Stage 1: Imparting knowledge through gamification

Our group created the ‘PilotFish communications’ agency as a platform to develop our game focused on the issue of World Heritage Preservation. This blog posting will focus on Stage 1 of our creative process. Firstly, it will discuss our groups understanding of a social impact games and our objectives, then it will continue to talk about the idea we chose to develop into a prototype product.

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In order to respond to our brief, we first had to understand and evaluate the Games for Change concept. We were presented with a strategic communication challenge which meant that we had to create a social impact game that would change real-world behaviour.

As we researched the G4C concept, we understood that a great advantage of communicating through games is that learning through games is accessible to almost everyone:  American author and researcher on the subject of online communities Amy Jo Kim says that today, everyone’s a gamer – even though people might not acknowledge themselves as one – they might play Angry Birds or Farmville or be on Foursquare. We found this revelation especially useful when thinking about our target audience:  our global issue differs from those of the other groups as it targets the higher tiers of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Preserving and understanding culture and history can be understood as a part of self-actualisation. Our target audience are individuals from ages 16 to 25. Whilst it might be true that most of them are more concerned about the basic level of needs, we understood that what they have in common is being Digital Natives. The gamification of life is a distinguished feature of the Digital Native generation. Thus, whilst a teenager or a twenty-something does not have time or an incentive to learn about world heritage, they are on ‘always on’ and ready to engage with something that entices them. Thus, we soon understood that our approach to impart knowledge mustn't be direct. Instead, we should try and impart knowledge through entertainment. As it was clear our target audience is tech-savvy, the success of our game depends on it being a transmedia story. This means that the game can be played on Facebook (successful platform for a social impact game, as proved by Half the Sky movement) or/and downloaded as an app.
Following further audience research we found that our game will primarily appeal to female gamers. The research that Vicky found on the attitude of youngsters towards historic buildings show that females are generally more concerned about historical buildings.  This finding was instrumental when thinking about the intrinsic values that would motivate our gamers. Amy Jo Kim highlights four social gaming verbs that represent four different types of motivation:

To interest our target audience our game should be  focused around the Compete and Collaborate verbs of social engagement. Thus, our game will emphasize winning, challenging and ought to be visually pleasing; players should be able to collect/view observe/track their progress and it should include a social element so the players can interact with each other/share/help.

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We knew we had to choose one aspect of the global issue. Two of the initial game suggestions we presented were focused around preserving cultural heritage such as historical monuments, whilst the last one’s focal point was biodiversity. All of us quite liked the idea of creating a game about world’s historical and cultural monument sites, because having done research, we found that despite the substantial efforts by international organisations they are still under threat. We were intrigued by the re-definition of the world heritage by Elisa Giaccardi (2012), according to which heritage is no longer contained to official lists, but must be understood in light of the rise of participatory culture.  According to her, conventional heritage and 'new heritage' (Le. digitally born forms of heritage) must be understood as a cohesive processes. Thus, the game had to include elements of both physical/offline monument sites and the community/online dimensions in order to reach our intended audience. 

We found that the threats to global cultural heritage are two-tiered. The tangible ones are the processes such as development pressures, unsustainable tourism, looting and insufficient management. The underlying cause that allows these processes to happen is lack of appreciation for the severity and scale of the problem. Thus, we had to tackle the threats on two dimensions: the inadequate practices involving global heritage as well as perception.

The first two game ideas we presented contained a savior/hero figure, which helped provide a narrative for our storyline. However, after our initial presentation, we decided that we were not satisfied with a ‘hero-figure’ saving passive monuments. We felt that in order to make our game more fun, and to allow for player to interact with the monuments in a more constructive manner, we needed a more creative approach. Thus, after a brainstorming session, we came up with the idea of a ‘traveler pigeon’ which is at the same time the hero of our story, and also an instrument through which the gamer will act to achieve a set of skills she needs to complete the given tasks. At this time, we also agreed to center our game on practices of sustainable tourism as we agreed that the ‘less is more’ approach could be appropriate – highlighting a specific area of heritage preservation we could tell a broader story.

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Unsustainable tourism threatens the World Heritage in various ways. Furthermore, different dangers manifest themselves within each cultural heritage site. This feature is useful as it helped us conceive the initial ideas about levels of our game. Focusing on a specific cultural site create awareness of different forms of world heritage as well as impart a set of practices that are particular to that site.

The initial example we thought could illustrate our idea was that of Machu Picchu:

• Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu is a must-see for any visitor to Peru. Machu Picchu’s management challenge is preservation of the site while making it accessible to all those who hope to experience an incredible part of Inca history.
• More than 75,000 people make the trip each year and along the way experience some of the associated sites that were part of the Inca network in this area.
• The appropriate practices include travelling by groups rather than independently. Thus, a level objective within our game could include our pigeons helping to 'herd' the tourists together in order to form a group.