Climateers - Persuasive Party Game
Climateers is a party game about climate change and the norm activation model. Collaborate with your neighbors, or betray them, with everyday actions that can hurt or help your community’s environment!
October - November 2021
Class: Transformational Game Design Studio
Teammates: Eileen Lee, Yinan Cai, Nadia Susanto
Skills Used: Iterative Prototyping, User Research and Testing, Norm Activation Model, Figma
Pursue the nature stewardship activity of volunteering in their local community’s
pro-environmental activities and events!
Persuasive game encourages new habits and attitudes towards climate change!
Working with the norm activation model as our leading theory for our climate change game, our game stirs up mixed emotions of helplessness and guilt that momentarily frustrates the player but encourages behavior change towards more pro-environmental and pro-social actions.
Process Work
This project was developed through the use of iterative prototypes, and play-tests that elicited user feedback.
Research and Ideation
Based on B.J. Fogg’s Ideas
For our research, we looked at research papers around the norm activation model and the theory of planned behavior, attitudes, and subjective norms. We want our players to make several difficult decisions in the game that trigger a negative emotion, such as guilt or frustration, and encourage them to change their behavior after the game. We also drew inspiration from “serious games”, or learning games, and the theory of place attachment by contextualizing our game into a local Pittsburgh neighborhood setting, a place that is familiar and personal to all of our players.
As a team, we individually sketched out some ideas for the initial direction of our game. We had a lot of great concepts, but some were more geared towards other bodies of theories, such as role-taking in nature.
In one of our ideas about endangered animals, we were all caught by the idea of players needing to balance betrayal and sacrifice. We believed this would fit well with our theory of norm activation where people would have to be in line with their sense of self to determine what actions they would want to take. We then took a look at similar party games, such as Mafia, Werewolf, and Secret Hitler for further inspiration.
Prototype 1
Originally, our game centered around encouraging players to participate in a local community garden, focusing on the feeling of helplessness. We wanted a betrayal game concept similar to that of Coup, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, or Mafia. The following are brief game rules for our first prototype:
There will be 6 players and 1 host. Each player would have a role that would be either in the “good faction” or “bad faction.” As in reality, each person has unequal access to food and resources; some players randomly receive an excess of food and others receive a shortage of food. The players’ roles will be decided by an initial primer question, where players with less environmentally-friendly actions will receive “bad faction” roles.
Playtest Feedback
Our first playtest was successful in that it gave us more information and insights on moving forward with our game. We saw that although players very much liked the idea of having secret roles and special actions, there was no sense of overall teamwork, with players working individually to take more self-serving actions rather than discovering others’ identities and helping people in their own faction. One feedback we received was
to eliminate the idea of “good” and “bad” factions altogether, since in real life, the roles of everyday citizens are more ambiguous, and it may even be a dangerous mindset to call oneself “good” or “bad” based on certain occupations or actions.
Climate change awareness and pro-environmental behaviors should be an ongoing habit rather than singular actions alone, so for future iterations, we reconsidered how players can map their environmental roles to their everyday actions outside of the game itself.
Prototype 2
For our second prototype, we simplified our rules further to not even include “good” or “bad” factions. Rather, four players in the game, guided by a host, will be selecting random chance cards for every turn. Each player starts out with an equal number of five resource tokens, losing a resource token after each day. Depending on the chance cards they receive, players will be forced to choose between two actions — pro-environmental or anti-environmental actions — that may either help or hurt other players. Players will be required to balance between surviving with enough resource tokens while making difficult decisions to help themselves or others. All players will win collectively if no one runs out of tokens by the end of five turns, but if someone runs out and is out, the player with the most tokens will win.
Playtest Feedback
Although our second playtest was more successful than the last, we saw one jarring problem with our prototype — there was no built-in time for community discussion. Although players had fun, strategized, felt frustrated and helpless, or even successful or gleeful, they were silent the whole time. This broke apart the notion of “a close-knit, local community” that our game was trying to form, so we decided to further iterate on our prototype by having time for players to talk and even plead with each other.
Some other helpful feedback that we received was to distance the role of the game master or the host and to make a closer mental model of our game to actually result in a transformation of everyday behavior. We then revisited the theory of the norm activation model and the theory of planned behavior in order to strengthen our game’s transformational strategy.
Reflection
One important decision that we decided upon was to reduce the number of tokens that players start with the next time they play the game if a game ends with an individual win. One of the problems we were having within the game was understanding how we wanted players to feel if they won individually instead of achieving the more desirable group win. Inclusion of the individual win was necessary because the players have the potential to lose within the game if they run out of tokens, as this adds necessary stakes to the game. As a design team we want to prioritize the group win because a major part of the norms we are trying to activate within the players is this idea that we should make decisions that benefit the community as a collective rather than make selfish decisions. However, if players only feel that they have won the game after they achieve an individual win then they are essentially rewarded for performing selfish actions within the game which is not the message that the design team wants to send.
Our solution to this problem was to reduce the number of tokens that each player starts with the next time the game is played in order to acknowledge the win but portray it as something that is detrimental to both the player and, more importantly, the entire group. Through the removal of these tokens, the game becomes significantly more challenging and it becomes much harder for everyone to survive all of the rounds. The use of this mechanic is intended as a negative consequence to deter players from trying to achieve the individual win in future games. This mechanic has the added advantage of allowing us to reinforce this idea that we should act for the benefit of the collective or the community when players achieve the ideal group win and when players achieve the individual win.