Abstract: They Aren’t Like Me: Developing a Meaningful Game for “Them”
Game design and development students at Bradley University recently created Wake Up, Koala!, a game designed to raise awareness for Sjögren’s Syndrome, an auto-immune disorder that affects millions of Americans. The project produced a game that is not only valuable to those affected, but produced an experience for undergraduate students to consider a target demographic unlike them–Sjögren’s primarily affects women over the age of 40. Through defining requirements with our collaborators at the Sjögren’s Syndrome Foundation, generating ideas, meeting deadlines, controlling chaos, and, as always, having a healthy dose of luck, the game’s 100+ levels were finished. For this talk, I will discuss key production processes we followed during the most important stages of development, with emphasis on how we purposefully considered the diverse needs of the target demographic.
This event is co-sponsored by the School of Interactive Games and Media and Women in Computing.
Bio: Dr. McGill is an Associate Professor in the Department of Interactive Media and serves as the Game Design Lead. Her research areas include curriculum and instruction of game degree programs, development and evaluation of meaningful games, and improvement of programming and software development education for all students through increased student engagement. In the classroom, Dr. McGill is active in producing online and mobile games with students, such as Coco’s Cove and Wake Up, Koala!. She also produces and develops meaningful games for various commercial and not-for-profit clients. Before coming to Bradley, Dr. McGill worked as a Systems Analyst and Computer Scientist in both industry and government. Her professional background includes formal methodologies to ensure code correctness, automated theorem provers, database management systems, and system design and development. She also served as an adjunct faculty member at the National Cryptological School teaching logic and formal methods.