Broken Game Design to Prove a Point about Medicinal Maggots (Pecha Kucha)
5Our entry for the 8th International Educational Games Competition.
Follow Sean on twitter https://twitter.com/DrSeanWalton
Follow Love A Maggot on twitter https://twitter.com/loveamaggot
Play the game https://loveamaggot.com/maggotgame/
Love A Maggot
---------------------------
Sean Walton, Stephen Mitchell, Alena Denisova, Chris Sherwood and Yamni Nigam
‘Love A Maggot’ was co-designed by a multidisciplinary team to communicate the effectiveness of medicinal maggots to primary school children. Medicinal maggots have an extremely high clinical success rate for disinfecting chronic wounds and are available on NHS prescription in the UK. They also offer us an alternative to antibiotics at a time when antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security and development. Despite these clear benefits, maggot therapy is not widely embraced by patients, there is therefore an urgent need to change negative attitudes towards medicinal maggots.
What is interesting about this project from the game design point of view is that we had to un-balance the game to meet the learning outcomes. The maggot unit is much more powerful than the antibiotics, and once a player learns this she can easily win every time. Although this means that players are unlikely to engage with the game past an initial hours playthrough, we found during testing with primary school children that the learning objectives were achieved in most cases during this play time. Accepting this imbalance as a game designer was really challenging, but ultimately achieved the aims of the project.