Gamestorm

The Prompt

Gaming for Change 2021 was a symposium for interactive media that focused on social issues. I was tasked with designing the networking activity after the main events. Since the event was about games and interactive media, we felt as though a standard networking session just wouldn’t do.

The session was initially called speed dating, as we wanted to let people meet others very quickly so that they could call on each other to help with their social initiatives. However, as time went on we changed the name to gamestorming — a gamified brainstorming session. The prompt I gave myself was: How might we connect people with similar interests in a short period of time? In retrospect, I think this prompt could have been more specific. I could have added more about forming lasting impressions or inspiring action.

Personas and Interviews

While I didn’t have time to interview people or really make a persona, I did make some assumptions about them. One assumption I made was that participants wouldn’t care about the other participant’s jobs, but rather the skills they had. Another assumption was that people would want to create something, not just talk superficially. After all, the people who were motivated enough to come to the event probably wanted to enact change.

After all of this, these were some things I wanted the gamestorm to achieve:

1. People form lasting impressions of each other

2. Get people talking about the skills they had outside of work

3. Motivate people to take action

4. Provide a fun, game-like activity

We wanted participants to walk away from the networking session feeling a renewed sense of hope and agency — like they could call on someone they met at the event and start something with them.

Ideation

As there were a few things I needed to achieve with this session, I quickly realized that no individual session would be sufficient. To recap what I wanted to achieve:

1. People form lasting impressions of each other

2. Get people talking about the skills they had outside of work

3. Motivate people to take action

4. Provide a fun, game-like activity

People form lasting impressions of each other

I wanted people to form lasting impressions of each other so that they would continue the conversation after connecting — not just forget each other. Given that people were coming to learn more about social initiatives, I wanted to shift the discussion away from generic work talk to what they were passionate about. Another way I approached this was to have people create with each other. The intent here was to let people do something active, something memorable.

To achieve this, I had people create their own social initiatives and talk about what skills they had to contribute to them.

Get people talking about the skills they had outside of work

Part of the reason why I didn’t want people to talk about work was that a job represents such a narrow view of people’s abilities. I didn’t want people talking about being accountants or lawyers or whatever else when thinking about how they could help further a social cause. Instead, I wanted them to talk about things that I felt were more relevant to a burgeoning initiative, like photo or video-editing skills, the ability to code, public speaking, etc.

I took inspiration from a Halloween party my parents attended that same year. Since many of the guests didn’t know each other the host created a bingo game. However, instead of numbers on the board, you had skills and attributes. For example, there was a square that said “speaks French” and to tick it off you would, well, have to find someone who spoke french.

To achieve this, I created a list of skills that I believed were relevant to a new social initiative. In addition, I also created a people bingo, where you would have to find people with those skills to win.

Motivate people to take action

We also wanted people to leave this event feeling like they could be showcasing their own project next year. Many of the people coming would already be quite aware of the social injustices that happen, what we needed now was to inspire them to take action. To me, the first step to taking action is finding something to rally behind.

To achieve this, I used my card game Mutagen to facilitate the ideation process.

Provide a fun, game-like activity

The name Gaming for Change gives the expectation that there would be games at the event. The networking session couldn’t be the exception. Besides that, having a more interactive and fun networking activity could help the connections they made stick in their mind and help people open up more.

To achieve this, I used bingo and Mutagen to gamify the networking session while still facilitating connections.

Prototyping

I had the chance to test the game a few times before but found it quite lengthy. In the initial version, players stole each other’s ideas and used cards to mutate them. The problem was that to make an educated move, they had to read everyone else’s ideas first. As a result, a game could take rather long. I tweaked a bit so instead, players just moved their ideas to the left. This sped up the game a decent amount and made it easier to explain. In addition, everyone was active at the same time, rather than one player going at a time.

Before the session, I tested this new iteration out with some of my coworkers and observed how they went through the game. With an example prompt, they were able to come up with some interesting ideas. However, I wanted to give players a way to make their own problems to solve. To do this, I thought of a good example problem and broke it down into its main components: the user, the social issue, and the action. For example, “how might we educate secondary school students about global warming?”.

With these components, I created cards so that the players would be able to craft quality problem statements quite easily (since many of these people were not designers). Each component I listed before had a huge range of choices. To help narrow it down, I created cards for each category so users could explore different problems, but not too many so that it was overwhelming.

Something I would change next time is to make the users more specific, as opposed to just age. I think profession could also matter.

Conclusion

Overall, the event went well. People had fun and talked about what they were passionate about. Bingo got people talking the most, and it was actually quite difficult to get people settled for the ideation part. I think next time I should be a bit more cognizant of how the energy levels can fluctuate. On one hand, I hope that the ideation session was engaging and thought-provoking. On the other hand, I wonder if the session would have gone better if I had allowed them to continue talking in that high-energy environment.

For the ideation session, I think the game could have been even quicker (and I have since made it quicker!). Since this networking session was at the end of a day-long event, people could be tired and wouldn’t want to spend too much time. In addition, I could have added more variety to the users in the problem statement. Instead of just focusing on age, I could have also thought of their professions. I chose age because I wanted to segment our users in terms of ability and knowledge. A student might not know anything and wouldn’t have the resources to make as big of an impact. An elderly person might have some knowledge, but again, not the resources. That being said, I think these categories were too broad when it came to middle-aged or working people.