After revealing that to us, she had spent the majority of her lecture talking about the idea of games touching difficult subjects, as opposed to games solely being played for fun. She cited some examples, and one in particular caught my interest. She told us a story regarding a day when her daughter came home from school. She had asked what her daughter had done at school and her daughter told her that she learned about Middle Passage. That’s a pretty important thing to learn in history so Brenda had asked her what she thought about. Brenda told us they was she described it sounded like people from Africa went on a cruise to America to work and they weren’t happy about that. And then she asked Brenda if she could play a game.

That was pretty surprising to many of us because Middle Passage is not a trivial event. So Brenda decided that it was time to prototype a game(from her lecture, I gather that she often does this and maybe I should too)  with her daughter. The game was modeled after the event. She had her daughter gather her prototype figures up to resemble families. Some of the those family members went onto boats(represented by index cards) and some stayed, to resemble the families being broken up. They had ten turns to get a ship packed with the slaves across the ocean. They have 30 amounts of food for the whole trip. Each turn, they roll a die for the ship and the number that comes up is how much food is consumed. When they ran out of food, people on the boat had to die. It was then that her daughter finally got the seriousness of the matter. And there were apparently many tears to go around.

Brenda is clearly a creative and intelligent woman; the way she got her daughter to finally understand what happened during Middle Passage from an abstract level was truly inspiring. By actually doing something that affected the recreation of a historical event, her daughter was able to learn about the subject more effectively than what school had attempted to do earlier that day. Hearing this story and others during her lecture was truly inspiring and I can definitely see why Brenda is one of the most revered designers in the game industry. I was reading Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design again yesterday and he stresses the idea that what makes games fun is that we learn something from them; we may not know it all the time, but we do. It was something I was thinking about for the next game I want to work on.

Play is an important part of learning because there’s no pressure involved. The goal of Brenda’s lecture seemed to focus on designing games that covered challenging subjects like history’s atrocities that may invoke sadness as opposed to joy that games are known to bring about in us instead. However, every game she discussed as an example had a strong educational aspect to it. People would actually gain something from playing her games. I’ve been thinking lately about wanting to create a game where players work together to accomplish something and possibly even learn from the experience. I am still not sure yet what that will be, but Brenda’s talk presented some possibilities and for that, I am thankful.