Service Learning Project Wrap Up - Game Jamming

Something I started with the Game Design Club was the idea of a traditional game jam. In this activity, people will use a limited set of materials (a deck of cards, a set of dice, beads, etc.) to quickly generate a complete game, herein defined as having A Goal, and Something That Gets In The Way of The Goal. It's proven fairly successful in teaching GADs to rapidly iterate not only on game mechanics, but also on ideas in general. We use it to keep our design sensibilities sharp, and our brains on our toes.

For the Broach School students, I started out explaining the importance of game mechanics and goals through a simple exercise:

1) Present the students with a goal (get the card I laid down on the table)
-Students grab the card. No one has fun.

2) Ask the student to grab the card again, this time I try and keep the card away from them. Student is more interested in the activity as they enjoy the challenge.

Then, using a deck of cards, I asked the students to decide upon a goal, what must each player do in order to win? They decided on "Make sure you possess all cards of the same suit". To demonstrate the importance of clarity in rules I took three cards from the deck that were all of the same suit.

We began iterating on the game, they made observations of the game as we progressed, first realizing that three cards was too few, that the game went too quickly. So we increased that the number of cards to five. Then they realized that players had little interaction with each other, that we simply put something in the way of the goal without making an interesting choice.

Then we added the idea of a card trade. Players could trade cards with each other on their turn. This was a relatively equal choice between that and pulling a card from the deck. This gave me an opportunity to discuss imperfect information, we as players do not know what cards are possessed by the other players, nor do we know what we will draw from the deck. One of the students decided to have players reveal one or two cards from their hand to be chosen, but allowing players to take any card from a player's hand. This lead to a number of emergent strategies (if you show a card, that means its the one you want taken or the opposite thereof).

We had another mechanic that provided players with a little more information about how close one player or the other was to winning, but we dropped that mechanic as no one was using it. This taught them about streamlining rulesets to keep the player's attention focused.

The students were attentive and seemed to have fun, they learned about game mechanics, rapid iteration, and had fun. I enjoyed working with them, and was glad I could fairly quickly teach others how to game jam.