I'm currently doing a pilot program at my school (I'm a teacher) in which one of my students has come up with a concept for a game that I and several other staff members think is a pretty good idea. He wanted to design a card game that would give the player an experience of what it is like for a student with multiple diagnoses of disabilities ranging from A-spectrum disorders (Autism, Aspergers) and common things like ADHD and Anxiety.
We have several ideas on how the game would go, and several possibilities for cards and mechanics:
- Target Audience: Teenage peers of students with disabilities, parents of children with disabilities, and students in school for degrees who will be working with students with disabilities in their careers. While certainly playable by students with disabilities, they are to varied and it would be almost impossible to make a game targeting many different disabilities since they all have different demands.
- Challenge Cards: These are the disabilities that each player would get. They make obtaining Event cards more difficult. We have not decided if players would have a starting pool of Mental and Physical points that would be expended on gaining Event cards, or if it would be a dice pool of multiple types of dice.
Additionally, we were toying with the idea of including various physical things they player would need to do, or not do, or face a penalty to their pool. For example, someone with the ADHD challenge card would have to get out of their seat and walk around the table every time some specific trigger happened in the game, or a person with the OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) might have to keep all of their dice in a single line with all the numbers being the same on all the dice. Failure to do these things would cause a loss of M/P or dice or victory points.
- Victory Conditions: The goal of the game is also up in the air. We can't decide if it would be better to make the Event Cards worth points with more challenging events worth more, and the Challenge cards worth either a multiplier or a set amount of large points, or alternatively to make it a card-gathering type of race, where the first person to get cards in certain categories would win.
- Event Cards: We have these divided into categories, ranging from school to family to social. Some are relatively banal daily tasks (taking a test, interaction at a party, phone call from a parent) to more intense challenges a person might face in their life. The goal is to obtain these cards as part of the victory condition, and depending on what challenge cards the player has, these will be easier or harder for the players. A player with ADHD might have to spend more points to get the "Taking a Test' event than someone with a social anxiety disorder.
- Mitigation Cards: We haven't figured out if this would be a separate deck or if these would be shuffled in with the event cards. Mitigators would be cards that payers could use to cut down on their challenge cards' disadvantages. They would be things like 'Friend', 'Tutor', 'Medication', 'Teacher', 'Hobby' or others that would either reduce the difficulty the challenge card presented, lowered the amount of dice/points/whatever spent on accomplishing events, and would either be single use or stay on the play field depending on the circumstances. They could also be removed by various events.
Other ideas:
- Challenge cards would be selected in a draft fashion, and possibly event cards as well.
- Players might have to rotate their 'person' forcing other players to use their challenges throughout the game. Mitigation cards may either go with the challenge cards, or possibly be wiped when rotations occur.
I'd love to hear any feedback and suggestions this community might have. I'm an avid gamer, but I've never really tried to MAKE one.
I once found a nice game to help web-interface design, and why 'busy' designs are inherrently less accessible than non-busy designs, for ADHD especially - Basically it gave you a bunch of information to find on a website, once with a sane interface, once with a busy interface, and once with a nightmarish interface where menu elements looked pretty, and had you navigate the website with your mouse while you played something like Kaboom! with your keyboard, so the idea of games that illustrate disabilities can certainly work.
One thing I'd note is that your basic description seems to fall well into the medical model of disability, while the social model of disability is often superior.
And this is a daft question, but have you and/or your student talked to disabled people about this game yet? Without doing that, you're always going to be missing one of the most important perspectives for how disabled people are affected by disability. Reading stuff by disabled people if no-one's willing to talk about their disability for the project is obviously a good idea too.
I actually teach at a facility where every student has a disability, and often multiple diagnoses. This student had the idea that people could better understand the disabilities via a game.