Games that Care: Lessons from Teaching Grief-Based Game Design

[Music] what is our job as games educators today a common answer to this question is to generate higher ability it seems like the value of game education hinges on our ability to integrate prospective game developers into an existing labor market this labour market appears in our institutional meta narratives and is often connected to an unchallenged set of best practices scrumming pitching jamming failing early specializing polishing portfolios in short we prepare students for a life in which they live for video games in order to make a living in which they become hireable but lately we start hearing different stories games as profitable as they are are becoming an increasingly unstable industry and one that burns out highly talented creatives as at a mind-boggling rate deaths in so-called employment

relationships live in the constant fear of being laid off after the next project if they don't collapse from burnout before that it really starts early as a highly productive student in one of my recent classes proudly wrote into their course resume to finish my game i had to break up with my significant other the student felt they had to ditch a loved one for a ba student video game this was happening in a design school mind you whose leading faculty pushed really hard for the artistic and political valency of video games in their curriculum and idealism crushed under the tangible dictator of variability couched in the provisional safety of my own precarious academic niche i watch the most talented students buy into and burn out inside this paradigm

it's a well-documented ritual starting with generous investments into the promise of a well-paying job i see students take out horrendous loans and work multiple jobs to pursue the dream of becoming a video game rockstar due to their passion and hard work they land an internship or a junior position but most of the time not in the core field of interest example or you're a woman you should be our community manager a new report by the higher education video games alliance short haefka suggests that while gamedev alumni have no problem finding a job after university that job satisfaction steadily decreases over the years this tends to be gendered as well women and lgbt plus folks alike more likely to drop out more quickly the reason rampant misogyny and other forms of discrimination such as toxic assumptions

about unpaid labor extra advocacy work combined with a loss of purpose from the perspective of institutional performance ratings we're sort of fine with that the students were hireable after all the problem is that the idea of hirability is based on a 1950s cliche of a secure labor market i remember when my nan who held a lifetime employment under the conditions of a soaring 1950s austrian economy used to ask me have you found a position yet or in an attempt to encourage me a bit more you will certainly find a position you like what you meant of course in either of these cases was lifetime employment inside a secure and thriving company designed to sustain my mental and physical well-being stable salary paid vacation and a nice

christmas bonus hirability we need to face the facts and start asking other questions harder questions questions which don't originate in quantification such as how will students have a stable life in an industry which doesn't seem to offer one how do we ensure our students will thrive while doing game design for a living while game education certainly cannot solve the problems of neoliberalism in the current gig economy it can take this question to heart and formulate strategies which are more versatile and sustainable in addressing our students futures i think of this challenge in terms of a question which i ask my students in my mind did my course equip you to define your space in video games culture did you learn skills which actually allowed you to express what you want to

express do these skills bring opportunities opportunities which enable you to build a sustainable life but that's the future back to the now in the now we face the serious challenge of how we might go about teaching such skills the answer i present in this talk is experimental and rudimentary for now let's call it teaching games that care or rather the making thereof but here's a disclaimer my idea of games that care is not intended to claim that it can save a structurally broken economy it intends to teach students to find new contexts and consumer groups and be less dependent on existing markets and industry logics it is supposed to inspire deep connections to the real world by encouraging encouraging students to work on what they genuinely care about i started being interested in this

approach while writing on my thesis on games and bereavement which is now available as a book in games and bereavement i was interested in developing meaningful ways to represent attachment loss and grief experiences in video games this interest was born from the conflict that in 2011 when i started this project these subjects seemed fundamental to human experience and absent in games the stakes were personal when my baby nico died in 2004 i found one way of coping with this by rebuilding my experience in the sims 2. i was able to design two young adults to the liking of my partner and me a baby was born through the sanitary animation which did nothing to simulate the hard work that is birthed for you and at the point at which nico was supposed to die there seems to resisted

it did not let me represent my experience this game about life literally did not support mine by disabling the death of babies the game symbolically erased the experience of thousands of other ex-parents like me expressing the unspeakableness of our fate through its mechanics finding mechanics which care then seemed crucial to me and it seemed like a good idea to do so by collaborating with students and other bereaved mothers parts of this project were presented at gdtc 17 but today it's the first time that i talk about the didactic side before i continue i want to note that teaching grief-based game design may appear like it's on the extreme end of what a game design subject can be this is because it's such a stigmatized topic to many of us grief is as ordinary as an essential essentialist drinking water and that's why i chose to work with it

but i want to encourage you to think uh of how these teaching methods i present in this talk might relate to what you find ordinary and essential and how you might introduce that into your curriculum i also want to note that the methods i used don't come out of the blue but they have histories in the plural one of these histories is the long-standing tradition of participatory design and this more recent mapping to game development participatory design especially in the scandinavian area emerged as a politically motivated methodology driven by unions and workers to include end users in the design process of their future working environments in the game development context the importance of the user has been emphasized as well especially in player-centric design one example you see here is tracy fullerton's game design workshop a classic which now

celebrates his fourth edition congratulations in the development process it is essential to many studios out there to conduct play testing in later stages of game development to give feedback on a fully formed concept however participatory game design goes a step further it insists on the inclusion of users and experience experts early on in the process this can have two advantages first it grounds technology in the world of real players real people and their needs and secondly it lets these needs inspire new technologies and new contexts of use participatory game design has been used in various settings around the world but there's two examples that have had a particular impact on my work these are the deep games lab at chicago's depaul university and the denmark-based game girl workshop the deep games lab teaches design

processes which are built on experiential resonance between maker and design students are taught how to work with the symbolic language of people who have gone through difficult yet common experiences like eating disorders depression or domestic violence the explicit goal is to use game design as a way to foster a deeper understanding of these experiences rather than designing for a quote-unquote measurable purpose the game girl workshop is one of the earliest europe-based feminist game focused initiatives using a semi-professional all-female setup to guide girls and teenagers through a development workshop from scratch to finish a core pedagogic principle is to increase increase the girls self-efficacy in a world basically designed against them it is to encourage their voices opinions priorities through game making and it does not expect these priorities to align or compete with common game

development paradigms game development instead should make space for what is by learning from these efforts my work is part of a wider community spirit which desperately needs game development to change from rationalized optimized information processing to practices of care this long but necessary introduction takes me to the agenda for the rest of this talk my ambition is to give you a vertical slice of some of the detective decisions that went into the teaching of jockoy which you see her a game about grief i will not go much into detail with the design elements of jokoy the game that was produced during this course those of you who are interested in it can check it out in my previous gdc talk or find the game on each io this side instead i will talk about my teaching methodology as a case of how care as a development skill might be introduced

into our teaching curricula i will start by talking about the context of how the participatory game design was set up and who participated secondly i'll talk about how to prepare the class or how i prepared the class and how the dialogue between students and participants unfolded and impacted ideation then i moved towards usability testing and the question how to evaluate a game made with and for grievous and each of these steps involved interesting risks and challenges i will reflect on along the way and in a brief final question why care about the context of this class our participants were far white women in their 30s who responded to a call channeled through the austrian self-help group regen boom which is german for rainbow my student team was composed of white predominantly male ba game engineering students in the early 20s who took the

course as an elective at the albert university copenhagen the course stretched over a period of three months during which the students developed the game chocolate that i mentioned before when it came to the women their motivations to join this project were political and personal on a political level they shared the hope to create awareness of pregnancy losses and ordinary experience worthy of destigmatization they had no particular interest in video games but they were enthusiastic about the outlook of being included on a personal level the women shared a hope to remember and celebrate their experience of motherhood even beyond death they expressed this in a way they gave their fetuses names and spoke of them as children for them keeping in touch with the inner images of their late children was important the students took the course mainly to complete their ba course credits and to

create an innovative game with a deep message in short the motivations differed my teaching challenge would be to find a way of facilitating a conversation between these groups an additional challenge was that the two groups were located in different countries and spoke different languages which required cross-cultural mediation techniques i found one such technique in the approach in an approach called muse-based game design by rila khaled rila suggests that dividing the roles in a design team between those who inspire the muses and those who create can be helpful to structure participatory design process in rila's words muse-based game design is an experimental empathic design approach foregrounding a dialogic artist-muse relationship between a game designer and a player following a user research stage focused on learning about the player

the designer forms idiosyncratic design constraints inspired by and relating to the player which are then used to inspire ideation in rila's original pedagogic setting students are the ones the students are the ones conducting this research stage but in our intercultural setting it was more useful to gather muse's data beforehand and provide it in a semi-processed shape at the beginning of the class the data handed to the students included images and transcribed conversations of a muse workshop i carried out prior to the course needless to say this required a bit of preparation so prior to the course i ran the muse workshop in which the women explored a single question what did their relationships to their babies feel like they explored this question through an imagination exercise

what if they could visit their baby on a planet these are the planets in response to this question the muses created metaphorical images in the eventually mockups of their relationships informative of their current grief situation in other words they started the process of symbolic modelling constructing haptic worlds in which my students engaged over the course of the semester when i went about constructing teaching materials i noticed in great horror the risk i had set myself up for with this method i could translate and transcribe what had been said and done in the workshop but would i be able to honor all the small gestures creating effective bonds between the muses and myself all the small talk laughs nods coffee breaks and the collective sweating in a hot room during early july these were things which contributed to the way the mock-ups were designed

would these be lost in translation ironically the act of writing about experience erased some of it on the other hand this created some speculative room for students engagement with these models what mechanics aesthetics and dynamics did the mock-ups invoke what speculations did they inspire and how did the students connect to these worlds these were important questions during ideation one symbol that drew the students particular attention early on was a mock-up we called the cave the cave was built by a woman who defined her setting in an excruciating amount of detail the cave was composed of two layers an inner cave and an outer cave surrounded by an island inside the cave lived the baby which had to be nourished by an army of playable characters all of them family members

and friends and the goal of the cave was to make the family leave in a spaceship but first they needed to collaborate to make the baby grow enough to be left behind safely first there was some collective enthusiasm among the students this was clearly a model with mechanics goals a setting in place if the team succeeded to translate it into a game wasn't that a rock solid way to express authentic grief experience the student created a prototype and added feature features multiple playable characters multi-layer level design customizable audio and lighting lock and key puzzles shape shifting feeding and holding mechanics and atmosphere which conveyed being in an internal space oh and what if you could build the spaceship the feature list grew and grew and grew and so did the doubts as to whether this could possibly be achieved within the

constraint of a three-month project at the same time leaving out the slightest detail from the mock-up wouldn't that necessarily mean misrepresenting the women this was a good moment to step back a bit and remember the laws and limitations of representation according to british media scholar stuart hall representation does not reflect reality it constructs it constructs it it is not outside the event not after the event but within the event itself it is constitutive of it this means it is virtually impossible to represent truth not even through engineering for my students this meant learning to embrace their own interpretations of the planet mockups what did they what did they see and feel and understand about these mockups what constructed their genuine truth about it this insistence on embracing what personally speaks to you is something i

learned from doris rush's work on symbolic game design her insightful book making deep games doris recommends to rely on the developers personal symbols and associations when creating games about emotional subjects i would add that this is especially important in participatory settings rather than overwriting the statement of your partner by trying to represent them truly use your own different words to create a genuine response use your broken words remember being vulnerable is a game development skill when taking their own perspective seriously the students started started identifying symbols in the mock-ups that interested them more than others they also started seeing blind spots in the women's conversations which were essential for understanding their grief for instance the women had taken a perspective of survivorship rather than

grief death was more of an unspoken circumstance framing the wish to stay connected to their babies to honor this reality the students decided to model loss in joko's control scheme in the game the player first builds up a connection between a mother sheep and her lamb through a shared control that is the left mouse button after the lamb is lost in an earthquake the button which used to facilitate child care is no longer available this is supposed to make players feel a sense of loss on the physical on the haptic level of gameplay rituals one of the most daunting questions was how to teach suitable methods for evaluating chocola i decided to let the students figure it out by themselves first which led to some exciting frustrations for the first iteration of the game the students decided to conduct usability tests with fellow university colleagues using

quantitative questionnaires their main concern was functionality which they interestingly divided into two parts first did the players know what to do and secondly did the players know what to feel well the first part returned clear results the second part did the players feel the right thing produced very messy data the play testers see the play testers seemed incapable of identifying their emotions by choosing the correct options in the questionnaire this uncertainty confused and frustrated our students it took some work to unpack the root of their frustration as it turned out the questionnaire had built on a common myth in effective engineering the idea that developers can engineer user emotions by making correct design choices

in this paradigm an information unit is triggered in a user when they interact with technology this myth is summarized in the brilliant research of kirsten berner and colleagues who who write ineffective computing effect is often taken to be another kind of information discrete units or states internal to an individual that can be transmitted in a loss-free manner from people to computing computational systems and back of course this is a myth which suits engineers because it translates complex emotion into quantifiable information units but scientifically speaking there is not much evidence that that's how emotion works instead what the researchers suggest is that emotion is more like a web of messy interactions rather than information units for my students what kind of ux methods were out there to measure emotion as interaction

spoilers very few we ended up with a method called cultural probes this method was first used in the context of urban design by bill gaber and colleagues and cultural probes for those who don't know them are small activity packs given to users with the hope for inspirational feedback the package is handed over in a little ritual and after that the user engages with the contents as long as they want and returns them at their own pace in most cases probes are used as a way to establish a connection with unknown research participants but in our case it served as a tool for reconnecting and testing the second iteration of the game with our muses the package contained postcards the game prototype and the personal personalized scrapbook these materials were supposed to invite

the muses to think about the workshop the game prototype and their mother-child relationship in their current situation on the day the probes were launched the disadvantages of this loose method became relatively clear two of the form users had to cancel the ritual and then had technical issues with the game since other probe contents depended on playing the game they had to be returned blank however the probes which were returned were of great value for the polishing of the stage of jokoy by now the students had learned that the muses were supposed to inspire rather than dictate the process and the probes offered additional support in crafting an appropriate atmosphere and feel of jockoy overall what the students had learned from exploring quantitative versus speculative ux methods was the value of associative ephemeral feedback which was

less quantifiable but more rich so why care the processes tools and learnings i've discussed in this talk are in many ways a lesson of care through engineering guiding my students through a development dialogue with grievous was a way of confronting some basic myths in video game engineering and updating them to resp uh to respect the real world and each other it is important that one source of respect is the respect for one's own games that care do not simply care about players or in-game representations they care about those who make them they commit to decisions which resonate with and validate creators games that care cannot promise my students to find a stable life inside a troubled economy it cannot prevent them for breaking up over a video game course

it can inspire the choice to develop games they care about and this may lay the foundation for a more full potentially interesting work life months after the end of the project one of the participants asked me to present the game at a self-help group networking event in vienna strolling through the room i noticed a heavy photo album displayed near the entrance of the group's office when casually flipping through the pages i stumbled over a section called our morning game which contained two photographs from the project the image were carefully arranged and glued on this thick dark blue paper and one of them showed a still from the game the other one displayed two of the muses looking over my shoulder as we were playing the game i cannot remember having this photo taken this photo album reminded me of the real

purpose of this course by including a group of muses into a ba game development course we had incidentally created a memorial technology for them which they were both keen on showing off to others and saving as a cherished memory by going through the process of careful engineering the students had helped found this entirely new user context of grief-based development and contributed to a meaningful dialogue around a stigmatized subject my job as a games educator then was to walk with them a bit of the way and watch them grow into complex reflective makers of things i would like to thank edertoff and simon nielsen for helping me develop this talk and thank you for listening [Applause]