Project 1 – Week 1 Blog Entry

1/31/2017 – Dylan Wheeler – Developer

Group:

• Joshua Robitaille
• Mathieu Lafreniere
• Nicolas Kruzel
• Zachary Larkin

My idea as a designer saw itself taking shape very early on, as I had already collected a store of knowledge about the subject of immigration from a prior class. I don’t enjoy approaching subjects like this from the angle of human morality, as it implies that those one is trying to convince don’t understand the moral value inherent, which is patronizing at best and not very helpful to legitimate discourse.

As such, my concept for a game focused around immigration approaches the subject from the angle of economics, seeking to illustrate how an immigrant population stimulates the workforce and productivity of a first world society to a significant degree.

The game would be a 4X title, a turn based strategy game meant to be played competitively with other players. Each player would control a fictional nation after the industrial revolution, with the goal of being the nation with the greatest sum of ‘Industry’ and ‘Happiness’ compared to the scores of the other players.

Pandora: First Contact is a type of game like this, with city management.

The players would need to juggle several resources, such as Money, Security, and National Appeal, they would control these factors by deciding what public works projects to approve construction of, and by enacting governmental policies.

How this relates to immigration is in tone with the benefits immigration provides in the real world: Immigrants bolster the workforce and population, as 1st world countries just make fewer children than 3rd world countries that produce a lot of immigrants. The more National Appeal, the more immigrants from the game’s abstracted ‘Immigrant Pool’ decide to go to your country over the countries of other players. The more immigrants you have, the more Industry you have, both making public works faster, and contributing to your game-winning score.

But without carefully measuring security, which would be an abstracted combination of a lot of relevant concepts such as police strength, political corruption, education and others, the native population, and immigrant population would clash, causing losses of money, happiness, and industry. The player would need to maximize the amount of immigrants their country can handle, while carefully implementing the policies and facilities that can help ease the transition and introduction of foreign immigrants into their society, and they’d have to do it all faster and more efficiently than their opponents.

Blog Entry #1

When I think of a successful serious game, two criteria must be met.

1. The game must be successful on the merits of it’s gameplay alone, if the gameplay experience is not engaging, then the creator has selected the wrong medium to convey their message.
2. The game must contain a serious message that is directly relevant in the real world, (So no abstract concepts like Justice or narrative themes like the effect of revenge) the game does not necessarily need to revolve around this message, but it can.

An Example of a game containing serious elements through topic is the original Deus Ex, which brought light to economic consolidation in the American workforce at the end of the first stage. At the end of the stage, if the player decides to question the NSF terrorist leader about his motives, he’ll explain the concept of workforce consolidation harming ordinary people and leaving them unable to pay for medical care. Over the course of the conversation he will give real statistics about the drift in economic power to government and corporations over the last century “Imperceptibly over time through taxation.”

An example of a title that is entirely revolving around it’s serious message (And one that I suspect you’ll be hearing a lot about) is This War of Mine. In This War of Mine, the player plays as a group of Civilians caught in the midst of a siege of their city during a civil war, they must scavenge and survive in the midst of the shelling and gunfire, as well as protect and hide their family and valuables from both sides of the conflict. Though the game’s war and nation are fictional, the developers have made it clear that the events are based off of the Bosnian War. The goals here were to show, by the game’s own tagline “Not everyone in war is a soldier” by highlighting the civilian lives utterly ruined by modern armed conflict, especially in populated urban areas.

By forcing the player to make decisions that can harm other civilians, such as stealing their limited supplies, the game illustrates the feeling of desperation that can often tarnish the character of otherwise moral individuals in times of extreme distress by often forcing the player to feel a similar sense of moral compromise brought on by an oppressive outside force.

For extra nausea-fuel, the game even later introduced an expansion, centered around children caught in the warzone, and the extra mile they and their caretakers have to go to survive.