One of our earliest challenges in designing Guardian of Law was the courtroom. We'd of course played Phoenix Wright, and seen Judge Judy, but trying to make a functional game that could teach something about legal argumentation seemed like something far, far away. Luckily, we had subject matter experts willing to come on down to the Filament office and learn us a thing or two about how to make someone feel dumb in the court of law.
We had various Our Courts and ASU folks help us whiteboard and paper prototype argumentation. The first challenge was structural: if we're to let players argument using cards, how do we break an argument down into pieces that fit onto cards in the first place?
It took us a while to whittle cards down into two simple categories: Argument and Support. An Argument Card was the "head" of an argument, a basic statement that needed reinforcement. A Support Card was one of the myriad ways you could support an Argument Card. Players would make evaluative judgements on the quality of the relationship between arguments and supports, and that judgement included the evaluation of that support's intrinsic strength.
This system let us give the subject matter experts a deep level of evaluation of argumentation without cramming a dictionary-sized rulebook down the player's throat. It meant that players interested in doing well would either have to play the game many times (an educational win!), research a hint document that maps out which card works well with each other (win again!), or evaluate the cards on their merits by reading them carefully and pondering (super duper win!).
With that more or less in working order, the next question in front of us was the judge. If the game gives you a bad score, the player is sure as heck going to want to know why. In order to make sure the player got useful feedback from the game to let them learn from their mistakes, we needed a system that could provide dynamic, contextual feedback.
Ah, but that is for another post, dear reader. Stay tuned!
One of our earliest challenges in designing Guardian of Law was the courtroom. We'd of course played Phoenix Wright, and seen Judge Judy, but trying to make a functional game that could teach something about legal argumentation seemed like something far, far away. Luckily, we had subject matter experts willing to come on down to the Filament office and learn us a thing or two about how to make someone feel dumb in the court of law.
We had various Our Courts and ASU folks help us whiteboard and paper prototype argumentation. The first challenge was structural: if we're to let players argument using cards, how do we break an argument down into pieces that fit onto cards in the first place?
It took us a while to whittle cards down into two simple categories: Argument and Support. An Argument Card was the "head" of an argument, a basic statement that needed reinforcement. A Support Card was one of the myriad ways you could support an Argument Card. Players would make evaluative judgements on the quality of the relationship between arguments and supports, and that judgement included the evaluation of that support's intrinsic strength.
This system let us give the subject matter experts a deep level of evaluation of argumentation without cramming a dictionary-sized rulebook down the player's throat. It meant that players interested in doing well would either have to play the game many times (an educational win!), research a hint document that maps out which card works well with each other (win again!), or evaluate the cards on their merits by reading them carefully and pondering (super duper win!).
With that more or less in working order, the next question in front of us was the judge. If the game gives you a bad score, the player is sure as heck going to want to know why. In order to make sure the player got useful feedback from the game to let them learn from their mistakes, we needed a system that could provide dynamic, contextual feedback.
Ah, but that is for another post, dear reader. Stay tuned!
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