Market Forces: Playing with Risk in Business Planning for Games

Market Forces is a tabletop serious game designed for a second-year Business Planning for Games module, aimed at helping undergraduate games students develop strategic judgement in early-stage studio planning. Rather than emphasising factual recall or simulation fidelity, the game places student teams in situated studio identities with finite strengths, confronts them with risk challenges, and requires them to justify each risk response through a three-part mitigation test tied to studio identity, strengths and strategy. The design is grounded in experiential and activity-theoretical principles and is intended as a practical model for embedding the demands of studio planning within games design curricula.

The central evidence is drawn from practice-informed classroom observation of a cohort of around thirty students playing five 60-minute rounds in groups of four to six. The authors report that students engaged more readily and collaboratively than in previous seminar-style sessions, and that the mitigation test surfaced gaps in student reasoning, revealed overconfidence, and made trade-offs and feasibility constraints explicit through discussion. Teams showed clearer alignment between studio identity, capability and decision-making. These findings are observational rather than controlled or empirical; no systematic data on learning outcomes were collected.

The authors are explicit about these limitations and do not claim measured effectiveness. Their contribution is best understood as a design case that offers a transferable mechanism for externalising strategic reasoning, with its educational value, generalisability across cohorts and institutions, and effects on learning outcomes left as questions for further study.