Thoughts on What We Played in Class
Dumb Ways to Die
This game uses repetition, humor, and fast failure to build awareness through habit formation. Instead of lecturing players about safety, it creates quick cause-and-effect loops that reinforce attention and caution. Its strength is that the message is embedded in player action rather than text or narrative explanation.
Fake It to Make It
This game is effective because it makes the player directly responsible for spreading misinformation. The mechanics demonstrate that harmful systems can grow because they are efficient and rewarding, not necessarily because participants are malicious. The uncomfortable feeling of succeeding through unethical strategies is part of the persuasive design.
Cards Against Calamity
This game works as a social reflection tool. It uses humor to reduce player defensiveness while encouraging discussion about serious topics. Its effectiveness depends on the group dynamic, but it can create opportunities for players to confront difficult realities through conversation and shared reaction.
Cast Your Vote
This game helps players understand civic participation by breaking complex systems into understandable steps. It reduces intimidation around voting by making the process feel manageable and procedural rather than abstract or overwhelming.
Detroit: Become Human
This game builds empathy through branching narrative and consequence visibility. Players see how social systems, prejudice, and power structures influence available choices. The game is most effective when it forces players to live with the results of their decisions rather than offering easy moral victories.
Gris
Gris communicates emotional experiences through visual and mechanical design rather than direct storytelling. It encourages emotional reflection and demonstrates how games can create empathy through mood, pacing, and environmental interaction.
Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds builds empathy through discovery and perspective. Players gradually understand the lives and histories of others through exploration. The game emphasizes curiosity, humility, and acceptance rather than competition or dominance.
Five Game Ideas Around Empathy
Borrowed Minutes
Players have a limited number of daily actions that must be divided between work, health, relationships, and survival tasks. The game builds empathy by showing how limited time resources force difficult life tradeoffs.
Signal Lost
Players cooperate while dealing with incomplete communication. One player has information but limited ways to share it. The game builds empathy for communication barriers and information overload.
The Room Next Door
Players live in a shared building and learn about neighbors through small interactions and environmental storytelling. The game teaches empathy by showing how behavior often has hidden context.
Care Cycle
Players manage community wellbeing using limited support resources. The game demonstrates how systems, not individual choices alone, shape outcomes.
Alternate Reality Game — Kindness Protocol
Players complete real-world empathy challenges delivered through text, QR codes, or hidden messages. The game tracks participation through real-world interactions, encouraging empathy through behavior practice rather than simulation alone.
Rule Set + Prototype Plan (Closed Loop)
Game Concept — Closed Loop
Closed Loop is a systems management game where players run a fully closed city ecosystem. Nothing can leave the system, meaning every product eventually becomes waste that must be processed, stored, or converted into new resources. The goal is to maintain population wellbeing while preventing environmental system collapse.
Objective
Players attempt to maintain population stability and environmental balance over a fixed number of rounds. Winning is based on long-term sustainability rather than short-term growth.
Players / Time
2–4 players
30–45 minutes
Core Resources
Population
Energy
Materials
Waste
Stability (tracks system health)
Turn Structure
Each round represents one operational cycle. Players produce goods, support population needs, and manage waste processing. At the end of each round, waste converts into environmental pressure if not processed.
Core Rules
Every production action generates waste tokens that enter the system on the next round. Waste can be converted into energy or materials, but conversion is inefficient. If waste storage exceeds capacity, system stability decreases. If stability reaches zero, the city collapses.
Players can invest in infrastructure upgrades that increase efficiency, but upgrades require multiple rounds to complete and temporarily reduce available resources.
Prototype Version 1 (Paper Test)
The first prototype will use index cards for buildings and systems, tokens for resources, and a simple stability tracker. The focus of testing will be whether players clearly feel tension between short-term production and long-term sustainability.
Iteration Plan
After the first playtest, adjustments will focus on making long-term consequences more visible. If players ignore sustainability without immediate penalty, delayed consequences will be made stronger or more predictable. If players feel overwhelmed, resource categories will be simplified to maintain decision clarity.
Playtest Goal for 2.19
The goal is to confirm that players experience meaningful tradeoffs between growth and sustainability and understand the closed system concept without needing long rule explanations.
Reading Questions (Flanagan Chapters 1 and 3)
How does Flanagan’s definition of games differ from Crawford and Salen/Zimmerman?
Flanagan frames games as cultural tools that can challenge norms and create reflection. Crawford focuses on structural properties like interaction and conflict, while Salen and Zimmerman define games as rule-based systems with measurable outcomes. Flanagan expands the purpose of games beyond structure into social and cultural impact.
What is an activist game?
An activist game is designed to influence awareness or behavior around real-world issues. It persuades through systems and player participation rather than direct messaging.
What other games share perfect information?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Checkers, Othello, Connect Four, and Nine Men’s Morris are all perfect information games because all players can see the full game state at all times.
Why did chance games hold spiritual importance?
Chance outcomes were often interpreted as fate or divine will, making gambling or randomization tools part of spiritual or ritual decision-making.
Earliest conflict between religion/government and games + modern examples?
Early conflicts centered on gambling and dice. Later examples include pinball bans and cultural panic around role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.
What is a fox game? Modern example?
Fox games are asymmetric chase games with one powerful player versus many weaker players. Modern asymmetric multiplayer games follow similar design patterns.
Purpose of Mansion of Happiness?
It was designed to teach moral behavior through gameplay, rewarding virtue and punishing vice.
Why did Surrealists and Fluxus artists play games?
They used games to challenge logic, social norms, and traditional art boundaries while encouraging creative participation.
What signals profound changes in games? WWII pinball reskins?
Changes in rules, goals, and rewards signal deeper meaning changes. WWII pinball machines were reskinned with wartime imagery and messaging.
What statements did Fluxus artists make by reskinning games?
They showed that social and economic systems are built from changeable rules, not fixed realities.
How are artists using war games?
They repurpose conflict systems to critique power, violence, and social structure.
Why is player agency important?
Agency allows players to experience consequences of decisions directly, making critical messages more impactful.