This is the game brief for the game called To Catch a Cheater that aims towards teaching teachers to act on evidence not on implicit bias. The game also is played with multiple people so the players can learn from each other to beat their implicit bias. The game brief goes over all of this and more.
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To Catch A Cheater
Genre: Card Game, Educational
Audience: The audience is student teachers aged 18-30 that are learning about implicit bias and how it affects their work. The entity states that the audience is those who are going into the occupation of teaching.
Primary Objective:.
- The primary objective of “To Catch a Cheater” is to educate and raise awareness, specifically student teachers, but also all educators whether they display signs of implicit bias.
- By playing the game, teachers will learn whether they generalize a student based on appearance or background, and if they do, strive towards learning to suppress their implicit bias.
- The entity revolves around trying to educate educators on implicit bias in our surroundings. The reason our game idea “To Catch a Cheater” reflects on the goals of the entity is because the game forces people to generalize but strives to nitpick who the players will generalize. The hope of the game is to promote and raise awareness of people’s individual implicit bias.
Introduction to Game:
To Catch A Cheater is a tabletop educational card game,for two to ten players, that is used to educate the player on implicit bias. Each player will receive the same 5 student cards, each card will have picture of the student on the front and a short bio on the back. Each student card will have a different hint about the student on the bottom of the card. Each player will have 60 seconds to decide which student is the cheater, based only on the information available on the card (i.e. appearance/background information). Once the time is up every player will tell who they chose as the cheater and why, then the real cheater will be revealed to the players.The game has a very fast pace, allowing for multiple playthroughs in one session. Similar to Clue, the player has to decide the cheater without knowing all the information.
Mechanics:
Cards
There will be 3 decks of 50 cards. The first deck will be 3rd graders, the second deck will have 6th graders, the final deck will have 12th graders.One deck will be specifically chosen per round in order to more accurately pick the cheater. The cards shall be presented with a front and back side. Each student will have 5 individual and different cards highlighting a different aspect of their character. Each card will have a “mugshot” frame picture of the student in the class. The back will have a short bio on the student, highlighting their name, age, and a fragment of their whole bio.
Timer
Game will provide a simple timer to be set for 60 seconds. Players have that time to review their cards and choose who they think is the potential cheater.
True Cheater Deck and Envelope
The identity of the true student cheating will be contained on a true cheater card. This card will be contained in 3 seperate grade based decks. One deck is played per round based off of which grade is chosen to assess. The deck will be placed in an envelope, remaining there until the end of the round timer. The players will reopen the envelope and reveal the identity of the cheater, drawing a single cheater card to see if they are correct or not. The true cheater deck of cards is not used outside of the selection, and each card has a backside with a short reason why the student chose to cheat.
Point Accumulation
To determine a final winner, the first person to correctly pick three cheaters will be declared the winner.
Explain how the mechanics chosen are the best ones for your Primary Objective:
These mechanics require the player to exercise their conscience ability to assess and analyze their hand of “students” and select a cheater based off of their own opinion. The game is meant to draw on our conclusions about stereotypes and background knowledge about different identifiers like appearance, race, and background.
Game Control:
Each player can only base their guess on the appearance of the student card. This forces the user to think about their bias in order to determine the cheater.
Score/Objective/Winning/Losing/Competition:
The objective is to find the cheater and whoever gets it right is awarded a point. The game keeps getting played until someone gets 3 points.
Interface/Information:
The player has cards with an image of a student and a small bio about them, including their name, where they are from, etc… These are the only details until the game reaches its end. At the end, after each player explains why they chose the student they chose, the real cheater will be revealed along with the reason that they cheated.
Main User Mechanics/Actions:
Identify Bias – Having to identify your bias and being able to use it to choose which person is the cheater.
Communication – Explaining your reasoning for choosing who you believed to be the cheater was
Levels/Environment:
N/A this is a card game. There is a single round in each game and you find who the cheater is at the end.
Obstacles, interactive elements, enemies, collectibles, npcs etc: N/A
Describe and Explain the unique ways in which your game idea meets the needs of the theme, entity, AND objective.
- The game meets the needs of the theme entity and objective by using the classroom setting that the people playing the game are involved in as well as using multiple players to see the thought process of not just the one person but of the multiple people and how they would approach the situation.
Sixty seconds of play:
The game will initiate with the distribution of five cards to each participant in the game and players will then have 60 seconds to determine which of the five students is a cheater. The game is played to unearth whether the players display any signs of implicit bias by deeming somebody a cheater based on appearance/background information.
Link to video of similar gameplay. Link to video or inclusion of images of similar look/style.
Will Montgomery Serious Game 