This blog post will go through the talk delivered by Matteo Menapace, who is a board game designer and is currently working on a board game that focuses on global warming, he’s working on a game with Matt Leacock who is known for creating and releasing the game Pandemic. He believes that creating a game about the issue of global warming will create awareness for the cause and hopefully influence players in how to fix the issue. The game is also cooperative, meaning players will come together to solve the issue in the game and hopefully this will translate to players coming together in real life to solve the problem of global warming as well.
He went on to talk about the challengers of gamifying an issue like this, though its in his beliefs that this is one of the best ways to get people engaged into the cause. Leading from this he showed us an exercise to gamify stories.
This gamifying exercise can be seen below –
I applied this method during the talk to the Movie Gremlins released in 1984 -
- Who/what are the characters/players?
- Gizmo/Billy/Stripe
- What do they know, don’t know, and think they know?
- Billy/Gizmo knows to stop the gremlins from multiplying by water and to kill them with bright light
- Stripe knows that he needs to not be exposed to bright light and must get to water to multiply, he doesn’t know that Billy and Gizmo are out to stop him
- What do they want?
- Billy/Gizmo to stop the gremlins from spreading out of their town
- Stripe to spread and grow his gremlin family as much as possible
- What action can they take?
- Billy/Gizmo can attack gremlins with bright light such as torches or even fire
- Stripe can attack with claws and teeth and even weapons such as a chainsaw, also can touch water to create more gremlin followers
One of the strongest points he made in my personal opinion was related to networking over social media. Before he began work on his new global warming board game he reached out to Matt Leacock on twitter about work on his hit board game Pandemic that Matteo said is one of his personal favorites in the market currently. The conversation started off basic with just talks about Matt’s work on pandemic though the discussion would move forward into global warming which Matt brought up. Matteo goes on to show us what his twitter bio was at the time with it mentioning global warming and that he’s a board game designer. These small details spiked off a conversation that would lead into the two collaborating on a board game about global warming. This really shows the strength of what social media can achieve and even the importance of small details to you online presence with even things like a twitter bio making an impact.
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