Hello, and welcome to CivRep’s week two dev blog!
For this week, we mainly focused on:
1. Playtesting Prior Work
2. Applying the Transformational Framework
Playtesting Prior Work
As we mentioned in week one, our team was extremely fortunate in that we were given the materials needed to recreate an in-person playtest of CivWiz that took place in January 2020. One of the very first actions we took in week two was to dive into the playtest materials and try to reconstruct the game so that we could experience it for ourselves.
Through a lot of reading, discussing, and a good bit of improv (thank you, Brenda!), we managed to get through one session of the CivWiz roleplaying module and discovered that it was…
Very Fun!
Just to give a quick overview of how the game works, the roleplaying module was set up in the following manner.
- Guests are organized into teams, and then assigned a city profile representing the community they would be tasked with governing over.
- The City Profile contained the following information
A quick overview of the demographics of the city
- Population
- General ethnic makeup
- Political Leanings
The City’s ‘Stats’ represented in the following categories from a scale of one to five, with five representing a great situation, and one representing a very poor situation.
- Money: The amount of funds available to the city
- Safety: How safe the city is
- Environment: The pollution level of the city
- Confidence: How much the city population trusts the council (the guests)
- Health: Overall healthiness of the city population
- Guests roleplayed as city council members, and were presented a series of scenarios. Each scenario proposed a public policy that could be implemented, and each team had two and a half minutes to discuss whether they should vote yes or no.
- After the timed discussion, each guest got to vote yes or no for the proposed policy. Because each team was assigned an odd number of guests, there would always be a majority voting bloc whose decision would go through.
- Depending on which policies passed or did not pass, the city’s stats would change to reflect the decision that was made.
- In the end, teams would get to see what kind of impact their decisions had made by comparing the city’s stats from its initial state to its final state.
Our team discovered that the roleplaying module was indeed engaging and fun. A summary of our major takeaways from the playtest are the following:
Player to player interaction is key
The core of the roleplaying module lies in the inter-player discourse it encourages. Getting to speak with others about policies, discovering perspectives that you never knew about, and learning about the different paths to approaching a problem… The roleplaying module offered a fun, engaging method of civic learning by channeling said learning through discussion. How we translate this into a virtual space will for certain be one of the key challenges our team must contend with going forward.
Hunger for more information
Throughout the playtest, we felt that our ability to successfully problem solve was stymied by a persistent lack of information. We just did not know things such as:
How much does fluoridation of a water system cost per taxpayer?
How much does it cost to create and run a financial oversight committee that would serve to audit and report on the department of education’s annual spending practices, relative to how much money we would save in the future from cutting down on inefficient practices?
We actually discussed this with our client, and discovered that the lack of information was by design. Our client hoped that by making the guests feel like they needed more knowledge to make informed decisions, they would be incentivized to being their own research. As we begin working on our virtual version of the roleplaying module, how we present information will definitely be a key design challenge we will face. How much information is too little? How much is too much? These are questions we will look to answer in the coming weeks.
Want a greater sense of progression and accomplishment
The CivRep team turned out to be a surprisingly decent city council. Our city started off as a poor, depopulated community which could only list ‘relatively clean air’ as its selling point. However, under our leadership the city blossomed into a slightly less poor community with a populace with excellent health who loved their city council. For the most part, our team had successfully made a positive impact on the community, and for a brief moment, we were happy and proud of what we accomplished. However, there was only so much that numbers on a screen could make us feel. We wanted to see our city change and grow as a result of our decisions. We wanted to feel like we had accomplished something. Although the roleplaying module was great at prompting conversation and creating initial engagement, it fell short when it came time to reward the guests for their engagement and participation. As we begin designing our virtual version, we must keep in mind that although generating initial engagement is important, it is equally crucial that we adequately reward the guests for active engagement throughout the experience as well.
The Transformational Framework
Our team spent much of our week one and two learning about the Transformational Framework, and discussing how CivWiz’s roleplaying module currently fit in with it.
High Level Purpose
One thing our team noticed during our first client meeting was that many high level purposes were mentioned throughout our talk. These included purposes such as:
- De-mystify public administration
- Create understanding of public policy
- Show the importance of voting and its consequences
- Encourage people to make informed public policy decisions
- Allow players to experience public policy decision making processes
It was clear to us that our client was very passionate and knowledgeable about Civic Learning, and for this week’s meeting, we worked to try and figure out how we could distill all of these ideas into one concentrated high level purpose. After a great discussion with our client, we discovered that another high level purpose he cared about greatly was that he wished for the players to become civically engaged citizens in real life after experiencing CivWiz. From these takeaways, our team decided that the high level purpose for CivRep would be:
Create Civically Engaged Citizens
Barriers
One of the key questions we had for our client this week was, what are the barriers preventing people from becoming civically engaged?
Following some discussion, we discovered two crucial barriers that we must address:
Many people believe political things are ‘not for them’
Many people believe they cannot make any meaningful change to public policy/administration
Something our client mentioned often was that the people with the knowledge to actually help out in the civic decision making process, such as those in the hard sciences, are often the ones who are the least engaged in said decision making process.
One of CivRep’s key transformational goals will be to help empower such people so that they understand and believe in the fact that they can indeed make a meaningful positive impact on their communities through civic engagement.
Guest Transformation
Going off of the discussion on Barriers, we also came up with a rough visualization of how we envisioned the guest transformation would take place in CivRep.
After spending countless days thinking about the transformational framework day and night, in meetings and workshops, (and sometimes even in our dreams), we believe we’re starting to figure out how CivRep fits into the puzzle. For the coming week, we will venture forward into exploring designs based off of the framework. See you next week!