The client

Dr Temidayo Eseonu, a researcher at Lancaster University

The brief

We had been working with Dr Temidayo Eseonu on another project facilitating a collective working around knowledge justice, and had spoken about how we were using games in our work. She was interested in how that might work in her research context—working with racially minoritised young people to explore their experiences of racial injustice and how to create deeper cultures of belonging in education.

Whilst we initially scoped a project around using games to communicate key themes of the research to public policy stakeholders, Dayo became more interested in the experience creation side of our practice. Her research had identified that the biggest impact on racially minoritised young people’s felt sense of belonging was the racist underpinnings of the education system’s practices, narratives, and rules. Whilst a game that communicates knowledge to public policy stakeholders might have been useful, Dayo was more interested in how the game might transform the pedagogy and practices of teachers to support them to be more bold in challenging their own practices, and their schools’ practices, narratives, and rules.

What we did

• Identified the key themes and insights from Dayo’s research
• Explored some initial game concepts and mapped out potentially relevant mechanics
• Found a clear narrative hook for the game and selected appropriate game mechanics
• Playtested with three teachers based in the North East of England
• Redesigned the game around playtest insights
• Designed the visuals of the cards and the gamebook
• Wrote the games’ rules and typeset them

What we learned

• The value of game hacking as a way into game design. Our knowledge of games like Fiasco, For the Queen, and Dialect helped us to think quickly about how different types of game could shape different experiences, and helped us to communicate these concepts clearly.
• How to bring a client on a game design journey. It’s a really unusual and different way of working for most people, so we need to be careful about how we communicate game mechanics—and ideally just need to play some games together to help give a sense of what it might be like.
• We much, much, much prefer in-person game design and playtesting. We can pick up things and move them around and have a really enjoyable time together. For people that haven’t played many games, it’s much easier to communicate what something means or might feel like. It also means we can eat delicious food together and really connect whilst we work.
• The importance of playtesting! Our early assumptions about what might work for the game were thrown out of the window as soon as we started our playtest with the intended players of the game. We found more useful ideas, more playful circumstances, and some of our assumptions were proved wrong when people loved roleplaying, even when they weren’t typical roleplayers!

What we made

• Belonging, a role-playing game for teachers and other educators that helps them identify ways to shift their pedagogy and school practices and processes to create cultures of deeper belonging for more students and staff