My introduction to game design
In graduate school, I took an interactive media class where we learned about game design and mechanics. We learned about the components of a game design team: a developer (someone that mainly codes for the game), an art director (someone who creates the art, sets the mood), and a game designer (someone who thinks of the idea, game mechanics, learning objectives). We all got the opportunity to play all the roles, but I was most excited about being the game designer. I wanted to explore teaching nutrition concepts to children through games.
Since this was an introductory interactive course, we had limited time to produce these games. While they weren’t professional quality games, creating them taught us useful techniques such as good workflow, researching the audience, and technical skills. Me and my different teams ended up making two games that were nutrition focused: Nutrition Mission and Dr. Smoothie. In order to effectively design these games, they had to convey the learning objectives as well as be appropriately engaging for the intended audience.
Nutrition Mission
The first game, Nutrition Mission, is for children aged 3-5 years. In a Ted Talk titled “Teach every child about food”, Jamie Oliver talks about how a group of kindergartners he talked to did not know specific fruits and vegetables. This game introduces children to the different food groups, including fruits and vegetables, in a fun and simple way.
A major learning goal in Nutrition Mission was the food groups. Players traveled down a road and had to collect the right number of food. Nutrition Mission was a simple game, where the player is driving a car and has to select the correct amount of “fruit”, “vegetables”, “grains”, “protein”, or “dairy” based off of USDA dietary guidelines. To turn this into a gamified visual, our team made it into a pie chart with a quantifiable “goal number” of foods. Each filling of the pie made their car go faster.
Pie chart to guide players
Players were distracted by glowing “junk food” (candy or donuts), which if they picked up too much of, would slow down their car, preventing them from finishing the game in time. My team wanted to push the idea of having a balanced plate, and addressing that a little bit of junk food is ok, but too much will, quite literally, slow you down.
Dr. Smoothie
The second game, Dr. Smoothie, is for adolescents aged 10-13 years. During this time, kids are developing the independence to purchase their own food at lunchtime in school or while hanging out with their friends. They are also going through a number of bodily changes. Building up an understanding of beneficial vitamins and minerals is an essential part of preparing them for making smart dietary decisions! Given its age group, this game had more complex game mechanics. In it, players were smoothie makers who owned a stand by the beach. Customers were different sea animals. Each customer would come up, talk about their age and what benefits they wanted from their smoothie. The player would then make them a smoothie according to what vitamins and minerals corresponded with those benefits. Hovering over each ingredient gave players information about their micronutrient contents. While this is definitely an oversimplification of the complex nature of micronutrients, it was a fun and engaging way for teenagers to become aware.
While this last part was not part of my interactive course, I wanted to put both of these games into perspective of the real world. I created a document that explained the series of “Let’s Get Fit” games.