Games that Change Lives: Social Impact Done Right

[Music] so my name is Elizabeth Muller and today I would like to talk to you about the process of creating two social impact games that I've walked on normal lost phone and another lost phone lower story these two games games where you found a phone and you have to find out what happened to the owner of the phone by looking through the different applications reading the emails looking into the gallery they are presented as investigative games but through storytelling they make people think about important themes such as homophobia or abusive relationships we sold more than two hundred thousand copies of these games and these games also had a real impact on a large number of people as you can see from different

messages we have received this game helped me come out of the closet this game made me realize that I was on a phobic and that I had to change this game has had me accept my past this game made me realize I was too jealous and I had to work on it all these different reactions are what I call direct social impact someone plays a game whose objective is to make them think about a subject and this game provokes a direct reaction I will give you some advice on how to design games with a direct order impact in a second part of this talk but first I would like to talk to you about indirect social impact

in direct social impact is the fact that any creation whether we intend it or not will have a social impact on it audience to take a more personal example when I was a teenager I had a lot of mangas on one side and read a lot of Rogers mangas for girls in this mangas there were always girls looking for Prince Charming and also looking for the best way to satisfy Prince Charming at the same time I was reading a lot of Shannon's wonka's for boys and in the mangas are Fred all the boys were presented as sex maniacs without exception I was quite young and I didn't have much perspective yet and

these two parallel weddings push me into the beginning of my love and sex life with to belief first my wall was to find Prince Charming and to satisfy him that's what I have learned from the shoulders but also hired to accept all these sexual desires because all men were sex-obsessed without exception including three in charming that's what I have learned from the shonan's if you want my opinion it was really not the best way to start young adult life what I'm trying to say here is not that monkeys are evil and that I regret having wet them not at all what gets me thinking here here is that I'm not sure that the authors of this manga we're living in Japan were

thinking about the influence that their works could have on a French teenage girl and that's in direct social impact every walk we create as an impact and as autos we have the responsibility to see about the creation we make our responsibility as autos is not a choice it is a fact and we cannot ignore it that's why we have to make at least inclusive games making an inclusive games is an approach that consists in thinking about the impacts that each creative decision could have and seeking to limit as much as possible any potential negative impact making inclusive game is essential but it's not the same as making an activist game to make an activist game is to make a game

for which you intentionally stick to express active support for cause it's not something that you should feel compelled to do because it's risky both commercially and militantly commercially risky because it will hinder some people and potentially generate lights and sales and militantly risky because it's it's really hard actually to make a good game with real impact I will therefore give you some advice and tips that we used for anomalous phone and another was for lower story the first particle ality of these games is that unlike other games you are not asked to play a character in which you do not recognize yourself and with whom you have difficulty identifying in this game you play as yourself you are the one who

found the phone you're not the owner of the phone you are playing me yourself searching through a lost phone this means that at no time do you find yourself playing a character that doesn't look like you and you should never make them choose from proposals that you don't like at all here it's a choice choices have already been made by the protagonist and you are just asked to try to understand what prompted the protagonist to make those choices however these mechanics had some failures especially in the first game in order to have more interactivity that is for gameplay reason we had setup unsent draft mechanic that is at times you come

across message that have not been sent and you must send them to receive a response that contains information that allows you to move on to the next part of the game it's something that really caused a problem for a lot of players and rightly so they didn't like interfering that much in the character's life and they were disturbed by the message that could be implied the treat that it was okay to search an interface in someone's life this is a negative impact that has not been considered when designing the game no it had been brought up during playtest one of the reason I don't think anyone gave us feedback about these problematic issues is that all the people who tested the game were people who knew us

directly or indirectly but and mostly most important that they knew it our intentions since those people knew that our intentions are good they didn't perceive the possible bad consequences of what we were doing this problem on the first game help us better think the design of the second game and three major changes were made for starters at the launch of the game we added a message to remind people that the game is a work of fiction and that in real life we must not invade anyone's privacy it's interesting that we had to put this type of methods in the game because the in an FPS for example you were live to see messages saying actually killing is wrong please

don't do it in real life but since searching through a phone it's something much more widespread I'm sure some people in this room have done that it becomes a necessary reminder that it is not something to be done in order to avoid privatizing it the other change in another loss phone is that there are never any drafts to send when we thought about it we found other gameplay mechanics to help the story move forward and we realized there are always other solutions it's the last change we made in another ops one was the end of the game the only way to end the game and one of them is actually a completely valid way but then the game is really

really short is that you open the game and then you erase the data from the phone and you don't look through anything and there's even an achievement for that because it's a noble way to play this game to decide not to play it another advice I would like to give to people who want to develop game with a social impact is to choose your battles could you raise hands if you're planning or if you worked on a game with the direct social impact oh well if you want to do it one day okay that's a lot of people good I congratulate you you all want to change the world that's amazing so I wanted to tell you that if you try to open supply your eyes on a lot of different topics at the same time it's a guaranteed disaster think of it as

glasses if you give glasses to someone who is not used to wear them it will take them some time to adjust if you give them classes with very sick lenses it will give them a headache and I will remove them right off right away activism is the same you can't expect that overnight thanks to your game your audience will become super awake on all subjects either for advise you to focus on a subject that is close to your heart to make this the main team and for the other subjects that are important to see instead of having an activist Ankama having an inclusive angle for example in a normal loss fun we never talk about

racism because it's a heavy complex subject and it cannot be approached us lightly however we try to at least have an inclusive angle on this issue we have very different characters and at no time do people use racist insults for example another example I like to talk about animal exploitation issues which are important to me personally so in an animal loss phone there's a secondary character that talks about it but it's just a little anecdote in the background the protagonist has a friend with vegan just like they've another one who likes board games in another loss phone in Laura's note we

find a recipe for stuffed zucchini the recipe turns out to be vegan but there is no mention of any time that it is specifically a vegan recipe however there are players were try to reproduce the recipe and therefore they add vegan that day you want to make a social impact game I advise you also to avoid having a moralizing game play avoid having rules that in the game that do not allow the player to move forward until they agree with the message you're trying to convey in the lost fan service players are never told that they are want to think as they do this allows them to continue and finish the game in character writing - which way not to be too many can characters will have a

vision of the world that we do not share well this culture they have other qualities and this is important if we want the people who actually think like these people to connect maybe with them and to not feel too attacked when after that we say that you know maybe you shouldn't think that to make a good game in absolute terms it's necessary to do play tests to check if the game is understandable and pleasant to use a big fan of play test when we make games with social impact we also need to do play tests to test this social impact and in order to do this you have to play test your game with people who knows a lot about the topic you are talking about and also people

play testing the game with people who don't know anything about it on a normal lost phone what we did is that we asked people to play the game and after that to explain the story of the protagonist from A to Z this made it possible to discover misunderstanding and the need to explain in detail a certain points that seem really obvious for us for example it's really silly but we realized that some people don't know what LGBT stands for for us it was obvious but it made us realize that we had to add at some point at the game someone explaining what it is because it's not obvious for everyone especially people outside the LGBT community also testing the game with people from the LGBT community there is some other problematic issues on the game in

relation to the message we were trying to get across there was indeed a part of the game where we talked about the suicide and murder rights of LGBT people this information was not false but we were told that this could lead some teenagers not to come out because of fear which was not our goal so we removed this part a normal loss phone was first created during a game jam so a large part of the story was created in 40 this means that there were no pre-production process with actual time to reflect on the message we wanted to convey so a prototype was developed and then shown to people from the LGBT community in order to improve it on

another loss phone however we wanted to take the time to do some research before writing the script we knew we wanted to talk about toxic relationships so I spent several months reading a lot about it essays scientific articles autobiographies even some novels I then contacted the victim support Association to ask for the help it was difficult at first to convince them to work with us like what you want to make a game about Joseph's relationship about domestic violence we had to explain that games can be used for something else than just entertainment finally we managed to convince them by showing them videos made by famous youtuber on a normal loss

form and by showing them all the comment section of these videos on YouTube and all the people saying that the game helped them that's why that's what convinced all the organization to say oh ok interesting way to change the world we'll try to do that with you in terms of process of writing oops sorry we had made progress on the scenario in a gradual way step 1 we asked the organization to think the subject how it should be addressed on the issue of abusive relationships we were told that what was most misunderstood by the majority of the population was the way the cycle of

violence works google it after the presentation which explain why so many victims do not live the person who abuses them the other thing that is often misunderstood by the majority of the population is the importance of psychological violence and how we'd proceed physical violence once we had these important elements it allowed us to choose the approach to the story we had to write a story that would explain the cycle of violence and that would focus maybe on psychological violence so then I I water one-page synopsis outlining lower stories this document was tidied by the organization that was helping them and they corrected some

points to keep us from falling into cliches once a new synopsis was written and approved we worked on a walkthrough of the game and we asked them to review it so walkthrough of the game which was a floral story the same as in the synopsis but with more details and especially it was showing the order in which the player would discover the different parts of Laura's story again with this walkthrough we worked on the details together and it was only after that this walkthrough was written proof read that we set about writing the entire story this method was very effective because it allowed us to know exactly where we were going without having to whitewall parts of the story and then finally we moved them as we

done for a normal loss home we have some time for question that I really hope that this talk has help you to think about the design of your games whether you want them to have the right social impact so whether you know it will have indirect social impact and there's a mic somewhere what I yeah for the questions and if you could start by introducing yourself pretty great hi my name is Laura I'm working on a similar project we're trying to create an AR experience but working with stakeholders and Native American communities and I guess my question is if you had presented this idea to save victims or people that are allies or working with those victims and they had said don't do this would you have

changed your course or like how would you have approached that I guess well that's what they did actually first is organization they say oh why do we want to make a game and then we we asked them why they think it's not a good idea and by understanding white everything it was a bad idea we realized that they were not understanding what we had in mind so I guess are talking more try to understand why and it's difficult to answer yeah but is it cool and a lot of support from the community but also we've sort of developed something and now we actually take it back to them and I'm a little apprehensive because I'm like what if they you know like it could derail a lot of the work we've done but I mean the goal has always been to work with communities to amplify their voice not necessarily to put our own spin on

it but at the same time we have sort of the keys to the kingdom in terms of Technology you know yeah so well you have to walk with them front of a to see anyway thank you hi there my name's Sam I'm a software developer and I've done a lot of like outreach activities with like students in schools from like low-income families and one of the things I know from that experience is there's a difference between knowing the facts about like learning like hey like you know maybe I should do this we should not do this versus like changing behavior and I was wondering like how your team worked on that like for your games like - actually did you address trying to change player behavior or did you just really want to help them be exposed to what homophobia could be and what it means I'm not sure and you just do the question so if I don't answer correctly please ask again no please

just could you ask again the analytic no worries so a lot of times when you're wanting to change behavior of people especially like in a case of like abusive relationships a lot of times people will know that hey like this isn't a good thing and sometimes it's hard to identify but that doesn't necessarily change their behavior and that's certainly a very complex difficult challenge so I just wondering like how you if you tried to address that in the game and if so like how did you approach that okay so now I understand it's a very interesting question on another loss for Noah story we one of the first question we were asking yourself is why do we do this game what impact do we want to have and we were saying thinking on are we making

a game for the victims are we making a game for the abusers and why when we talked with the organizations that helped victims we realized that it was more interesting to try to make a game for the people who might know other people who are in abusive relationships in order to teach them how to react because that's the majority of those people like maybe some people here are in a abusive relationship and I'm sorry for that but I wish that it would be a small portion of it but I guess all of you you know someone oh maybe you don't realize it with in this position so this was the call trying to teach people to spot abusive relationship and give the

white advice understand them better understand how the cycle of violence works remind them that the organization that kind of helps this kind of stuff alright thank you so much hi thanks for the talk I was just wondering you said that one of the things that you were focusing on was allowing people to make choices from perspectives that you didn't necessarily agree in all agree with in the game so kind of honoring the alternate perspective from what you're trying to teach I was just wondering if you could say a little bit more about that like how do you kind of encompass a divergent view from the message that you're trying to get like how do the people that are making those choices kind of learn from the game I'm still not sure I understood the question sorry I thought in your talk you were saying that that you allowed players to to play

the game from different perspectives so there might be people that were making choices that you wouldn't necessarily agree with no we don't do that that's the opposite of what we're doing we're making again where the players has no choices to make oh I'm sorry I misunderstood sorry hi my name is Manila and I'm stirring game development and I had like a very interesting project I'm from Mexico and there's a lot of like corruption there so my project was about corruption and it was really hard because like you said you can't force a player to see like your perspective and agree with it but where do you cross like no where do you draw the line you know because I wanted

to make the players feel the way like let me think about it like when you're in disadvantage with someone because of the corruption and they're obvious of power and stuff but out like for example we had to like force the players into that perspective but because without giving us without we giving them that like character they couldn't like see the issue you know and I think there was an issue with the game because of that because players didn't connect really with the character but like where do you draw the line between like giving the perspective you want the players to see and giving them the freedom to really connect through the game I think the

answer would be play test in order to find this line and also maybe use warnings at the beginning of your game contact warning tariqa warnings I'm not sure if that helps yeah I have time maybe for one last question after that if people wants to keep asking question now we will do it outside because we have to clear the room for other people call my name is Gabriela dato I make learning games for kids I my question is about the mechanics that you use so you said in the initial game you didn't want to do the sending the drafts what if you could just talk through a couple categories of mechanics that you used in the game to replace that or just how do we think about mechanics in this dialogue game okay well the idea behind the sending the

draft was to be sure that the players have access to different part of the game at different moment it was inspired by a friend of us who had a bad experience with the game a story where they got to the end at the first minute and they didn't enjoy it so we wanted to have a system so that youth even if you feel like you can read everything in reality you have to read that part first and do something about it and then you can access the rest of it and so and the draft looks like a good idea at the time and what we did is the second game is instead having more password protected apart and these passwords they were always you always had to have some information that you have read somewhere

else to find the password so that's how we did it well thanks a lot [Applause]