Team reflections
The serious game concept that we have incorporated into our project is Women in Engineering. Through our game, we want to show the challenges faced by women pursuing a career in engineering, and strategies that could be used to overcome these challenges. In the very early stages of the design proposal phase, our team conducted research to identify the current situation of women in engineering and the problems they faced. We also collected stories of discrimination from the female members of our group including the challenges they have personally faced. From this, we generated ideas for the story-line. Once there was an agreement that the story-line was suitable and appropriate for the concept, the next stage was to decide on the game mechanics. Several ideas were brainstormed but in order to meet the project requirements and satisfy all members' expectations, several adaptations were made to the game mechanics. We eventually reached a point where the game design was to everyone's liking.
From here, we moved onto implementing our first prototype (development phase). In order to integrate the Women in Engineering concept ideas into our game, we used a concept mapping table. Through this, we discovered there were some game mechanics that we assumed to deeply map the game concept, but were then identified to just be surface mapping after some discussion. For example, we originally thought that having the player meet a mentor as a quest would inspire her to choose a path they want, but after some discussion, the mentor became only an NPC figure used to achieve a goal rather than teach the player. We found it challenging to convey the Women in Engineering concept that matched with real-world scenarios in the dialogue, but research and experiences from our own members were used to make the dialogue more realistic.
Overall Team Reflections on Implementation and Mapping of Serious Game concept about Women in Engineering
We continued from our initial game design and tried to add in more serious game concept mapping into the level story-line through positive and negative NPC interaction. We implemented two other levels which portrayed the view of Jessica's life in her university education and in her work career. We wanted to improve our serious game concept mapping following the feedback given for the prototype submission and create more balanced scenarios with both negative and positive role models for Jessica. We provided more balanced numbers of positive and negative NPCs to meet this serious mapping balance.
Also from the feedback, we found that many of the mappings we did for the first submission were to a satisfactory degree, hence we decided to keep incorporating existing serious game concept mapping methods present in level 1 into level 2 and 3. For example, we had a female inventor/professor role model in level 1 that encouraged our player to follow her dreams. A similar mapping was used in level 2, where a 4th year civil student empowers our player to make changes and help the player understand the problems of Women in Engineering. In level 3, a role model is also include as a part of the serious game concept mapping; the role model is a manager at the place and helps our player to improve herself. By looking through the game concept mapping from level 1, we were able to deepen the serious game concept mapping such that it more meaningfully showed the benefits that an individual would have from such a role model.
There was a lot of thought put into how interactions in the game could show the player opportunities for systemic change, not only in game but in the real world.
For example, in level 1, our player needs to confront stereotypical statements by an individual and her choice or reacting to this statement could lead to positive results for the environment she would be working in. To do this in level 1, the player can also ask the electronics and technology teacher to personally invite another female students to the class, to host a women's only programming event, or to make physics and programming mandatory.
We wanted to allow similar opportunities for systemic change in level 2 and 3 and thus further strengthen the serious game concept mapping. We found these to be difficult, but through research and consideration of the scenarios we were in, we were able to add these into the levels. Initially, our opportunity for systemic change in level 2 was not obvious. With edits to our dialogue, we make it obvious she (the role model) is empowering and encouraging the player to make changes by encouraging other women to pursue engineering, as well as helping the player to understand the problems facing women in engineering. In level 3, we have an NPC who provokes our player with dismissive statements about the technical abilities of female engineers in general. Because our player (can choose to) confronts the NPC on this, the player eventually earns the NPC's respect by standing up for herself - as well as for women in engineering. We wanted to incorporate systemic change into all 3 levels so that the changes that the player makes, does not just improve her, but also improves the society and environment she is in.
Our group met very regularly for the prototype submission so that we were satisfied with the quality of our product, but this resulted in many group meetings and sometimes resulted in an unbalanced workload for certain team members at different stages of the prototype submission.
For the development of our final submission, we allocated work more efficiently such that our allocations allowed team members to work independently. This meant we did not need to convene in as many meetings compared to the development of the prototype. Approaching the deadline for prototype submission, the work was again allocated such that every team member was able to work on a piece of the final prototype independently. These allocations were catered to team member preferences. Conflicts and major problems were minimized through strong communication and co-operation among the team. Although time management was a slight issue towards the end of the project, the overall result at the end was of good quality.
