{"id":1409,"date":"2008-07-29T12:45:03","date_gmt":"2008-07-29T16:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1409"},"modified":"2008-07-29T12:45:03","modified_gmt":"2008-07-29T16:45:03","slug":"strata-game-development-its-my-familys-fault","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1409","title":{"rendered":"Strata game development: it&#8217;s my family&#8217;s fault"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the record, <i>all<\/i> I did was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/001365.html\">create a game<\/a> to engage students in talking about education policy. But my daughter suggested we play it, even in draft form. Here&#8217;s what I learned from that first round of playtesting:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The basic game is playable.<\/li>\n<li>Everyone started inventing stories for their families, and my son (who was given the poorest family) complained about how unfair life was&#8230; until his family&#8217;s children did well in the first round. <\/li>\n<li>Game pieces exist for a reason: it&#8217;s a headache to keep track of a game&#8217;s state-space on a notepad<\/li>\n<li>More generally, do not create a board game that requires a calculator or a spreadsheet <\/li>\n<li>I now understand the role of Monopoly&#8217;s chance and community chest cards &#8212; to introduce shocks into the gameplay without having to change the regular rules.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ve simplified some of the rules and added a set of &#8220;change-agent&#8221; cards to be drawn each round. Half of the cards do nothing. Some of the other cards determine economic circumstances (long boom, boom-and-bust, depression), a few change the circumstances of either the wealthiest or poorest families, there&#8217;s a forced vote on a tax cut (everyone gets a bit more money, but with a tradeoff in educational quality for the next turn or two), and a few cards give players the option to propose rule changes for the entire game. Oh, yes, and one of my children suggested a card for a social revolution and purge, with players exchanging families (the poorest and wealthiest players change families, then the 2nd poorest and wealthiest, and so forth). They&#8217;ve enjoyed games like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boardgamegeek.com\/game\/116\">Guillotine<\/a>, my son has played nation\/culture-strategy games such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cybernations.net\/\">Cyber Nations<\/a>, and they may have come to the table expecting some dramatic turn of events. So for the record, the idea of a revolution and purge is <i>not<\/i> my idea.<\/p>\n<p>While thinking about and drafting the game in the last week or so, I&#8217;ve come across a number of discussions about using nation\/culture-strategy games in history classes, such as using historical war tactics games, <a href=\"http:\/\/edugamesblog.wordpress.com\/2007\/12\/05\/civilization-mods-for-teaching-history\/\">Civilization modifications<\/a> (or mods for short), or other <a href=\"http:\/\/historicalsimulations.com\/default.html\">teacher-selected<\/a>\/created <a href=\"http:\/\/www.historicalsimulations.net\/\">simulations<\/a>, or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.glsconference.org\/2008\/session.html?id=167\">requiring that students create simulation games<\/a>. Civilization or SimCity are good in thinking about resource limits, but I&#8217;m wondering if there are other structures for the type of history class I would teach (specifically, history of education), where decisions are in between the individual\/family and the society-wide. (Strata is for an interdisciplinary class.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the record, all I did was create a game to engage students in talking about education policy. But my daughter suggested we play it, even in draft form. Here&#8217;s what I learned from that first round of playtesting: The basic game is playable. Everyone started inventing stories for their families, and my son (who [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-mJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}