Pack-a-Pack

Symbolism

In this game you pack a student backpack with the items they need for school, but instead of school supplies, it’s human needs! I based the needs bars off of  a simplified version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. On the Shelf there are needs that will help the student, and rocks that will only weigh them down. You can explore the effect that different help gives the student.

Connection to the Films

In my original design for this game you would need to pack a backpack to help different students from the films we watched in class. Alike from Pariah was lacking in societal support and she was experiencing homophobia. Auggie from Wonder was lacking in a support network, causing him to lean too much on his family to help him meet social needs. And Eva from Freedom Writers had experienced trauma and was lacking in therapy needs. In the end, I didn’t have time to add everything I wanted, so I just based the items and stones off of what these characters would have needed in their emotional backpacks. 

Connection to Texts

One thing that stuck out to me in the texts was “What ‘white folks who teach in the hood’ get wrong about education”. I wish things were as simple as packing a backpack. And I like to think that an individual teacher could make the difference we see in movies like Freedom Writers, but of course in reality things are much more complicated than that. Many of the problems these kids face exist at the societal level, and the best we can do to help them is get to know them and their culture, and listen to their individual needs, and work from there. If only things were as simple as taking a rock out of a backpack.

Connection to the Lens

Some of the items of the game refer to lens and themes we connected things too in our film analysis sheets. For instance, I connected Privilege with money. I know that people who are being discriminated against sometimes have money or power, but I thought that since making money is easier to do with privilege it was an appropriate analogy. I also wanted to connect being poorly represented, or wrongly stereotyped, can negatively affect students. We need to fight against existing power structures so that no student has to go to school with rocks filling up their backpacks. 

The Making of this Game

If you’re not experienced in making video games, it’s worth it to know that making a game like this is very time consuming. I have been doing game development competitions for some years, and I still underestimated the amount of time I would need to finish this. As it, this was a 14 hour long project. The art and coding were the most time consuming parts. Even so, my dream is to one day make educational games, so I really wanted to practice with this project. Designing a game to teach what we learned this semester was an iterative process. Previous versions of this game looked more like a search and find kind of game, with different lens showing different objects. I ended up changing the design to make it faster to play through, since I’m sure you have a lot to grade.