As Ali and I honed our trading card game idea for the upcoming pitches, Dan chatted with us about our idea, and, amidst game mechanics and presentations, came a question that struck me as a core point of our project: ‘Is the narrative of the project ethics, awareness, or neither?’ After the chat, we began our research on whether we should pursue a narrative of ethics or awareness. Through researching for our narrative, I came across Tareq A’s (2019:266) Advances in Human Factors in Wearable Technologies and Game Design, which explores ‘The Design of Card Game for Leukemia Children Based on Narrative Design,’ where the study concluded that ‘Participants had a quick recognition [and] could trigger the association with the medical information,’ lending great credence to the notion of a card game’s mechanics fusing well with medical elements, as a ‘search-for-the-cure’ mini-game is planned for our game.

However, Wilson N’s (2019:368) ‘Pokémon-like card game teaches ecology’ called Phylo TCG in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, concluded that, amongst university students ‘players also showed more positive emotions and were more likely to donate to prevent negative environmental effects…instead of protecting species or ecosystems directly,’ arguing for a viable game where ethics and facts inform the world and game results. Ultimately, through the help of these sources, our narrative solidified to become less radical and more sombre, telling the story about animals, where the objective isn’t to win, its to survive. Ethics plays a large factor the story and gameplay.

Reference List

Ren L, Pan H, Zhang J, Sun C (2019) ‘The Design of Card Game for Leukemia Children Based on Narrative Design’, in Tareq A’s Advances in Human Factors in Wearable Technologies and Game Design, Springer Cham, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20476-1

Wilson N (2019) ‘ ‘Pokémon-like card game teaches ecology’, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 17(7):368-368, DOI: 10.1002/fee.2092.