Serious Game – Streets of Stockholm

So this week I’ve been working on two different games at the same time, one of them having a deadline tomorrow. This was the game project I’ve worked on in the course Serious Games.

It’s called Streets of Stockholm, and is mainly about informing and trying to raise sympathy for the homeless in Stockholm. Their situation and how you can help as a person is what we set out to focus on with the game.

We’re basically done with it now (otherwise we’d have a lot to do tomorrow) and it was a lot of fun to work on. We made it for three players where each player controls a different charity organization that helps homeless people through cooperation with the other players. This is done by placing cards from the character deck (representing homeless individuals) in different helping slots. They have a primary need that needs resolving first which is either food, clothes, shelter or healthcare. After that you can deal with their possible addictions by placing them in the addiction clinic. Not all homeless have addictions so some of them are able to move directly to the next step, the permanent residence.

We used dice a lot throughout testing of this game, both by rolling but also as counters for turns and resources. The game is played throughout two weeks and there are different win and lose conditions you can meet, such as “don’t let 5 homeless people die” or “save 10 homeless people”. In the start of each week the player who is the provisions manager gets to roll for donated provisions. There are also tests for the characters once they pass through the addiction clinic or permanent home slots, to see if they managed it or if they failed.

The thing I think we succeeded in with this game is that we really made the players feel like they were helping homeless people. This was mainly achieved by making the characters have faces and names, it made it a lot easier to connect to them.

What I think we could have done better is the serious part of the game. We could have emphasized a bit more on the informative part of the game and to raise awareness. We ended up focusing a bit too much on the entertainment part.

Overall I’m happy with the result though, it was a lot of fun to work on and it was very interesting designing a game from another perspective.