Game mechanics + Board design prototype

In the past two meetings we have tightened up the game mechanics (see separate Google Doc) and started to design the prototype board and cards. This will be finished until next meeting so that we can play a game....

Rapid Biology Learning

Wednesday's session of the biodiversity game was an awesome biology lecture for me.  We had Dutch biologist Fam coming in to help explain and discuss how different events such as mining, wild fires, power line construction, urbanisation, environmental laws etc would impact different animals in different regions.

A challenge we faced in our work was which time frame to look at. For each event you can plot follow-on effects on a time line, and the further into the future you look, the more systemic and complex the consequences will be. A flood might for example have a terrible immediate impact on some animals in a biosphere, but later create more biodiversity which will help the species.

In 1,5 hours we discussed how 29 animals across eight biospheres would be impacted by 24 different external events. Talk about rapid learning...

An excel spread sheet was used for this assessment, which is now uploaded to our Google Drive folder. Please post your email address as a private Yammer message to Adam or Yoav to get access to the file and join the discussion about +1, 0 or -1.

Biodiversity Game Session 3

The design of the biodiversity games continues.....

Yoav sketched the game board on a piece of cardboard.

We listed the positive and negative human and natural events on blank cards and tried to rank them depending on their environmental impact.

 Other elements of the game were decided. Corners of the board will for example function as "summits".  

 

Finally, we played a test round of the game to try to identify the challenges we still have with the mechanics.

 

It now starts to feel like we have a game, and in the next couple of weeks we'll spend more time to refine the mechanics.

Some ideas for next time:

Yoav drew the game board as a world map. Robert, the artist-in-residence at Hub Melbourne, is currently working on an artwork where the world map is the foundation of the image. An action point for next time is therefore to talk to him about potential game board designs.

Ownership of this game might be based on the number of hours individuals have worked on the game. It is therefore important that we each log how much time we spend on working on the game.

Next meeting:  Wed 6 March 11 AM at the Hub Boardroom.