Interviewer: What does it take to put together an educational or a behavior changing game? That's next on The Scope.
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Interviewer: If you ever thought, "Man, I've got a great idea for a game that can be educational or might help change people's behavior, putting that together is really challenging, as you're probably learning, so hopefully this podcast will give you some key insights and help you out a little bit.
Kerry Kelly is in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Utah and the game called Bad Air Day: Play It Like UCAIR was her idea. It's a game that teaches teens in the Salt Lake Valley about the bad air problem here and the factors that cause it and the barriers to a solution. You had the original idea and I'd imagine that that was about the easiest part of this whole process.
Kerry: Yeah, the idea was easy and the initial meetings with the gaming team were really fun. Then getting the money to make it happen and then actually making it happen was a challenge.
Interviewer: Just a real high-level overview, putting together a game like this, what were some of the initial pieces you have to pull together, you need to be aware of?
Kerry: Okay, so first of all you have to get a little bit of money because you have to pay some developers or students to develop the game. In this case, we worked with the University of Utah's Engineering Arts and Entertainment Program and we got a grant from the UCAIR foundation to develop the game. So that's the first step.
Interviewer: Okay.
Kerry: Then the next step is, we needed to get a team of people together of stakeholders because we wanted the game to be reality-based, so we needed a certain amount of information on air quality and we wanted to make sure it was accurate. Then we also wanted a network of people to help the game live on when we were done developing it, and that's sort of the stage we're in right now. But we wanted to make sure that we involved them all the way through the process.
The good thing is, now that we've involved them, they're engaged in the game and are helping us distribute it. The challenge is you have to involve enough people that you have a critical mass of people who will get your game out there but everyone has their own opinions, so it's a little bit like herding cats.
Interviewer: Yeah, it's important too, because I've done a little research on gaming. You can't just get programmers. You have to get people that understand the elements of what makes a game compelling as well.
Kerry: Exactly. That's why we were really lucky to work with the Engineering Arts and Entertainment Program at the U. We worked with Roger Altizer and then his student team of game developers and they have a producer, they've got a programmer, an artist, and then a first-year sort of assistant who, I guess, took care of all the odds and ends.
Interviewer: What were some of the other considerations?
Kerry: Well, one of the challenges is the game needs to be engaging and there's some trade-off between how much information you actually put in the game and how much you just want to inspire curiosity. I think that was one of the things that we really struggled with, because if you cram a lot of text or a lot of information into your game, it might be a little less interesting for students to play. You might have trouble getting students interested at it at all.
We wanted something that was engaging and the game developers really wanted to fly. That was a little bit of a challenge as we were looking at air quality along the Wasatch Front and how we were going to have our main character fly throughout the game.
Interviewer: And creating pollution as they go.
Kerry: Exactly.
Interviewer: That's interesting. You're highlighting how important it is to have people that understand the gaming aspect of it and then some of the other challenges. What was the biggest challenge that you faced in this process of pulling all of these people together? First of all, how many people were involved approximately?
Kerry: Probably about 12.
Interviewer: So it's not a small undertaking.
Kerry: It isn't a small undertaking.
Interviewer: Although 12 is not really that many either.
Kerry: No, but one person of the 12 was representing several people, so that was a challenge to have so many people in the room with sometimes slightly different ideas of how things should go.
Interviewer: What's the biggest lesson you learned? So the next time you do this, you're going to take that lesson right into that experience.
Kerry: I think I would start working directly with the team earlier on. Initially, we kind of let the students go away and come up with their idea and I didn't really want to micromanage them, but we realized that we needed to make sure that we had the important aspects of the game in there. The air quality information, that was critical to get, having the game be accurate. So if I would have done this again, I would've engaged just a little bit earlier.
Interviewer: In the actual development of the concept just to make sure everybody understood a little bit better?
Kerry: Yes, we have a very high level idea of what was going on, but as we started to move into what that was actually going to look like, I think I should've been just a little bit more involved. I think it would've made things a little bit easier.
Interviewer: Could have saved you some time on the whole process?
Kerry: Yeah.
Interviewer: How different from your concept was the final project and did you struggle with that?
Kerry: You know, I think the good thing is, because I'm not really a gamer, I didn't have any sort of fixed concept of what the game would be. I was excited that the students wanted to do more of an action-based game because there are some air quality games out there that exist and they're often based on sliders or sort of a survey thing and you get a little award if you're a good air quality person or it'll show you if you're not. You've got a task to do and I liked the idea that the game physically changes as air quality changes. If you make poor choices, the air quality is visibly worse and your paper airplane flies more slowly, and in some cases, if you make poor enough choices, you can't see anything.
Interviewer: I think the message to take away from what you just said there is also maybe do some research on if there are existing games around what you're trying to do, see what they're doing and see if you could actually improve upon that.
Kerry: Exactly. And the students did that as we started and that was really useful to the process.
Man: What would you say to somebody that is inspired - they have a game idea, they think they could probably get the team that they need, what would you say to that person looking at the beginning of this journey?
Kerry: Think about what kind of partnership you need and think about distribution. It would be really unfortunate if you have this great game idea and then you get your team together and you develop this excellent game and then it dies because you can't get it out there to the people who are interested. Getting the partners engaged is also a key to the distribution.
Interviewer: Okay. Making sure that they're part of that whole process so they're engaged stakeholders.
Kerry: Exactly. Exactly. You definitely want to avoid that sort of tossing it over the fence.
Interviewer: Okay, sounds good. How long did it take you to make it? From beginning to concept to end?
Kerry: Well, in terms of concept and getting the funding, probably over a year, but the real game development started in earnest in the end of August and we just released it and we do have just a little bit of funding to keep one student on the game and we've got a survey that the accompanies the game, and if people would like to play the game and give us some feedback we'd welcome it. We're trying to make some refinements and also as Breathe Utah goes out and play test the game, we're going to try to tune it a little bit to make sure it's fun and we'll think about things like what kinds of strategies come up most frequently and how the PM levels show. So we'll do a little bit of tuning over the next semester.
Interviewer: You can check out the game at badairday.org. Congratulations on your new game!
Kerry: Thank you, I appreciate it.
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