Values at Play: VEXATA Game

Mary Flanagan · Helen Nissenbaum · James Bachhuber · Zara Downs

Thu., June 11, 11:00–12:30, Play Circle Theater (2nd floor, West)

In this workshop, our research team will demonstrate the latest game in our series of game design card games, VEXATA, which is designed to facilitate discussion and understanding of human values in games. Building on the insights gained from our team’s prior work with Grow-A-Game cards, the new game is designed to open the discussion on human principles in games to young designers who may not yet have the analytic experience necessary to do open-ended brainstorming and values analysis.

Developed at Tiltfactor with groups like the Boys and Girls Club of America in mind, VEXATA is engaging because it combines board game and card game elements to scaffold the discussion about values for the middle school audience. While moving their playing pieces around the board, players draw cards that introduce new game rules that express social issues and human values. Values are translated into the dynamic rules one uses to play the game to spark consideration of how values can be expressed through game mechanics and representational elements. VEXATA is a useful first step towards helping young thinkers integrate human principles into their discussion and analysis of existing games, and development of new games.

We build on prior research incorporating the study of ethics, science, and technology studies, and design disciplines demonstrated in our Values at Play project. We use Freire’s (2005) “problematize” to describe how we encourage designers to keep a critical view on games’ impact and their role in culture. Kincheloe and McLaren (2003) note that, “Such work involves the unraveling of the ideological codings embedded in these cultural representations… [made] complicated by the taken-for-grantedness of the meanings promoted in these representations and the typically undetected ways these meanings are circulated into everyday life… The better the analyst, the better he or she can expose these meanings in the domain of the ‘what-goes-without-saying,’ the activity previously deemed noise unworthy of comment” (p. 448).

Our goal is not simply to help participants recognize that human principles (negative and positive) can be embodied in design but also to set forth the expression of particular principles as a fundamental design goal. Tiltfactor, working with the Values at Play team, is working to make tools to help designers and players learn to include values as the set of criteria by which the quality of a given technology is judged. We actively strive for a world whose technologies are not only effective, attractive, easy to use, etc., but also promote or challenge the values to which the surrounding societies and cultures subscribe, such as justice and equality. The VEXATA game activity is intended to help younger players uncover for themselves the “taken-for-granted” things in games by emphasizing the link between social values and game mechanics.