BT Young Scientist Exhibition Game
I found out about the original game design competition, This Is Not A Game, through my older brother. The competition was run by Griffith College Dublin, Coderdojo and The U.S Embassy and was for students who were between twelve and 18 years old. The whole point of the competition was to raise awareness of problems in the world through games. The idea is that every year a different issue will be chosen and there'll be three or four different themes or topics to deal with and try to incorporate into the game. This year the issue was the ocean and how much it is actually needed. The themes to use were over-fishing, climate change and pollution.
The launch event was on the 29th of October in Griffith College Dublin. We were then shown the different ways of going about making a game and had talks from different speakers. Speakers included mentors from Coderdojo, a marine biologist from Texas and a software developer from Havok Studios. These talks were to provide us with the facts and information that we needed, show us how to use different game design software ranging from the simple GameMaker to the more complicated Unity3D or Havok's Project Anarchy and to show us how to make an effective trailer using something as basic as Windows Movie Maker. We were then told to form teams ourselves and to start planning the game.
We were then given around 3 months to make a game from scratch and have a trailer ready. We were assigned mentors from various companies associated with gaming, game design or software design, though as far as I know none of the teams, including my own, actually had much contact with the mentors.
The actual game my team and I made was really simple and didn't take half as long as the other games to make. Most of our time was spent bickering over who should be doing what and what we should actually do. We decided to keep the game simple so it could be played by anyone of any age group, even if they weren't actual "gamers". We decided to go for getting the message across rather than making an amazing game with really good graphics or a story line. The game itself is easy, you play as a sea turtle and must eat the jellyfish while avoiding the plastic bags. Only problem is, the jelly fish and plastic bags are almost identical, if we can't tell the difference between them, then how can a sea turtle? There is also no way to actually win the game and every time the turtle dies a message pops up saying:
"It is estimated that 100 million sea creatures die each year due to plastic debris washed out into the ocean off the streets".
We were hoping the more times a person played and lost, the more determined they get to try and win which will result in that message showing up multiple times and hopefully it will stick with them.
Four finalists were chosen out of 19 teams and games who then got to go to to the BT Young Scientists Exhibition with the games. It was an amazing experience to be able to show off our game there. There was even this one little boy, he couldn't have been older than six or seven, who had played my team's game and after a couple of hours he came back over to us saying "where's the turtle game gone? I want to play the turtle game again!". That was best part of the whole thing to me, the fact that a little kid actually played the game and wanted to come back and play it again. We were only given one screen and one laptop so only one game at a time could actually be shown and played. But every time the other teams but their games on, they'd go look around at the other stalls but there'd always be at least one person from my team at the stall so we'd change the game back to ours. So ours was the most popular game by the end of the day.
Later that day, Americans from the U.S Embassy came over to have a look at the games we had made. We had to present our games to the Chargé d'affaires Stuart Dwyer, though we were told he was the actual U.S Ambassador. Each team had to take it in turns to present their games to him. My team was the last to do the presentation, so while I was explaining how simple the game was, my teammate Thomas decided to interrupt and tell him he should try the game to see how easy the game actually was. The faces on the other teams was priceless! They didn't think to let him try out their games himself so they stood there raging and fuming to themselves.
All finalists were then presented with medals while one member from each team did an interview for 2fm. The whole experience of it all was amazing, I wish I could do it again next year, but I suppose I'd have the unfair advantage seeing as I'd be doing game design and development in college, well hopefully I will be anyway, because to me
"What makes you a gamer isn't the systems you use, it isn't the genres you play, or even how good you are. What makes you a gamer is that you realise it's never "just a game". Because whether it's to save one special person or an entire world, if you want to be the greatest in a match or the greatest of them all, we pour our hearts and souls into what we do. We get back up no matter how many times we're knocked down and we keep going until we reach our goal. That passion is what makes who we are, that is what makes us gamers."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjWiSclZnt4&feature=youtu.be that's an overview of the This Is Not a Game competition with an interview with my teammate Thomas Carrigan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV6waUbHt-w&feature=youtu.be that's the this is not a game finalist's trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtHCUZeMuB8 that is my teams game trailer, it doesn't have any actual game footage in it, we wanted to catch people's attention instead
Lauren Keogh
