Walk for Water

Our Team

Game Poster

Walk for Water

Razor

Overcome hardships and work together to collect water for the family!

Slogan

Try your best to survive during a water crisis!

Vision Statement & Top level summary of your game idea

Living in Africa, where more than half of the population is suffering from water scarcity, access to clean water is far and limited. Walk for water is a time based cooperative role playing game where players experience the life of children living in Sub-saharan Africa helping their family fetch water. Children’s dreams run dry as they have to sacrifice their education in order to help their family fetch water needed for their daily activities. The journey to fetching water is not easy, you will encounter many events and accidents that can affect your health and chance of going to school. You must work together with other players to make smart decisions in order to overcome all the difficulties and get to school on time.

Player experience goal(s) + atmosphere users should experience

Summary

Our current player experience mainly sits on People fun and Serious fun based on Lazarro's 4 Keys 2 Fun. Based on Yee’s player motivation taxonomy, we will focus on the role-playing components and mechanics to optimize our game’s player experience. Accordingly, the fun player should experience from our game could be listed as Expression, Narrative, and Submission refer to the aesthetic from the MDA framework.

Our desired player experience goal:

1. Let players connect to their role play characters and interact with other players through the game.

2. Informative experience where players acquire new knowledge through the game’s mechanics and storyline

3. Let the players empathize with the situations their role play characters are facing during the game play.

Our desired atmosphere:

1. Exciting and engaging atmosphere where players are having fun but also critically thinking about each decision they make in the game

2. We hope to invoke an intense and emotional atmosphere at times when players make sacrifices or emphasize with other players.

How does it address the design challenge of a Transformative Game?

What’s the underlying challenge/problem your game aims to tackle, and how could addressing this help make this world a better place to live?

The underlying problem our game aims to tackle is the water scarcity in sub-Saharan Africa where both the governments and the water management system are weak while also facing the polluted water caused by the overpopulation. Clean water is a scarce resource, many people struggle to get access to the quality and quantity of water they need just for basic everyday activities. Through this game, we hope players understand how difficult it is for children to fetch water everyday and how much it is impacting their health and education. This is an important topic of discussion because most of us living in first-world countries can get access to clean water easily and therefore it is easy to forget that not everyone in the world has this privilege. Addressing this issue will encourage players to support and donate to water projects that can help these communities get access to water more easily.

Background research on underlying problem/challenge that your game aims to tackle

The key factors of people living in sub-Saharan Africa having water scarcity that we would like to focus on:

• Lack of water resources

• Frequent disasters such as drought, happen in such area

• Lack of water sanitation

To be more detailed, the real reasons should be:

1. Surface-water is highly polluted but groundwater is the best resource for people. However, the governments do not have enough funds to deal with the technical challenge to filter the water and find sources that are large enough to serve the population in need.

2. Overcrowding in the area leads to large volumes of water being extracted from existing sources. Besides, the influx in human waste outpaced the development of the wastewater management system, and leads to pollution of water and unintentional use of wastewater.

3. The transboundary water laws are not well legislated to provide enough water for the people in sub-Saharan Africa to get water from other colonials. The tense relationship between states affects this.

4. “Students no longer have any energy and aren’t really learning much,” he says. “I have students who have to get up at 1 a.m. to take animals somewhere for water, and they don’t get back home until 5 a.m.”

5. 20% of the school’s students have dropped out since the beginning of the year, or that physical education classes have been cancelled: there isn’t enough water to give to children who would be exercising.

References:

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/water-stress-sub-saharan-africa

https://thewaterproject.org/water-crisis/water-in-crisis-rural-urban-africa

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/water-and-sanitation-crisis-sub-saharan-africa/

https://www.unicef.org/stories/where-drinking-water-90-minute-walk-away

Team motivation

Our team cares about this topic because it is a relevant problem that is happening today. Our members feel that there is a lack of awareness about water scarcity as all of us are living in first world countries where the access to clean water is not a big problem. We use water daily for different purposes without realizing that not everyone can get access to water easily. People in other parts of the world have to sacrifice their health and education to get water for everyday basic duties.

Why would a game be a suitable approach to tackling this challenge/problem?

Game is a good approach to tackle this challenge because the players can experience a different worldview in our game without having to create an actual experience in real life, so it also provides us with a high degree of freedom to express the topic and underlying message in different forms. Furthermore, a game is an immersive experience where players can learn through action which is more interactive and easier to grasp about the problem. Besides, a game expresses emotions so that players could understand the message easily when their emotions are triggered during gameplay.

Desired “transformation” and impact of game on players

The desired transformation we hope players experience is a change in thinking and understanding about the issue of water scarcity and encouraging them to help out (ex. donate) to people in other countries suffering from water scarcity. We chose this aspect because we believe that player’s will change their perspective of water usage by first understanding the severity of the issue and emphasizing it with people who are experiencing this problem. To do this, we set the premise of our game in Sub saharan Africa, a country that is dealing with severe water scarcity. Each player will role play a child living in that environment and they will have to experience the dangerous journey of fetching water and how that can negatively impact their education.

How would you assess the game’s impact?

The potential indicators of success is observing whether players are immersed or focused during gameplay because in each round, players have to make decisions on how their clean water is being used which will lead to issues that pertain to real life consequences. At the end of the game, we hope to see players go through their role play and resource cards and understand the scope of the problem through the storyline of their role and much water they are able to use daily. Observing the player’s emotion would be a good indicator during playtest to see if the game worked in communicating the underlying message.

Inspiration Analysis

This is a water conservation game that teaches players about how their everyday actions can harm Lake Michigan. This is a very interesting game as the use of each bead in the centre represents the water In Lake Michigan and every action the players take that wastes water, they will need to take out a bead which represents water being wasted. In the end the beads can be used to form a bracelet that can be worn by the player. I thought that this is a very unique use of mechanics because players can visually see the effects of their actions and the bracelet can remind them about conserving their clean water. Through the use of simple mechanics and rules, the game was able to stimulate a discussion about the importance of water conservation. https://www.chicagobotanic.org/blog/plant_science_conservation/play_game_learn_about_water_conservation

Water for tomorrow - This is a game about the importance of managing water resources. An interesting element to this game is that each player is role playing someone in the city (ex. farmer, environmental advocate, or a small town mayor etc.) and they are given a set of cards that shows a different storyline based on the character. Our game also incorporates storytelling and this is a good inspiration for our game. Role playing puts players into someone else's shoes and sees the situation from a different perspective. The visual design of their mechanics is also very inspiring because they incorporated a lot of images, quotes, and descriptions which is very informative and helps players be more immersed in the game. https://www.tesacollective.com/portfolio/water-for-tomorrow-creating-a-game-for-the-nature-conservancy/

Flow - This game is also about water conservation in particular the competitiveness of water in the world. What is inspiring about this game is that there are interactive mechanics where players can collect pipes that connect to each other that represents their water amount. This is another way of allowing players to visually see the impact of their action which I believe is a good way for players to reflect on their behaviour. This is something I want to also implement in our team's game.

https://mspratt.myportfolio.com/flow-water-conservation-board-game-design

Why Your Project is Innovative?

Our project focuses on water scarcity in sub-Saharan Africa, which is a novel theme. Our game allows players to learn about the seriousness of the local problem by experiencing the real life of African children fetching water every day, so as to arouse people's attention to the problem. The selling point of our game is the environmental protection and public welfare attributes of the game itself. Environmentalists, people who are enthusiastic about public welfare, people who are concerned about water shortages in Africa, and people who are suffering from water shortages will care about it and want to play it.

Introduction

Premise : Children in Africa live in a water crisis environment which is disrupting their education. However, for most children, they spend the early mornings travelling miles to the water well to fetch water for their family’s daily activities. As a result, children do not have time to attend classes, are forced to miss school or simply do not have enough energy to learn.

Setting: Sub-saharan Africa

Objective: The goal of the game is to ensure everyone fetches all the water and reaches home before school starts within the 40 min time limit.

Core gameplay: 3 African children attend the same school. They all have the task of fetching water at the water well every morning. Players have to work together to fetch all the water ( 10 droplets per child) within the 40 min time limit before school starts. If the time runs out or they lose all their energy (health points) before the players reach home, players will not be able to attend school.

Unique: What makes this game unique is that it involves strategy, luck, and teamwork and the gameplay allows players to immerse in a new environment and think from a different perspective about the value of water.

Narrative/Story

There is no narrative or story

Game mechanics

Number of players: 3-4 players

Target Audience: ages 8 and above, suitable for all genders to play at gatherings or for educational purpopses

Game Mechanics:

Core: reward cards, event cards, resource cards, role cards, container cards

Secondary: timer, dice, points counters, figures

Game Setup:

Gameplay Procedure

Each of our players will have their own figure to move around the path on the board. Players roll the dice to decide how many steps they could move. When moving along the path to get water, players have the chance to land on the square where they need to draw an event or reward card. When a player reaches the well, the container will be filled with a certain amount of water and the player has to bring it home to gain the points. The players who reach the 10 points in the limited time will be the winners.

Basic Ideas of the Rules

Our basic idea of the game is to make a board game which could educate players and evoke sympathy about the harsh life of people living in sub saharan Africa facing water scarcity. We want the game to raise more awareness about the problems of water scarcity. Moreover, we intend to let beginners put their hands on our game easily, hence, our team decided to make our rules as simple as possible, which should be understood and remembered after going through it once or twice.