with a group of sad Sudanese young people and so we we get together in a in a room and we really Workshop what the story is what the the narrative is and the outcomes that they want to achieve through the game and then we wrap some game design around that and and put it into our platform really um where we want to take this is you know keep building it and um because we need Partners we need not-for-profits to use our product and uh we want to continue to bring the price down the more times we can roll this out the cheaper it will become over time to really use the product and we're building out a uh some really easy storylines that are in general which uh

will have a dashboard that sits sort of in the back end which a client a not-for-profit organization can just go in and type in their details type in the names of the workers and type in the opening hours of their service and all those kind of details so when a young person plays the game in that location they will get the appropriate information the right information of the youth servers or any other service that's available in that space so get in touch if you're interested and that is my talk so I'm done are you going to come up and do a last minute thank you very much oh wait we hit it on time and on budget I'm getting one minute from the back so thank you thank you everyone for coming and speaking and telling us all about the great work you're doing and thank you all for coming and uh of

course fill out the surveys but more importantly uh if there were things that you were inspired by I hope you'll stay and and chat with some of our speakers we're going to go over to the Alcove 305 which is over here somewhere uh and I hope to see you there thank you very much for coming enjoy the rest of the conference [Applause] foreign [Music]