Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Wrapping up phase 1- the Game Design

Intro

The last two months of work have been really cinematic.

We’ve spent evening in bars gossiping with our colleagues, we’ve attended community meeting in which we had to decide the future of entire portions of our town, we’ve pondered about the universe,  later at night, during an outpost in the desert, we developed new technologies to save our fragile economies and we mourned the loss of friends and land due to sea level rising.

We took surreal trains with the Death, we tried to enter exclusive colleges that were accepting only Vampires, we drawn maps, rolled die, flipped cards.

The Flatiron Building in New York City view from the street level, the building has a triangolar shape defined by the streets of its block

We were in the middle of the first phase of our project: game design! And we explored games that were in between Role Play, Map Making and Live Action.

Starting the design

Playful Futures is a pilot that revolves around a game, and because of that it made sense for us to start the project tackling the most important and core part of it.

In a nutshell, we will rigorously analyze the dialogues, choices of the game as if they were real life, with ethnographic methodology to understand if, when we play, we access resources and values that can be interesting in a context like contemporary coastal communities that are facing a thread due to climate change.

While writing the application we had multiple points that we wanted the game to satisfy in order to be a good starting point for the ethnographic coding, so when the design part started we went back to those.

A slide from a presentation in which are listed the Design Constraints and the Design Goals (they are explained below)

Our game was to be set in the universe of Witness, a sci-fi world that has been co-created by a community of activists and economist, imagine like Hogwarts for Harry Potter, a background of sort in which we decided to situate our play.

In the months preceding the application the community that created Witness experimented with games already, and few prototypes were designed and tested, and we saw a potential for more games in the area of online LARP (live action role play), or RPG (role play game), or as someone is calling them right now, LAOGs, live action online game.

So together with the design constraints for the ethno-coding to work, we wanted to create a game in this style. Here is a breakthrough of the list of design constraints and goals.

  • Online – The game will be played over the internet, making it accessible to a wide range of participants from all over the Mediterranean area
  • 90 minutes – Being aware of the attention span and the zoom fatigue, we wanted to have a game that was short, powerful and to the point
  • 10 participants – People that will play the game at the same time
  • English – main language
  • Witness – Based in the word of Witness, a sci-fi world that has been co-created by the community of Edgeryders
  • Text/audio output – That could be analyzed and coded by the Ethnographer
  • Ethnographer integrated – To have the Ethnographer in the room and with a role, instead of being a Big Brother observing from outside

In term of design goals (things that we would have loved to have)

  • No preparation – Super accessible, if you don’t know anything about Witness and anything about Role Play, you should be able to play this game anyway.
  • Re-playable – If you played once and you liked it, you should be able to play again
  • Asynchronous part – To have some sort of play activity that is happening also before or after the live session
  • Light RPG/LARP – The style of game that we wanted to design
  • Scalable: more players and no facilitation – Ideally a game that can be played autonomously, with clear rules and materials, and that can be played by more than 10 players.

As designers we decided also to incorporate things that were interesting for us, and more were added to the list, like

  • To be a little surreal and light-hearted instead of dramatic and hyper-realistic
  • To have something aesthetically beautiful as documentation (not a screenshot of faces)
  • To explore human relationships and memory more than economic systems and politics
  • To be the same experience for people that never played a RPG as to hard-core players
  • To explore the theme of Ecological Grief opposed to Tech Toxic Optimism
  • Have something players can take with them as a token of their experience (or a digital representation of something like this)
  • Explore intimate / meditative moments between two people amidst the chaos of all players together
  • Maps! Making or referencing maps, or an interesting variation thereof.
  • To design for in a Modular Structure, collection of small things/experience

Of course not all of the design constraints, design goals and design interest where respected at the end of the design phase, but this list created a great design document to refer back to every time we had to take a decision, we had doubt about the direction of the game or the experience we were creating for our players.

Designers

In order to speed up the process I (Matteo Uguzzoni, project manager and game designer of PF) decided to work with two game designers that I knew from previous collaboration and for their amazing work in the world of role-play and LARP design.

Their name are Ally and Viditya.

The pictures of the two designers. Ally Whitney (they/them) are blonde and wearing elf ears while looking at the camera. Viditya Voleti (he/him) are wearing a black and white t-shirt and a paper crown while looking at the camera

I met Ally and Vid at MICA, Maryland Institute College of Art while being the Game Designer in Residence at their Game Lab, they were seniors and in a crowd of designer interested in digital game were the two that stood out as more interested in role-play, narrative and non digital games.

Ally Crowne Whitney (they/them) does games that revolves around strong narrative and characters, they have great creative direction skills and writing, their website is here.

Viditya Voleti (he/him) is a game designer that specialize in tabletop role-playing games, he like to bring people together through his designs, and his website is here.

We never worked together before (I helped Ally with their podcast project few years ago), but since we’ve been in the same space before, we play tested each others game, we knew our personalities and style of collaboration, so it was really easy, after the first meeting to jump into ideas and research.

We decided to use Discord as a platform to collaborate because 1) they were both very familiar with it 2) it gave us the ability to jump in calls and invite people to playtest without emails or other hassles.

We also setup a Google Drive folder in which we created the design document (see above), a research folder and a prototype folder.

Game style RPG map-making games

As told before we had some limitations and some things that we wanted to explore in this design.

One that came out really strong since the beginning was map-making. Maybe it was the idea of sea-level rising and the fact that a lot of the discourse about it usually involved maps (how will Florida or Venice looks like in 25 years?) or because when talking about territory it’s a natural way to approach to it, but we decided to research games that incorporated that.

Another very strong element was the need to have a game that was entry level, where character design could be quick and accessible also for participant that had never before role-played.

Accessibility will be key because if we want to have a very diverse audience we should be able to be interesting and not frustrating for everybody no matter the age, background, etc..

This need emerged also when together with Alberto Cottica and other members of the Edgeryders community, we sat down to write the paper “Witness: a science-fictional universe to explore everyday life under radically different economic systems” that was presented at the Futures Conference 2022, in Turku, Finland (June 2022). One of the concept that we explored in the paper was how scenario  practices had incorporated “discordant pluralism” in the last decades, and the argument by Vervoort et al (2013) that “world-making allows for a further paradigm shift—letting go of any single present, even a present seen from multiple perspectives, and accepting the fundamental plurality and constructed nature of both present and future worlds.”

illustration of a person standing in front of a sea wave that is menacing a town, in the background a temple

Research (which games we played?)

No design is created in a vacuum so we started our process with two weeks of research. We created a folder in which to add the games that we thought were interesting for the design of this one. The list kept growing until the final days of the design with more than 20 games in it, and we played a bunch of them, to understand how some of the mechanics were able to create certain kind of experiences for the players.

Some notable example

The Quiet Year

An Altogether Different River

The cover of the game "an altogether different river" by Aaron Lim. In this illustration we see a small town with a dock, wooden buildings and houses and people hanging around while in the background we can recognize the profile of a new more contemporary city

Downfall

The Sundered Land

Do Not Read This Journal

Night Train

The Ground Itself

The cover of the game "The ground itself" by Everest Pipkin. In this black and white crayon illustration we see a small town at the bottom of a mountain range

Prototypes

After few weeks of playing, reading and researching we started writing down some prototypes, we had five to start with and from any of them there was an element that we liked and that we incorporated in two new design that were the ones that we play tested extensively.

One of the prototypes was called Museum of Us and it was a game in which participants were students that had to visit a museum about the town of their grandparents, every room was a different moment in the history of the town and they had to come up with stories from their family that were related to that. It become immediately a game about grief, but because everything was set in the past, it was very dark and sad.

Another prototype was called The Harvest Division and it was about a group of technician visiting a town during and after a climatic related event. It aims at showcased the tensions that can emerge in a community when faced with climate disaster.

Finally another one, called Disaster Lurks, had a very interesting roll dynamic to determine what Trauma every character had to survive in the past, and what brought them here.

All this elements are now part of the final design and it’s very interesting to see where they come from.

Final Prototype

After internally play testing some of the prototypes we decided to mix and match some of them and re-design something new, this process resulted in two design that were more promising, one was called “A Town by the Sea” and the other “Latest Edition.”

Here is the short description that we used to invite people to the play tests.

A Town by the Sea

The cover for the prototype "A Town by the Sea". We see a small village arranged on a cliff right above the mediterranea sea in a beautiful sunny day. The houses of the village are of different colors and a road is leading to the small beach below it

In ATBTS you will play as the citizens of a small town in the Covenant (more Distrikt will be available in the final version) that is very close to the sea.

Together you will create landmark of your town and see them destroyed by sea level rising. As a community you will be able to savage one landmark every time a wave will hit, but with a cost. It’s a game about community, memories, grief and hope.

 

Latest Edition

The cover of the prototype "Latest Edition". We see a pile of old newspaper clippings

In LE you play as a young upcoming reporter from a Distrikt that just started working on a tabloid caller Witness Weekly. This could be the launch of your career as a reporter so you have to manage your frustrations and passions to share the best pitches and stories about your Distrikt. It’s a game about solutions, gossip and personal growth.

These prototypes were the one that we play tested the more, Latest Edition 3 times and A town by the Sea 5 times, every session was more then 2 hour long and was followed by a re-design session between the game design team, so it was the big chunk of almost two months of work.

We want to thanks also all the play-testers that were really generous with their time and with their advice, to give your time away for free and play something that sometimes can also be frustrating it’s really a work of love and we hope to be able to reciprocate soon.

From these play tests some consistency emerged that helped us pick the final design.

While Latest Edition was more direct in asking players to dig into the Witness world, in the last iteration was a little confusing because it was asking players both to defend and to criticize a Distrikt. It was fun, and it was easy for play-tester to enter the world but it felt a little strict.

Also there was not a lot of interactions between the players, that yes had to battle over attention and present their ideas, but were unable to create emotional connection with one another, or even alternative storylines. It felt like everyone was playing by themselves, doing a little homework on Witness.

A Town by the Sea on the other hand was able to deliver a very personal experience to play-tester, with a good balance between character creation and relations with the Distrikts, and we felt that between the two was the more promising and it was also the one that had better re-playability.

A screenshot from a playtest of "A Town by the Sea". We see the map of a coastal town in which 4 areas are highlighted with different colors. We can recognize also black squares and symbols that indicate buildings and roads

ATBTS was also checking way more points in our design documents that Latest Edition, it was intimate vs informative, there was map making and character creation, it was re-playable, it had element of lightness and surrealism, it created a good documentation (the map), explored the theme of Ecological Grief extensively but also some solution oriented mechanics, it didn’t require any prep in term of Witness or RPG playing style and so on.

A screenshot of the a playtest of "A Town by the Sea". In a close up of a town we see a lot of flowers covering two buildings named "The Nun's Brewery" and "The Marble Monastery", all around are little icons of waves representing the sea level rising

Conclusions

We officially concluded the design phase in the first week of October and reflecting back it has been a great experience. Thanks to a strong design document we were able to keep our focus on little aspect that on the long run will be fundamental and not being distracted by choices that seemed more important in the moment.

We had a great run of play-test, with a diverse gourd of play-tester and a lot of useful criticism and feedbacks.

We are happy with what we created and we think that it has a great potential to be adapted to other themes that are not sea level rising or climate change.

While we keep refining the game and starting creating the final materials for it, we are now starting with the communication phase and the ethnographic coding phase. Probably right before Christmas we will be able to run a general run of the game that will be coded by Johan, the ethnographer from TANTlab – University of Aalborg that is part of the partners. After that at the end of January we will start hosting the play session and we cannot wait to go to A Town By The Sea with you all.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Matteo Uguzzoni (November 18, 2022). Wrapping up phase 1- the Game Design. Playful Futures. Retrieved March 14, 2026 from https://playfutures.hypotheses.org/74


1 comment

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.