The Games We Play (and Build)

I was excited to go to the Games for Change conference this week - a conference on using video games for social good - and it didn't let me down. It was a great conference, with a lot of opportunities to look at games close up and talk the people behind them.

Being a geek for details as always, I wanted to find out what building games entails from a practical perspective. I asked a lot of people how they went about thinking through their games, and what lessons they learned. Some interesting themes emerged - some expected and some not so much:

• Creating an immersive, cinematic experience is the name of the game. One of the key defining factors of a game is that it creates empathy, a connection to real life. This is more easily said than done. Creating a strong graphic design, with the right feel for the tone of your game, is important. You also can't rely on lots of text, which people generally won'te read - instead, you need to convey info (usually in stages) through audio, video, animation, and game play.
  
• It's a different kind of technology development project. Because of the need for immersive elements, and other things, it's a different animal than building most other things. You need specialists - game designers, illustrators, animators, and script writers can all be important.
  
• A good game requires deep knowledge of your subject. There will tons of decisions about every aspect of the game - what words would people use? what does their house look like? what's a realistic outcome? - that requires nearly encylopedic knowledge. And the more sensitive your subject matter is, the more important it is to have credibility through subject matter experts (and expertise)
  
• Focusing on (and measuring) your desired outcomes is critical. There's a temptation, even more than usual, to concentrate on the nifty rather than the useful. Keeping your end goals in mind (i.e. do you want to educate? engender action?) , as well as how you'll measure whether you succeeded is important.