Gameplay Journal Entry #8
This week I played the game Digital Cards Against Calamity. In this game the player becomes the mayor of a town and guides the community through times of trouble. The costal towns are hit with devastations such as flooding, hurricanes, and mud slides. Each devastation gives the player a variety of options to choose from on how to bounce back from the hit. There many factors to consider, and once the community becomes too unbalanced, you lose and have to start the game over.
In this game there is conflict, but not in the violent way of most modern video games. The conflict in this game is mostly with your own mind by trying to figure out a way to benefit everyone in the community in tough situations. By balancing the different factors and stakeholders in this game, players are educated in the resilience of coastal towns. This game holds a lot of educational value, and according to Nissenbaum and Flanagan “embedding values, however, stands a better chance of creating socially conscious games than ignoring the topic and thus leaving embedded values to chance” (182). This game was very entertaining to play, and I think everyone should try out being a mayor of a costal town for a little while.
Flanagan, Mary, and Helen Nissenbaum. “A Game Design Methodology to Incorporate Social Activist Themes.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI ’07, 2007, doi:10.1145/1240624.1240654.
