Session Information
| Title | Tales From the Aloran Insurance Salesman: Bridging the Gap Between Learning Games and Indie Hits |
| Presenter(s) | Jordan Pailthorpe |
| Time | Saturday, October 18, 10:15a-11:15a |
| Location | Lake Ontario |
| Format | Speaker |
| Description | If you had three months, four team members, and a limited budget to create a game that teaches how risk management is essential for healthy development, what would you make? This is the question we had to answer when developing Risk Horizon, an online game hosted by the World Bank Institute for their massive open online course (MOOC) on Risk and Opportunity. In this talk/workshop, we will open up the design process of Risk Horizon to show how our attempt to break the conception of what a learning game is and has been helped us pursue a more radical approach within genre, scope, and gameplay. We will use our experience designing Risk Horizon as a touchstone to explore how learning game developers and small studios on can create games that are not only fun, but also demonstrate specific learning goals necessitated by outside partners, how developers can take the sometimes touchy, political, or ham-handed real-world subject matter that humanitarian and non-profit partners live in and distill it into game contexts that avoid ethical problems and stifling design choices, how measurement and assessment tie directly into the experience, and how to design for a worldwide audience with little to no experience playing digital games. Finally, this talk will explore the reactions, results, and reflections, negative and positive, of participants encountering a game in an online course with such serious subject matter. |