Reflection on a Design Process for an Educational Game on Mindful Drinking

This paper reflects on the design process of an educational video game on "mindful drinking," developed at a public state college in the United States to teach incoming first-year students about responsible alcohol use. The game is intended to eventually replace the college's current mandatory alcohol training. The paper frames its contribution as a case study that combines several areas, including applied games for social impact, small-team development, interdisciplinary collaboration, and games education, in a way the authors did not find together in other projects they surveyed.

On the design side, the game blends an interactive narrative, presented in visual novel conventions with branching choices that fold back into a central storyline, with minigames that let players practice specific skills. Narrative elements were written with an authentic student voice, and learning objectives supplied by campus stakeholders were sorted into narrative or minigame form using a learning mechanics framework. A notable example is a minigame on standard drinks, which asks players to pour a standard serving of various alcohols to show how hard it is to judge drink size in a 16-ounce red party cup. Playtest results reported so far indicate that students and some non-student adults found the characters relatable and the scenarios meaningful, gained knowledge about standard drinks, and mostly enjoyed the game. The paper does not provide sample sizes or formal statistics for these playtests.

The paper also reports on the team's organization and sustainability. The team is interdisciplinary, combining faculty and undergraduate students who learned new skills such as coding and script testing, and it used several rounds of revisions, focus groups, and stakeholder reviews to keep the game authentic for students while acceptable to campus student-life offices. Because faculty teaching loads and limited scholarship time constrain such work, the authors argue that sustainable collaboration depends on building a campus community around games and drawing on a mix of internal grants, state funding, departmental support, and independent study credits. The project has involved more than ten students over roughly eighteen months.