The playtest day proved quite fruitful. We observed many groups of children playing our game and, after three playtest sessions, we learned something both valuable and scary: they were not talking. There was not a peep. The groups were small, being no more than four students, but every time, they would just grab an iPad, sit down, play, and not say anything. They seemed engaged, often times underestimating the amount of time they played for or asking to play again, but none of them ever spoke to one another during play.
That is, until we learned the secret. One group somehow got split up, with two students coming in early. We ran them through our explanation and sat them down to play. After playing for about 6 minutes, the other two students came in. We ran them through an explanation of the game, and we restarted the game so that they could also play. This time through there was a lot more talking. Initially, it was just the two students that had come in early talking to each other about what some of the trash was and asking for recycled components. They also answered some rules questions from the other students, and shortly, all the students were talking.
This made us believe that understanding how to play the game was being the biggest barrier to creating the social experience we wanted. This helped us decide that we ABSOLUTELY NEEDED a tutorial and improved feedback to make knowing what to do and how to do it much less of a burden and allow the students more mental bandwidth to focus on the trash and the trading. Another interesting thing we noticed is that students tended to believe that the wants were individual and not shared, which led to students asking each other for components, an interaction we enjoyed seeing and think we will make modifications to the game to encourage this practice.
Our subject matter expert, Dr. Gwen DiPietro also came to play our game, and she brought two friends. One, Ms. Sara Willis Hartwell was speaking about solid waste management, which is her area of expertise. We talked with her and she agreed to look over our list of waste to check if the items we had were good and realistic items that fell into different waste categories. She also told us that there were some items on our list already that were categorized incorrectly, like paper cups, which due to the plastic coating inside of them are not recyclable! Who knew?
That means that this week we worked on finishing up all of our features, fixing some bugs, making feedback much better, and finalizing the trash we would use. The new and improved feedback required we create new UI elements and layout, which ate up a lot of time, meaning that there was some temporal slack with getting the trash finalized. That was useful since we needed to rely on an external source to help us with that. We also ran into an issue with one of the plugins we were using for a feature.
It was a bit frightening looking at everything we needed to fix as evidenced by the playtest, but very reassuring that the students had fun! Hopefully we can keep pushing on that as we polish to make the fun do a good amount of lifting in engaging our audience, which has been one of our goals from the start.