Question: A Game Designed to Boost Critical Thinking Skills

Though my love for video games has existed my whole life, my interest in game design emerged sophomore year of high school when I attempted to replicate a Pokémon game using the rudimentary programming platform Scratch. I spent my senior year in high school developing a “game for change” through my school’s “STEM scholars” independent study program.  My game, called Question, attempted to train players to recognize situations where they employ “mental shortcuts” and equip them with the skills to utilize their critical thinking abilities and avoid those situations in the future.

Abstract

A 2011 NPD study stated that 91% of American youth aged 2–17 plays video games. With this media form reaching such an expansive and impressionable audience, my project investigates how video games can be used to promote positive qualities within the player, with a specific focus on bolstering critical thinking skills. Using Petty and Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of Persuasion to inform the game’s structure, I designed a story-based role-playing game that measures the player’s Need for Cognition (NFC) statistic and correlates it to the rapidity with which the game is completed.

Presentation of Findings

Art Assets

 

Flicker: A Game To Reflect and Combat Loneliness

Flicker was created during the 2020 game jam “Jamming the Curve,” which focused on developing games to combat sickness rates during the pandemic. Flicker intends to invoke the emotional experience of loneliness during quarantine and inspire solidarity amongst those suffering. Here is an interview about our work with a link to the game, and here’s a quick video of the gameplay:  

Witchwood: A Game to Decrease Sexist Bias

Witchwood is a fully-formed game plan I developed while taking a Games for Change class at Rochester Institute of Technology. Witchwood is centered on the figure of a lone woman in Puritan New England who helps members of a local village and watches their assumptions about her change as witch hunt hysteria rises. Using an Embedded Design framework, the game intends to decrease sexist biases in the player that frame women as weak and incompetent, as well as reflect the harrowing experience of microaggressions against women and build empathy for those who deal with this on a daily basis. 

Here is a mock pitch video for the game explaining the theory of change, description of play, playtesting plan, aesthetic decisions, UI/UX decisions, and accessibility considerations: