Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

good introduction to the frustrations of rural life in a developing country. Interesting to play.

Interesting game. Nice look, nice subject, solid approach.

Definitely felt too hard. My family was broke and on death's doorstep within 1 year. I know conditions in Haiti are bad, but I don't think the average family descends into crisis quite THAT quickly.

The game needs sound.

Dear Barry:
Many thanks for keeping me updated. In this era of digital media (games, websites, text messaging etc) Ayiti: The Cost of Life is a great way to teach American youth about global issues such as poverty, access to education and human rights. Players’ efforts to keep the family healthy, happy and both parents alive make you engulfed in Ayiti. I hope Global Kids receives more finding to develop additional serious games. Keep up the good work!

Chinwe Okorie,
United Nations Representative for the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts

P.S.
Trying to provide the family (Jean, Marie, Yves, Patrick and Jacqueline) with money for adequate healthcare, and education was hard for me. At the end of the first year the family was in terrible shape. No one earned a diploma, they were all in poor health, and Jacqueline and Yves eventually died!

It was brutally hard, and that made it discouraging. This cuts to the heart of the sort of points I was making about serious games at the conference in NYC.

In order to make the player feel like they are accomplishing something, you need to give them some successes early on, to encourage them that they can succeed. If instead you punish them for every action, you teach them instead to give up. In this case, that means giving up on the situation as a whole.

Some possible accomplishments might be not giving the options for all the expensive stuff (such as school!) until the family is capable of handling it; to let families come out of disease on their own; to have more positive random events; and especially, to give bite-sized intermediate goals to players that can be accomplished easily as a way to learn what to do.

The two screens of text when you launch are also a turn-off, by the way. The game should strive to teach that stuff more interactively.

I sound very critical here, but please take it as constructive criticism. On the plus side, the gameplay does look solid, a typical "management sim" sort of thing, and the presentation is very nice.

Raph,
Thank you so much for taking the time to play the game and post the feedback on our site. Your comments are well founded and much appreciated.

I agree the game could benefit from more ways to make the player feel successful, but after watching dozens of teenagers in our schools over many hours play the game, I have found that while one student did stop playing the moment she fell into debt (she thought it meant the game was over) the others always seem to approach "not succeeding" in the game as an engaging challenge and leads them to want to play again to try different strategies.

As a game to be played just once, there is no question that it can feel too hard, since as you mention a few "bad" decisions early on destroys your future. But this changs with interative play sessions. We have created a game that is about engaging the player through multiple sessions before it offers satisfaction (while still offering enough reachable challenges to keep the player engaged).

Rather than be a game where a player progresses through increasingly complex levels, each interaction of the game becomes it own level, increasingly in complexity due to the experience of the player (not because the game changes). If so, the game should prove more successful on its on, on the web, than it will as an educational tool by educators (who most likely will set time limits and expect their youth to play only once).

I wonder if this is a feature more common to "serious games" than ones that are not based on real world issues, due to the constraint to not make the the real world issue so easy to solve in the game. In any case, thank you for your thoughtful and sharp feedback that gave me new perspective on the game.

Barry

"But it seems (by accident, if not design) we might have created a game that is about engaging the player through multiple sessions before it offers satisfaction."

Hi all - Catherine here from Gamelab (the game design team behind Ayiti).

From the very beginning of the design process, we looked at games like Cute Knight and Oregon Trail for inspiration. Both of those games have relatively short play sessions and satisfy and reward more with additional play sessions. Engaging players primarily through multiple play sessions was ABSOLUTELY by design. Replayability was one of our top play values and a very very important design goal for Gamelab.

An essential consideration in designing the game for multiple play sessions, however, was ensuring that each play session taught the player how to better optimize the underlying system - and hence lead to a better awareness of some of the underlying obstacles to education and survival in places like Haiti.

I'd like to think that Gamelab successfully achieved these design goals, but that of course remains to be determined by the players themselves. *I* am definately a better player than I was when the game design and balancing was first in a playable state. I've had 100's of play sessions. And to be honest, I still enjoy playing it! ^_^

I just read the following post from Clay Shirky, which I thought did a good job explaining the educational power of this game. He was writing about "iterated agency" in a game:

"This to me is the book-end of personal agency about the game; the ability to re-play the game, to change your strategy or your behavior and observe what happens, on a growing base of past experience, strikes me as the other key element of agency. This is the reason I think that games designed to be played once are giving up one of the key virtues of games (sometimes as a result of the literature-envy that seems to nest in parts of the game world), and especially for games in education. Learning through iterated experience is simultaneously one of the greatest pleasures fo playing games and one of the biggest sources of real-world value."

I congratulate all of you on a great job.

I won't repeat some of the things mentioned in the previous comments. It is indeed quite a challenge to get the message across in Serious Game and at the same time make it fun to play.

I lost miserably the first time I played Ayti. Was it fun to lose? Not really, but it totally communicated the issues and challenges poor families face in the developing world.

What's more important then in a Serious Game? The message or the fun factor?

You'll always have two types of players: those who will drop the game altogether after losing the first time, and those who will feel that the game is challenging them and they will try again.

But both types understood the message you are trying to communicate the first time they played. Mission accomplished.

Cheers,

Juan

I had heard about this game at a previous "serious games" meeting and I was intrigued. Having now played the game, I find it compelling and very helpful in communicating the basic realities of life in a developing locale.

Beyond my work as a geocultural consultant for retail games, I have a strong interest in these types of great learning vignettes. My own goal is developing similar games that promote geographic and cultural literacy, but clearly games lie Ayiti can do exactly that in building empathy with people facing very real challenges.

I am deeply impressed by your game. It is smart, bold, touching and fun. I think the challenging difficulty is perfect. If the game was easy, it would seem like surviving in the third world was a walk in the park. Because it is so challenging I had to watch my family descend into poverty many times. It was an overwhelming expierience. Thank you! I will forward your URL to as many People I can. I whish you all the best in your future Projects!

I've played the game many times over the past 24 hours, and developed a strategy that keeps everyone happy and healthy, and gets one diploma for the family :-)

I am interested to know just how accurate is this game? Obviously, it is kept simple for teenagers, and the main message is: Poor families face heartbreaking choices. But does it accurately represent the challenges and outcomes for real Haitians, even if the details are not precisely the same?