Veteran game designer Jordan Weisman is now interim director of the University of Washington Bothell's Center for Serious Play, which has just launched its first student game on Facebook.
The game, UWB Wetlands Restoration, is a social game with a real correlative to the subject at hand, developed in collaboration with the university's ecology department. The Center itself is a new initiative, just under a year old. Weisman, who established FASA, created series like Shadowrun and MechWarrior, and was also the founder and initial CEO of Smith & Tinker, co-founded the Center with Wanda Gregory, a teacher of game design who's also worked with Wizards of the Coast.
The Center got off the ground so quickly that Gregory and Weisman quickly realized they'd need a full-time administrator. As Gregory had a full courseload, "I stepped into the breach," Weisman tells us.
The new 5,000 square-foot facility has classrooms, project rooms and a social space. Its goal "is to be an estuary between academia and industry, which is unique for an undergrad program," Weisman says.
Undergraduates will have the opportunity to get involved in various industry programs, in addition to support in the development of their own media -- the focus is on interactive media, versus on games in specific.
"The goal is to get students a lot of hands-on experience with creating interactive media from concept to ship... not with a very strong focus on engineering as much, but on design, narrative development and project management," Weisman describes.
The University already has a strong computer science program, but as in many academic institutions, other disciplines have historically been less well-supported. UW Bothell is one of many schools exploring broader offerings for interactive entertainment students that focus on interactive media as a holistic, multifaceted creative discipline, versus more traditional, programming-centric approaches.
"This was a unique opportunity to help build something different, and it's exciting," Weisman says. "I just love the energy of undergrads... they come up with really great ideas unfettered by conventional wisdom telling them such things aren't possible."
With Wetlands Restoration, the center was looking to task the students with a large scale project that would also demonstrate the kind of aim the Center had.
"We were looking for something in the social space, because it is a dynamic and fast-growing environment," adds Weisman. "We thought students learning how to design for that space and doing a lot of research in that space would be something that was very useful for them."
The UW Bothell campus is invested in the restoration of local wetlands, and ecology faculty have been engaged in that research for a number of years. "It seemed like a really good fit, to take an established game dynamic and use it to educate about the real causal links of a project like wetlands restoration."
The university ecology professor's team was available to help teach the Center students about the building, maintenance and restoration of fragile wetlands, the better to inform the game dynamics.
"We worked with our students to craft something that was accessible to a broader audience, but still had enough underlying science to it to be respectable and actually achieve the goal of education," Weisman explains.
80 percent of Wetlands Restoration's profits will actually benefit the wetlands, although it's still too soon to fully evaluate what kind of impact the just-launched game will have.
It may not be "cutting edge" by social game standards -- that's somewhat the nature of the beast -- but Weisman believes it achieves its core goals of engaging and educating players. It's unique in that it has an end game players can reach, versus being an always-open persistent universe.
"Beyond what we're hoping to see in terms of public response, we've also gotten a lot of enthusiastic response from other educators who are enthusiastic about using this tool inside of high school and college classes," Weisman adds.
Up next, the Center will work with a local startup on its virtual world tools offering, helping create content that will exemplify the product. It's also developing innovative web apps for a local jewelry company.
"And we're continuing our efforts to create a development culture, and a common toolset, and mentoring from a whole bunch of different excellent local professionals," Weisman adds.
"I think it will continue... on a broader spectrum than just games. The concept of how to design for interactive media isn't limited to just games, as important as games are," says Weisman.
"It's the future literacy that's going to be required for people."
None of us UWB CSS students were involved in making the Wetlands Restoration game, they outsourced it to a studio in India. If any student was involved with the project, it was for designing the ecology. We only touched it in our Software Testing class, almost post-production.
He came to talk to our class and told us, almost verbatim, that they only really produced the Wetlands game because they needed to show the school quickly that their money was producing *something*. It was something like $75k that was spent on the development of this without any student involvement at all.
Well even with the caveat of Jordan Carroll's info, I really like the idea of games using their influence to do real world positive things with their profit generation, be it for charity or a project like this. As an industry we could and should be doing much more here, which is difficult when the economy is tough but as a 'progressive' type of industry, it is good to see the games industry putting it's positive foot forward.
I found the game to be basically unplayable. Or maybe it was just so not fun that I didn't think it was a game. It seemed to be a mismash of social and monetization features with half the content missing.
This was a really fun project to work on, largely because we were working with undergraduates with very little prior exposure to what is involved in creating a project form the ground up. The student designers worked hundreds of hours with me and the outside professionals we brought in to craft the core mechanics, ecological system and rules, UI, etc. The science was driven by a leading ecological researcher here on campus (where, by the way, there is an amazing real-world restoration project going on). The whole point of the Center is to do projects that blend professional and student teams to create real-world titles. This exposes the students to all the requirements of meeting milestones, dealing with clients and partners, communicating across disciplines and time zones, and all the things you need to know when you work in the real world and which you seldom learn about in school. In this particular case the internal focus was on the design, but as we grow and move forward, we hope to be able to work with all the various departments at this amazing institution from Fine Arts to CSS.
He came to talk to our class and told us, almost verbatim, that they only really produced the Wetlands game because they needed to show the school quickly that their money was producing *something*. It was something like $75k that was spent on the development of this without any student involvement at all.