Learning to Be Human

Main Page: Learning to be Human
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Learning to Be Human was a commissioned piece as part of an anti-bullying campaign for the North London Collegiate School Jeju in South Korea. In the game, an Android protagonist helps players understand and help improve the lives of bullies, victims, and even bystanders when they choose to spend their days with the different characters. Because these experiences are so personal and engaging while offering students chances for change, students can better absorb and identify with the lessons presented.

Creating this game required research into local Korean student culture, research into strategies for change, and of course, a delicate strategy for making a game fun.

Here are the article discussing these different issues:

Cultural research

Anti-bullying research

How to make an educational game fun

Making Educational Games Fun (Learning to Be Human)

Note: This post deals with my game, Learning to Be Human. As such, it will contain spoilers.

An educational anti-bullying game has to do everything, and do everything well. It has to be accurate, engaging, and polished. If any of those things slip, the game falls apart quickly. I made sure that didn't happen by avoiding those all-too common pitfalls.

Cultural Research (Learning to Be Human)

Note: This post deals with my game, Learning to Be Human. As such, it will contain spoilers.

I would like to address the fact that I wrote a socially conscious game about a South Korean social issue, despite the fact that I'm white, I live in USAmerica. I want to acknowledge and own the fact that I am writing to an experience I have never had, and can never have. My racial and cultural difference means that, even though I worked hard to get things right when creating this game, there are aspects that I might have gotten wrong. Because of that, if any of my work was insensitive or incorrect, I welcome the opportunity to make corrections. All that said, making sure the game felt culturally real took a lot of work.

Anti-bullying research (Learning to Be Human)

Note: This post deals with my game, Learning to Be Human. As such, it will contain spoilers.

The bullying problems and their solutions needed to be portrayed accurately in order for the game to be at all effective. This meant research into how bullying works, and what can be done to stop bullies and empower victims.

The Sea Eternal

Making The Sea Eternal was a monumental undertaking. Its goal was to give players a rounded experience that feels both immersive and player-directed. I wanted to create a world where the players were dealing with realistic characters that had needs that sometimes conflicted, and asked the player how they wanted to sort through those different issues, in a way that felt organic and natural. That took a lot of words (nearly 300,000*) and a whole lot of testing, editing, and polishing. But I'm really proud of the way everything came together.

I've documented the different aspects of design that went into pulling this all together down below, as well as some aspects of the game design that mattered to me:

Research

Planning

Choice Structure
Variables, Stats and Endings

Gender Inclusion

Racial Inclusion

Definitely you should
Get the Game Now.

Research (The Sea Eternal)

Note: This post deals with my game The Sea Eternal. As such, it will contain spoilers.

This game required pulling a lot of different elements together seamlessly to create a realistic fantasy ocean setting, and ended up requiring a lot of research into oceanography, marine biology, and mythological creatures. I ended up dividing my research up into sections.

My first area of research focused on the very human aspect of enjoying the ocean, specifically SCUBA diving. A lot of people actually do swim around the ocean, and there's a special feel and knowledge to diving that I wanted to make sure I captured since I've been snorkeling a long time ago, but never diving. So I watched diving videos, looked up popular diving spots, and even went through an encyclopedia of diving lingo. A lot came out of that with regards to the creatures, the colors, the snow, the visibility, and the ocean wreck.

Planning (The Sea Eternal)

Note: This post deals with my game The Sea Eternal. As such, it will contain spoilers.   

Planning was a huge part of getting ready for working in ChoiceScript. Because writing in ChoiceScript is just using a text editor, I find that lack of structure can lead to programming issues if I just jump right in.

So I planned the whole game out using Twine first. Here's a screenshot of a very early iteration of the game. You'll see that it's not a functional game, since there aren't really any links between boxes. But it's a representation. It's kind of an outline or even... pseudocode. Documenting a choice game with a flow chart allows the game to be represented like the actual game it's going to be. Thorough documentation like this really helps frame the game: where is everything going, how, and why?