In our Games For Change class, Tiger Louck and I worked on a tabletop game that dealt with themes of oppression, poverty, and organizing against a political and economic system.  The Machine acts as this system, and after every turn, the Machine will inflict 1 of 7 acts of economic violence onto the players.  The object of the game is to be able to change, or “fix,” the Machine by flipping any 4 of those 7 Machine actions to their respective positive versions.

We had decided to turn this metaphorical Machine into something physical and tangible for a more immersive player experience.  Additionally, a press of a button with a screen telling which action occurs is much easier than rolling a 20-sided-die and consulting through a lengthy reference sheet that shows which number coordinates with which action.

Our original concept shown above was to lay out 7 switches for the player on one long breadboard, a button, a speaker, a motor, some lights, and an LCD screen for output.  The switches would act as the negative Machine actions and their respective positive versions that the players would flick the switches to.  The button would be pressed to decide which action the Machine would take.  For ambience and setting the tone for the game, the speaker would let out a low humming noise, the motor would rumble every so often, and the lights would blink on and off.  Lastly, the LCD screen would be used to relay the information back to the players on which action the Machine would take.

https://youtu.be/kTRABeJezPg

This is our final draft of the Machine.  We had decided to ditch the speaker and the motor, as they would draw a lot of power and we had ran into power supply issues throughout the development of the project.  Because of not being able to provide enough power throughout the breadboard, we had to use the aid of an external battery.   We kept all the other parts though, and used an additional smaller breadboard to act as the controller for the switches.

There are several intentionally unusual design choices we had incorporated.  Firstly being to make the Machine physically messy, as all economic systems figuratively are.  In addition, since oppressive societies are tough to change, we made it physically difficult to get one’s finger in between the wires to flip the switches.  We have also made the Machine difficult to interpret at first, which is why we included a map as well.

Catch The Red was done by a group of German students for a game development project, the ones credited being Lisa Miller, Elisabeth Friesinger, and Tine H.  They built it with the Arduino Uno base, as well as with LED lights.

These students created an escape room scenario in which the player must press a button whenever a moving white LED light crosses over a stationary red LED light, and if they were successful 5 times, a key would be revealed that would let them out of the room.

A suspenseful atmosphere is created by the idea of being locked in a room with the idea of having perfect timing in order to escape the room, and that pressure contributes to a large sum of the difficulty of the game.