Authoring the game: using a gamified powerpoint presentation
With my reading of the Landers et al, and my knowledge of the Web Sustainability Guidelines, and my knowledge of my audience (UAL learning technologists and others engaged in online learning) I had to think about how to deploy the game. Ultimately, I have decided to develop the game within Powerpoint for the following reasons:
- It’s a low tech, non internet dependent way of developing and playing a digital game. So while it might be nice to create something high tech, that wouldn’t be true to the overarching mission of the game and this project which is to seek out sustainable options for online learning.
- It can played in a group dynamic with a facilitator, or it can be played by an individual in present mode. Having flexibility about synchronous/asynchronous modes at this early stage felt important.
- Easy to edit, easy to scale. Again at this early stage being able to quickly develop a game that can be iterated is important and in line with sustainable approaches to content development.
- Easy to make available to others. Powerpoint is widely available and used programme to that makes it easier for people to access the game and play. Powerpoint slides can be made available as downloads from pretty much anywhere, ie intranet, blogs, Moodle etc.
Storyboarding content and activities
In this Miro board, I’ve included my draft for the game storyboard. It focuses on the ten areas of sustainable guidance, ideas for questions connected to these points, and some ideas sparked from reading Landers et al (2019) including the progress bar and milestones. Using all these elements I created the first draft of the game – I say first draft as I do feel it needs some user feedback to improve.
Game aesthetic design
The last part of creating the game was its visual design in Powerpoint. I knew that I wanted to keep the file as low in size as I could and the design would be part of that. I used ual branded colours and fonts used icons/shapes over his res photos where possible (I also compressed all graphics in the file as well). I decided that this minimised aesthetic, could also embrace the humour and familiarity of more pastiched elements of Powerpoint including simple slide design, word art and animations – these can be design (and sustainable) strengths rather than a weaknesses. This ties in with the concept of permacomputing (mentioned elsewhere in this blog post). As Mansoux et al (2019) state:
As a result, permacomputing aims to provide a countervoice to digital practices that promote maximisation, hyper-consumption and waste. It seeks to encourage practices as an applied critique of contemporary computer technology that privileges maximalist aesthetics where more pixels, more frame rate, more computation and more power equals more potential at any cost and without any consequences. We believe that such a critical practice can be relevant to artists, designers and cultural practitioners working with computer and network technology who are interested in engaging with environmental issues.
What next for this intervention?
I feel that the next steps for this game is to test it with my fellow digital learning colleagues to understand its effectiveness, areas for improvement and to gather any thoughts they have on it. Testing iteratively in this way ties in with the sustainable concept principle of ideation.
You can download the first draft of the game below. Coming in at 4MB the carbon impact of downloading or sharing it is significantly reduced compared to a higher tech format with audio, photos and video content. (In fact it’s somewhere between the same size as a blurry low quality picture taken on a smartphone and streaming one minute low res video! (GreenNet 2023)
References
GreenNet (2023) Understanding file sizes. Available at: https://www.greennet.org.uk/support/understanding-file-sizes (Accessed 22 January 2024).
Mansoux, A. et al. (2023) ‘Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design and Culture’, in Ninth Computing within Limits 2023. LIMITS. doi:10.21428/bf6fb269.6690fc2e