Little did the team know there was still a lot of research ahead. Week 4 and 5 continued a heavy pre-production phase, where the team explored game possibilities in the transformational design space.
The team met with project Prism, at ETC project from last semester that made a transformational game that educated students about their peers with autism. They made a game where symptoms of autism were anthropomorphized into animal characters. The students interacted in an open forest world with different animals and helped them accomplish a goal. The students then had a facilitated discussion to talk openly about why their classmates with autism act differently than themselves.
The team from Prism first narrowed down the barriers in their design space — why does a person with autism behave differently from them? Prism made their transformational goals from there. The game explains sensory overload and communication problems, and let’s players know that other people have a different way of functioning. Again, these transformational lessons that appear in the game are then discussed openly, solidifying the learning and understanding of what they just experienced by bringing it into their real life experiences with students with autism.
The Brake Point team learned that they have to somehow encourage reflection about the game experience to anchor the transformation in the real world. The barriers that their teen demographic faces in regards to safe driving are lack of experience, tied to a feeling of invincibility and lack of practice making decisions on the road.
The team continued to brainstorm on what was possible…