------------------------------------------------------------------ Playability Podcast Episode 22: Karen Cleveland Run time: 17 minutes, 2 seconds Episode recorded by Rebecca Strang. Playability is produced by Mike Risley. Transcript auto-generated by Temi and edited by Rebecca Strang. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Music Intro 00:00 Rebecca Strang: 00:09 Hello, and welcome to Playability, where we hold conversations at the crossroads of gameplay and accessibility. I'm your host, Rebecca Strang and I'm joined today by Karen Cleveland, who is a biologist and works for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Today we're going to talk about their educational nature game, What in the Wild. Welcome to the show, Karen. Karen Cleveland:00:31 Hi. It's great to be here. Rebecca Strang: 00:32 Yeah, we're happy to have you. So can you tell me a bit about what in the wild, what its development path was, how it came about, and what the primary goals of the gamer? Karen Cleveland:00:43 Yeah, it's actually something that came out of my last college degree, that I decided to go back, get a degree in game design, and I was looking for projects to work on, talk to a colleague here who said, "Oh yeah, we've got an elementary school curriculum." And I said, "Ooh, that sounds really cool." And so kind of looked at it and decided how can I turn this into something that's a game that can get played in the classroom or at home and is fun and you learn a little something from, and it turned into a game system, basically a deck with five games attached to it that kids and their parents can play and have fun learning about Michigan's wildlife. Rebecca Strang: 01:24 That's awesome. So what are the different types of games? You said there were five of them. Karen Cleveland:01:28 Yeah, and part of this was based on, it's for elementary school, so I don't want to get too complex and strategy rich. I want to work with things that kids might already be a little familiar with. So with the deck, there's kind of a riff on memory where you try to match up a species with its habitat components just by remembering where things are. There's one that riffs a little bit on dominoes where you're trying to place things next to each other in a connection that makes sense with a species and its habitat needs. You kind of build the map out on the table of what a landscape might look like. That one actually is a cooperative game rather than a competitive game. There's different rifts on games that kids might've already been exposed to and be a little familiar with and comfortable with rather than trying to immerse them in something completely new. Rebecca Strang: 02:18 Uh huh, that's awesome. So regarding games and game design, what does accessibility mean to you? Karen Cleveland:02:26 Well, it's a little bit different because I'm in a government agency and so we very much have to think about the Americans with Disabilities Act whenever we think about making things for outreach or objects for the public. And so we kind of very much start with okay, it has to be colorblind accessible as a baseline. We have to think about some of those things of how do we make it as easy to use as possible and remove as many barriers as possible under that act. But we also think beyond that of we are serving this broader citizenry, what are some of those other barriers that we have to deal with? And so as I said, we are designing for kids. How do we think about the cognitive issues of kids from the ages of five to eleven and how do we accommodate what they're going to need to do this. Because we're working with classrooms, how can we make this something that's easy for teachers to bring into classrooms? We think about class length and things like that and so it's very much about how many barriers can be removed beyond just the physical. It's the cognitive, it's the economic, it's the points of where access, where people can kind of connect with what we're making. Rebecca Strang: 03:36 Yeah, and five to 11 is quite a big span when you're talking about cognitive ability with kids, so it's great that you've got five different ways that a single debt can be used to bridge that gap. Karen Cleveland:03:47 Well, it was really kind of fun because even with some of those games I was, I was play testing with kids, which trust me is kind of interesting. I was finding that if I was play testing with six and seven year olds and eight and nine year olds or eleven and twelve year olds, I was seeing very different kinds of responses and levels of interest and so three of those games actually have variants that can make them longer or shorter or harder, easier so that it can kind of scale between five and eleven years old. Rebecca Strang: 04:16 And so what was the play testing process like if you're play testing with kids, did you go into schools or libraries to do that? How did that work out for you? Karen Cleveland:04:25 A Lot of it very much started off, I kind of get lucky, I've got a lot of coworkers who have kids, so there was a lot of oh hey, how would you guys like to play test the game this evening? And some of the kids really got into it and wanted to play games over and over, which is very gratifying as a designer. Rebecca Strang: 04:42 Definitely! Karen Cleveland:04:43 But we did a lot of basically family based play testing for most of the development because we want this to be a game that can translate into the home very easily. Once the games were working fairly well and it looked like things were going pretty smoothly. We actually did work with a second grade classroom and a fifth grade classroom here locally in the Lansing area and brought the games into the classroom and asked the teacher, "Can you please teach this so that we can watch how you teach this and how the kids interact with it?" And God bless teachers is all I can say. Rebecca Strang: 05:16 So are you beyond the play testing? Have you worked with schools or libraries to now get them to incorporate the finished product into their lessons or programming? Karen Cleveland:05:27 Well since this was designed with our elementary school curriculum in mind, which is our "Go wild for Michigan's wildlife" and is very much about learning about common species and learning about what habitat is, we developed a teacher's guide that accompanies the curriculum that you can use to incorporate the games directly into the classroom. And because our mission is not so much about making money selling games, but it's getting the outreach done, we have been buying copies of the game to get into classrooms that are using the curriculum. And we've gotten some, some really positive feedback from teachers who opened up a box in the mail and discovered they've got a bunch of games to play with kids in their classroom now. Rebecca Strang: 06:10 That's awesome. And so for you, what's your favorite part of the game set? Karen Cleveland:06:16 I will admit that "Connect It", which is the dominoes riff is now my favorite. It was a thorn in my side all through development. I was trying to turn it into a competitive game. We've all played dominoes, you want to win, this is what dominoes is. And I never really kind of liked the way it was coming together. It was working, but it wasn't great. The kids liked it, but they weren't particularly selective in what they liked and then brought it into the fifth grade classroom to play test it and the kids basically ignore that it was a competitive game. They shared the cards with each other, they told each other where to place the cards. I got back in my office that afternoon and I went, well, I guess this is a cooperative game. It's not a competitive game. And kind of took some of the core elements but redesign the game to make it a cooperative game. And I have taught some kids how to play it since then and I've watched some kids and the way that they light up at the puzzle-y pieces of it, and they connect with where the species are in their habitat and there's that garter snake and this is what it needs. That is really cool to watch. Rebecca Strang: 07:29 Yeah, that is really cool. Um, so when you were choosing the different habitats and species that you've got in there, what was the planning process like as far as what you were pulling into the game? Karen Cleveland:07:40 We kind of got lucky in that our curriculum designer actually had a set of nineteen species trading cards that she includes with the curriculum. And these are nineteen species that are relatively common in Michigan. They're ones that kids in urban and suburban environments are probably going to encounter. So for Michigan, these are things that make sense like white tail deer and American Robbins and stuff like that. And so the design decisions right from the gate was those nineteen species have to go into this. But then when you start thinking about relationships between species and food webs and you realize that the bulk of these species are all herbivores, you kind of go, Wow, this is a really flat, boring food web and there's no plants." And so a lot of it was how do we build out a web around those nineteen species? And we actually brought colleagues together and we brainstormed up, "Well, what kind of species do we think we should show the kids and how do we break this out into different species groups of birds and mammals and reptiles and what kinds of plants might we want to put it in there?" What a fun part of that conversation was, we were saying, "Oh, we want puff ball mushrooms and we some of these other really common mushrooms and fungi that we're all familiar with in there." And then we got into a debate of, taxonomically, where do these fit into the groups of the game? And it wasn't a blood feud but there was a very strong debate of these can't go into either plants or animals because they are neither and we decided that what we're going to just table fungi in this game, so kids enjoy your mushrooms but we don't have any in the game. Rebecca Strang: 09:28 Do you have any plans for future games where those things that had to be left out might be incorporated or expanding on the idea is that you have in the initial five Karen Cleveland:09:37 I had talked to my boss repeatedly as a kids in the play tests were coming back with ideas and said, "Oh I can think of like another way we can take this deck and another game we could build," and she thankfully has been the voice of reason and said, "No, we're going to get this game out and then we're going to get out of game for our middle school students and then maybe later in a year or two you can think about going back and touching that again, but we have to consider that a finished product." It's just way too tempting to just keep going back and playing with it some more. And I kind of hope that the kids and the families get excited by that as well and they actually come up with their own little home brew games for it. Rebecca Strang: 10:21 Yeah, that would be awesome. And have you started development for the middle school game yet? Karen Cleveland:10:25 We have actually done quite a bit of play testing for the middle school game. The middle school game is all about bears and how bears navigate a landscape that's impacted by humans. And we've had a lot of kids who are really interested. It's very puzzle-y. It's very tile laying. It's another cooperative game. From a conservation perspective, we really want to foster a lot of collaboration and cooperation because that's how conservation works more so than your cutthroat competition. Yeah, for that game we're actually, the kids love the game. The game runs really too long for a classroom. So there's going to be two games in that box with the same components. One will be much shorter, one will be about an hour and a half to two hours long. But we've got an illustrator we're hiring this summer to come in and illustrate it, so we are looking at doing kind of finalize design on that in the near future, hopefully before the end of this calendar year. Rebecca Strang: 11:23 That's awesome and I love the art that you have in What in the Wild. It's great that you've been able to have an artist do that work for you and it's super colorful and vibrant and you know it looks like something that kids would want to pick up. Karen Cleveland:11:40 We are so lucky having Shennelle Anthony here on staff to do graphic design. This is way outside our traditional products here as a government agency, as a wildlife division, and she kind of jumped in with both feet and came back with a whole bunch of ideas. When I said, "Okay, here's my kind of ugly looking biologists design prototype, that is, it works but it's not pretty." And she came back almost immediately ideas. We wanted it to look like the trading cards that we give out with the curriculum and it very much complements that. It's, we loved the black and the green, that dark contrast that worked really well for us. And the big challenge was getting all the photographs, the, when we talk about accessibility, the tendency for us when we think about forests and wetlands is to go to some really remote, pristine area to capture that and most of the kids aren't going to see that around them. And so I was doing a lot of sort of adventuring around my office and my home and when I was on vacation to kind of go, "Okay, can I find a forest that looks like there's people around? Um, can I find a marsh that looks like there's people around?" And so I was standing on a concrete culvert behind a pet store taking a picture of a retainment bond with a traffic intersection in the background for our marsh picture to be able to say, "No marshes or things that you're going to see around you." Habitat is something that's everywhere. It's not way up north or way in the wild wildlife finds habitat everywhere. And to try to capture that in the photos so that the kids could really connect with, "Wait, this is something I can recognize." Rebecca Strang: 13:41 Yeah, that's fantastic that they can look in the game and see the world around them, which is exactly what you want them to do. So, what do you think when kids are playing this game, this game set, what do you think makes it memorable for them? Karen Cleveland:13:57 Part of what's really fun when I watch the kids play it is the way that they make up the stories to go along with it. They'll laugh about what is eating what when they're making those connections as far as it needs to meet his food needs. "Oh I'm going to have a raccoon eat a woodchuck!" And you go, "Okay, we all know that wouldn't really happen." And the kids laugh because they know it, too. But it's great that they're sort of thinking about how that connection happens. Even if they're laughing cause they made something that's not quite 100% realistic and so it's, it's kind of cool to see that happen. We actually had had the fifth grade teacher who was play testing for us. We gave him a prototype deck in advance so that he kind of play it and get a feel for the games. And he told us that he'd taken it home, he played it with his wife a bit and then he and his three year old went out in the yard with a deck of cards to try to find the things that were on the cards. And it's just really cool to hear about that kind of connection. Rebecca Strang: 15:02 Yeah, that is awesome. So for anybody who is listening, who would be interested in getting a copy of the game, where can they find it? Karen Cleveland:15:11 We are selling the game through The Game Crafter and so to buy the game, just go to thegamecrafter.com and search for What in the Wild. And we've got that available as a print-and-play as well as the deck. So it's kind of whatever works for your budget. We'd love to just see it get in your hands. Rebecca Strang: 15:31 Awesome. And for people who'd like to keep up to date with what you're doing online, where can they find you on social media? Karen Cleveland:15:38 Well, there's our agency accounts where we're going to be announcing any kind of work that we're doing with the games and what's going to be coming out soon. And on Twitter that is @mdnr_wildlife for the wildlife division and on Facebook that's MichiganDNR, all one word. Rebecca Strang: 16:03 Alrighty. Well that sounds great. And we hope to see you guys come out with somewhere fun stuff soon too. Oh, and um, do you want to share your personal Twitter stuff too? Karen Cleveland:16:13 Um, if folks want to talk to me about random game stuff that's very silly, they can find me on Twitter @gamebiologist. I can't promise that it will be particularly professional, but I do chat with folks there about games, game development, game design and wildlife. Rebecca Strang: 16:36 Awesome. Yeah, there's all kinds of game chat on Twitter. So. Well, and for our listeners if you have any questions or comments that you'd like to share with us, please email us playabilitypod@gmail.com and you can find us on major social media platforms @playabilitypod. Thanks again for listening and I hope this episode helps you play with a new perspective.