Team:
Dandan Du
Pepin Hazan
Jonathan Ahnert
Flora Cheng
Adam Liss

Our client this semester was the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute. Their original goal was for us to make a transformational game aimed at changing people's beliefs about disaster. They wanted us to use 1 of 4 proven belief change strategies, build a game, then give it to them to test and modify.



We began brainstorming, and ended up settling on using the concept of metaphor as our "belief change strategy". As a designer, I helped my team brainstorm, and conceptualize what it meant to use metaphor as a belief change strategy. Eventually, we decided on a final concept called "Pause", a game that was designed to look like a video player, and which the player would control using the play/pause/rewind/fast forward buttons.



The idea was that this game would contain a number of interactive scenes, so as a designer I began brainstorming ideas for scenes that would use metaphor to change people's beliefs about disasters. This was an incredibly interesting challenge, especially working within the constraints of our video player gameplay. However I believe it led to some very unique and interesting designs, and overall was very well-received by faculty and guests.



This semester I also did a significant amount of work as producer as well. This was a very difficult project to plan and prepare for, as the look, feel, and interactions that we'd be working with would change week to week. I suggested to my team we implement Scrum, and I believe we all found it incredibly useful for staying organized and productive.