Posted on by Amber Holt

Week 4 – 5 Serious Game Ideas

  • Drag Queen Dress Up – In this game, you play as drag queens getting ready for shows and events. You get to pick hair, makeup, and outfits, but you also have to attend events like visiting a children’s hospital, doing a book reading, brunch, etc. This game is to reduce the stigma that drag queens have, with the media believing that all drag queens are sexualized (some definitely are, but not all), etc. 
  • Realistic Driving Sim – A driving simulation where there are lot of random road things that come up that will potentially damage your car—potholes, random objects, etc. The lower the car that you drive in the game, the harder it is to drive without getting some serious damage. 
  • Summer Camp – a game where you play as a teen day camp counselor that needs to navigate the tricky world of caring for and watching children with 0 prior experience. You don’t have training for children with intellectual and physical disabilities, which makes caring for those children even harder, all while managing 20 other children. Your goal is to make sure that all children have a happy and good time. The game would expose some of the children’s “backstories” throughout the game, like what their athome life is like, and you may need to make the decision to report some not great things you hear. This game is based on my experience with being a day camp counselor and seeing that some of the children that I worked with really needed that experience and that that was what they had to look forward to during the day. I learned about some of the backgrounds of abuse that they had and it absolutely broke my heart. However, it was a difficult experience because I wanted to try to make sure that all the children had a great time, but I was unprepared for a lot of the situations that arose, since I was just a teenager myself. (Sara also helped inspire this game with her prototype about not knowing what others are going through!!)
  • Safe Food Practices – a tabletop game where you interact with actual food pieces (very interactive like the children’s play food sets or interactive children’s books) to complete certain cooking tasks to make a dish. Another player plays as the inspector as you complete these tasks and they won’t tell you what they are looking for, but they will let you know when you failed to complete the task in an unsafe manner. In this way, players must be extra careful with how they handle the food, as anything they do wrong could get their restaurant shut down. While this sounds like a silly game, I think this game could be important if I incorporate actual safe and unsafe food practices into the game and provide a little bit of background information on it. 
  • It Could Be Anyone of Us – A game (very vague at this point) about not to trust everyone that you meet. You must make decisions to go along with different strangers, however you don’t know their actual backgrounds. Someone could be a serial killer, or just a flat out mean dude. Based on who you decide to trust, your actions will have consequences. I see this as a card game, but other than that, I’m not sold on any mechanics. 

4 Replies to “Week 4 – 5 Serious Game Ideas”

  1. I think drag queen dress up does a good job at making drag not as demonized as the right wing media wishes to portray them as and instead shows normal everyday activities and livelihoods.

  2. I like all of your game ideas. I think you did a very good job at providing us with a a vivid narrative of each of the games.

Comments are closed.