[p4k] Hunger and Flow
We finished another good week at Playing 4 Keeps this week. Despite the Thanksgiving break, everyone came back ready to work and think, and I was happy to se how little cajoling it took to get everyone focused and on task. Partly as a way to reflect on the luxury many of us had experienced over the weekend, we discussed world hunger on Monday. As usual, we used a mix of role-playing and video game playing to examine the issue. We also had a principal and teacher from a high school in Connecticut as guests. They’re considering bringing P4K to their school, and I think they were impressed with how we blend the digital with the physical to examine serious issues.
We began with an activity where students pretended to be a country’s food suppliers, and it was always distribution, not production that kept their population hungry. When we started our discussion after the role-playing, many students were surprised to learn that hunger is caused by political and economic issues, not by an inability to grow enough food. After discussing the exercise and establishing a foundation on knowledge, we moved to the computers to play 3rd World Farmer.
The game, while using simple drag and drop mechanics, is very effective at communicating the hardships faced by farmers in impoverished nations. Some people find the game to be too slow to sit with for a long time, but our students were very engaged. They were constantly frustrated by the random hardships that would sweep in and destroy the fruits of their labor. During our discussion, it was satisfying to see their understanding of the game develop to grasp how frustrating games can teach lessons about frustrating realities. We were also able to compare the game to our own Ayiti, and see how different approaches expressed similar ideas. We also looked at how our role playing exercise compared with 3rd World Farmer, discussing the strengths of both types of learning.
Today, we spent almost the whole period playing games in order to look at how different core mechanics influence the play experience and values of games. From the manic Subway Scramble to the elegant Flow, we surveyed a variety of play types. Each game appealed to different players for different reasons. In our analysis, I especially stressed the strengths of Flow, because it is such a simple and unique game. I don’t need to spend much time praising it here (there’s enough of that online) but it just represents how diverse games can be when designers liberate themselves from the traditional trappings of the game industry’s “bigger is better” mentality. Our game, I emphasized, can succeed by embracing a similar philosophy, trying to be cohesive, clean, and engaging, without being loud and ostentatious. It is that approach, I think, that holds the most promise for independent game makers trying to expand the traditional audience. Many of our students loved the game, and I think the game made a real impression on them.
