Gamestar Mechanic Goes to Minneapolis

For a group of teens attending the Design Camp at the University of Minnesota in August, seeing the world as a potential game space took on new meaning. Eric Socolofsky and I--two members of the Gamestar Mechanic design team (a game developed by Gamelab--spent the week working with the teens to design and playtest games in the alpha build of the editor we currently have for the game.

As part of the game's larger playtesting and assessment plan, design camp proved to be a remarkably fruitful site for learning about the kinds of games the teens were able to make. We worked with 12 participants, ages 14-17. Most were boys, 2 girls, some were gamers, some not. All loved to play, however, as evidenced in the many rounds of playtesting held throughout the week. Each teen's experience varied widely but by the end of the week everyone had gained an enormous amount of confidence in their ability to design fun, playable games.

Eric and I ran the workshop as a conversation between two primary forms of games--Big Games, or games designed for play in physical spaces and Gamestar Mechanic games, created with our in-game editor. We wanted the teens to compare and contrast the experience of designing games for contexts with such different affordances and to find ways to explore a set of basic game design principles.

Over the course of 5 days the group designed 6 big games. Three were designed for spaces at the Walker Sculpture Garden (Bobbleball, Cradle, and Hex Runner) and three for spaces near campus (Save the King, Snareball, and Treasure, Treasure, Treasure). Two of the campus games were very physical (lots of running around and strategic team play) and one was very slow and puzzle-like and perhaps not surprisingly, immensely popular with the less than active camp crowd. Eric and I were quite amazed at how playable and engaging their games were, and it was interesting to hear the teens make connections between the digital games they were designing in Gamestar Mechanic and their big game designs.

View the long version of the video below.