F.AI.R

• Both aesthetics and narrative of the game where inspired by the storytelling genre of Hopepunk. Hopepunk is about “... demanding a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts.” If the core function of the game mechanics is to showcase the issue of biased AI, the core function of the hopepunk-inspired narrative and aesthetics is to instill optimism and activism - the moods required to reach the Forever Fair future.

Development:

Below is a few key elements that lead our thinking during the design process

Playertypes

During our theorectical research we found Bartles playertypes as piece of theory worth using especially when mixed with procedual rhetorics, as it gives us ways to question what types of player might learn most from the mechanics.

Bartles playertypes, is a framework based on countless forum posts and interviews with creators and moderators of "MUDS" which is a type of old school MMO. Based on these pieces of information Bartle divided the players of these MUDS into four types socialiser and killers, player who interacting and act with other players, explorers and achievers, player who act upon and interact with the world. 

Since our game is a singleplayer game that focuses on narrative aspects it primarily fits to players who are explorers and achievers as they do not require other players to interact with. But here an interesting junction appears, as we ask ourselves who might learn the best?

We put our money on the achiever player type, as something found within most education system is the grading system, which creates a mechanic the achiever player can strive to achieve the highest in, this means that in order to motivate learning all that is needed to engage an achiever is that the strategy giving the most points coincides with the strategy which creates the desired procedual rhetoric dynamic. Which is why in F.AI.R we include score which is gained from guessing all the apects of the targeted person correctly, an action best achieved through the purchase of a diverse set of datasets. We also recognize that achievers can be of two minds, the more competetively minded achievers are given a highscore mechanic to chase after to encourage repetetive play, and the more story minded gain the allure of a "best ending" to chase after.

Playtest: the what

During the third day of F.AI.R's creation we held a a playtest involving stakeholders, chosen based on their knowledge about AI and relation to our work group, as the scope for the project only afforded proper testing using the circle of "friends and family". 

These test were at set of think aloud test were the player would sit down with the game after an icebreaker and say every thought that came to mind. The goal of this was to evaluate the games ability to teach the desired values of AI literacy and see how well the players understood the goals and controls of the game.

Playtest: results

The results of our playtest was an overhaul of the games UI elements, as many testers did not understand what their goals during the game was, originally small snippets of real seeming text was present during the beginning phase and the "buy phase" of the game but this text confused the players more so than it helped.

So we added more clear text and a "primer" at the beginning to help the players understand their goals and how the mechanics functioned.

Another aspect of a similar issue was a lack of failure state, to fix this issue we added multiple endings and more primers within the game to try and nudge the player towards replaying the game.

We did also find that many players did not learn about the ways in which AI became biased, but one tester who had previous knowledge about how AI could be biased noted that the game reminded them of it, we chalked that up as the games mechanics succeeding in delivering the desired procdeual rhetoric but not priming player to think along those lines enough to get the message.