So, why did I choose to design a game, over anything else?
Originally, I had chosen to design a workshop experience based off a design experiment I did called 'Futuri-Tea House' that would ask participants to storytell and worldbuild off prompts and have conversations about health and wellbeing in the playful manner set up in the aforementioned experiment.
However, a provocation by Andrew Burrell, my supervisor suggested that the workshop experience could be turned into a game. This got me more excited, and particularly spoke to an issue I foresaw regarding the question of longevity. - Who would run the workshop after I had run it? How does it get out into the world?
This spurred me into designing an interactive game as my design outcome, and paved the path towards To Our Health.
Game Design
An important aspect of my research involved looking into Game Design and Game Theory, particularly when it came to the type of game to design. In the end I was drawn to a hybrid between pen + paper and a card game. This was due to my engagement with two anchors, that became important examples to draw inspiration from, for the style of gameplay.
Both of these were important because of their storytelling and worldbuilding capacity. Whilst designed for different audiences and for different intentions, the boundaries set by the rules enabled the emergence of rich stories, worlds and experiences that I was able to observe in playthroughs of the games. As such these provided the starting off point and 'in' for me into designing a game, and was invaluable in learning how to write detailed yet understandable rules.
Audience and Tone
When thinking of my audience, I was initially very board and vague, however when pivoting to create a game, the audience became clearer. Primarily, To Our Health would be for young adults and for tabletop gamers. I can clearly see this experience being used in a teaching context, when learning about topics and concepts such as complexity, systems thinking, storytelling, worldbuilding, futuring and complex adaptive systems. Nonetheless it still remains a game experience, and would be easily consumed by other tabletop gamers.
This neatly complimented the tone I was after throughout the game which was:
Playful, Witty, Accessible yet Expansive.
This tone was chosen because it makes it easier to engage with such heavy and complex content around health and wellbeing, as well as systems and worldbuilding itself. After all, a large aspect of the challenge is accessibility to knowledge in health and wellbeing, layered under jargon, scientific terms and statistics. This was achieved through the use of humour, references to culture, the colourful palette and linework visual language.
Lastly, I wanted to make this experience accessible, and in understanding my audience that includes tabletop gamers, I decided early on to create a black and white, print at home PDF version of the game, so that people can experience the game without spending sums amounts of money.