Symbiose Rush | Mon Portfolio

- SymbiOse Rush -

Tools used

Pen & Paper

Microsoft Suite

The Project

SymbiOse Rush started as a tool with the educational goal to help people better understand concepts of CSRD through the prospective scenarios of ADEME. It became a fully fledged game that could be integrated in multiple types of corporate events such as teambuilding or seminars. Its main goal was to train future-thinking and creative skills to unlock conversations within a small teams led by a manager. Over the course of 3h, player will travel to the future and tell their own adventures by recording a narrator talking over moving images.

Overview

This was my first experience outside of the entertainment industry. I wanted to explore the process of creating a game with meaningful real-life impact, which came up with a lot of unique and new challenges along the way. During the four months that I spent at the studio, I was able for the first time to own my creative work from early ideation to a final product that was played twice during corporate events (one from Engie, the other from Axentia).

From improving my process to properly communicating with a team not familiar with game development terminologies, I was faced with challenges of many types. But some where really specific to the process of designing a serious game, which I'd like to put my focus on :

What kind of tools do I need to design a serious game ?

What kind of frameworks do I need to make more intentional decisions ?

Which concepts from cognitive and social science must I get familiar with ?

These three questions will be the common thread as I walk you through the creative process that led us to a final playable game over the course of four months. I will indicate them with the following icons :

Tool

Framework

Concept

Ideation

When I joined SymbiOse Ecosystème, the creative director Sara Dupuis had already laid out the groundwork of what would become SymbiOse Rush : a blend of learning tool and co-creative storytelling activity. My task was to turn it into a game, bring more structure to the storytelling part and infuse more of ADEME's prospective data in a way that would still make the learning fun.

So, how do you turn an existing experience into a game ? And even more, into a serious game ?

This was my first time : I lacked tools, concepts, knowledge about my target audience and the potential use case of such games. So, I looked in the area where I felt there was the most insights about that type of challenge : gamification.

The first tool that helped me is the Octalysis Framework by Yu-Kai Chou, and his book "Actionable Gamification". It defines a set of 8 human drives as underlying forces for intrinsic motivation. Each drive can be more or less strong depending of your own design goals, and they can even change over time if you want your game experience to evolve between the onboarding and the final act.

The underlying science about human motivation was not as deep as other books specifically about that topic (for example the "Oxford Handbook of Human Motivation"), but it gave me a solid foundation about gamification principles.

I got a lot of fun coming up with many versions of the framework and thinking about the kind of game experience, human dynamics and gameplay it could generate.

An other tool that greatly helped me brainstorm through many game ideas where the Gamificartes, which I discovered thanks to another designer working next to our office. Compared to the Octalysis, the Gamificartes allowed for a much granular brainstorming process. It also had a very different set of core drives, many of which resonated more with the kind of game experience we wanted to make like "creativity and autonomy", "meaning" or "immersion".

Crucial concepts at this stage of the process where related to the following question : does more data lead to better insights and creativity ? Two elements caught my attention : the criticisms around the information deficit model, and how low-data thinking can breed creativity. Both of these proved me that more information does not always lead to behavioral change or better decision making (it can even make things worse and lead to denial or many data-related biases)

I sadly lost all the paper prototypes that where done at this stage, but out of this first phase a couple of core creative pillars started to emerge :

1) put the focus on creativity, meaning and social influence

2) emphasize low-data thinking

3) prioritize future-thinking over learning

Now, it was time to better understand the underlying mechanisms to make that possible.

Design

At this stage, my goal is to create a coherent game structure and define all of its key elements such as player actions, victory and loss condition (if any), turn-taking, obstacles, constraints, and sources of uncertainty.

I started with my own major constraint, as defined by the creative director : the game has to end with each team producing a 2-minutes voiced-over movie using still images. Then, I listed all the feedback that had been made about the previous version and ended up with a couple of major ones : "there is not enough structure to create the story" and "it's difficult to visualise that future".

The OpenSeriousGame website is a goldmine of tips, tools and existing games. The Serious Game Narrative Canvas gave me a way to translate real life elements such as people, situations, contexts and possible actions into engaging storytelling. Because Serious Games are explicitly based on real-life, it's very risky to directly model the game systems without first modeling the real-life systems that you use as reference. In my case, I was modeling a social system where people were trying to create a story while struggling to cooperate, be creative and visualise how the future could look like in the 2050s.

There are many approaches to storytelling and worldbuilding out there, and for some time I experimented with more complex or non-linear ones. But in the end, I realised that the design goal was not to create an intricate story : it was to build a shared vision and intimacy between people who don't know each other and want to be more positive about the future. The story had to stay simple, inspiring, and meaningful. After considering Vladimir Propp's tale structure and the Hero's Journey, I settled down on John Truby's structure that allows for more cinematic storytelling while staying very simple (though the actual version in his book is much more detailed).

While I don't use any frameworks during the ideation phase to go as wild as I want, the design phase is where frameworks are extremely helpful. "The Environmental Game Design Playbook" gave me a a coherent set of concepts and gameplay patterns (like roleplay or no-win scenarios) to keep experimenting with different designs.

The core concept that I kept in mind during this phase comes from the "Environmental Game Design Playbook", and is part of what they call key predictors of pro-environmental behavior : knowledge. As said earlier, more data is not always a great thing, but a minimum is still required to make decisions. Sadly, most of the time no difference is made about the various types of knowledge and what is needed to go from one to the other. Here, I learned about four types of knowledge (awareness, systematic, action and effectiveness knowledge) and that each one builds on top of the previous to bring an increasing sense of perceived self-efficacy. For the rest of the time I would spend at SymbiOse Ecosystème, I always asked myself what type of knowledge I was putting in the game data, mechanics, descriptions, or even see emerge from the gameplay itself and written down by the players.

The game structure defines the various phases of play, along with the key resources, inputs, outputs and content

At the end of this phase, I had a game structure, clearer intent and new concepts to keep in mind. In parallel of that design phase, I also spent some time reading through the ADEME's four prospective scenarios and extracting as many keywords and data I could. That allowed me to design both the game systems and their content. I could not know yet if it was actually fun, but at least it was a coherent whole and as true as possible to the creative director's vision. Now, it was time to test the hell out of it again !

Prototyping, playtesting & iterating

There was a lot of content creation to do at that point, as the total amount of game elements I had (re)designed was the following :

- Persona cards

- Context cards

- The Truby sheet

- Unforseen Events cards

- Key Takeways

Most of this phase revolved around quick pen & paper creation. Thought the tools and concepts I will show here did not directly impact that phase, I started to keep them in mind during the discussions we had with the rest of the team to better nail down what we wanted out of the game experience. There were a lot of back and forth between the game's design and the prototypes : the two major changes that were made out of this phase were to give up on TTRPG-inspired roleplay for a more theatre-inspired one, and to turn the negociation gameplay into a single but highly celebrated moment where multiple teams would have to cooperate after an unforseen event disrupted their carrefully crafted narrative.

Crucial to any kind of serious game were two elements that I had never considered until then : debriefing and facilitation. My creative director helped me a lot to improve on that front, along with the "Debriefing Cards" and "La boîte à outils de la facilitation" which is litteraly a toolbox of facilitation techniques to leverage during a playsession. While most of their impact cannot be shown, one of their tangible addition to the game's design was a detailed list of post-game questions to ask the players.

At this stage, I was still trying to explore the game's design transformational potential : basically, the idea that gameplay can translate into real-life behavioral change. "The Transformational Framework" from Sabrinan Culyba (along with other readings from cognitive and social science) was both a blessing and a curse because it made me realise the sheer complexity of such a goal. This is where I realised that it was not an achievable goal for the kind of game's design or scope we had and gave up on it.

How does creativity actually works ? For a long time, the concept had been explored by many fields within humanistics and the arts, but only recently did other fields such as neuroscience or psychology provide some insights about the subject. Getting a broader vision of the concept of creativity was the major topic of this phase : it later influenced my discourse about it during the two playsessions with Axentia and Engie, but also how I communicated about it on the SymbiOse Ecosystème's page and how I designed the game to encourage and reward creativity.

At the end of the prototyping phase, we had a clear idea of how the game would work and its content, how it would integrate into the rest of the corporate event, multiple logistic considerations such as when to do a break or what kind of equipment would be needed (pens, sheets of paper, colored team scards, etc..) and the role of the animator over the various phases of gameplay (from passive timekeeper to actor during key dramatic moments). But one last challenge was to find a way for the players to visualise their journey : as the game would last for 3h and was very dense with information and gameplay phases, if was important to represent the player's progress and content creation over time. The creative director therefore asked me to come up with various graphical designs for what we called the "Alice's Board" (in reference to Alice in Wonderland). I did not discover that concept, but it was still a pretty new way for me to design a progress bar !

I first came up with the global layout to make sure every important information was there, before experimenting with three different designs from the most functional to the most symbolic.

The final result

After four months, multiple prototyping, playtesting, and official playsessions with two clients, my time at SymbiOse Ecosystème was about to end. The game's design was documented, along with any type of required element such as the game phases, rules, content, animator cheatsheet and so on.

An excerpt from the animator cheatsheet, detailing the various phases of play

Examples of the game content : Unforseeen Event, Context, Persona, Images and Key Takeaways

And last but not least, a picture of players having fun with the game !

Because that is the true reason why I go through this game creation journey over and over again.

Round Up

What kind of tools do I need to design a serious game ?

Tools to help me understand the broad range of possible designs from gamification to serious games, debriefing and translating real-life considerations into a powerful narratives. In short, many tools that I was lacking as a game designer solely evolving in the entertainment industry until then.

What kind of frameworks do I need to make more intentional decisions ?

Frameworks that tackle the specific challenges of transformational gameplay and environmental design patterns.

Which concepts from cognitive and social science must I get familiar with ?

Concepts related to knowledge, information and creativity, as they are key for serious game focused on learning and collaborative storytelling endeavors.