After Hours: A Game for students, by students.
Background
It all began with a hope for students to be exposed to the ever-growing community that can help open doors creatively, personally and professionally. ATLAS provides an abundantly diverse community, but that can sometimes feel intimidating or overwhelming to new individuals.
We wondered, how possible is it to use gamification to expand undergraduates learning outside of the classroom? We began with researching topics that related to community, creativity, collaboration, communication, interactivity, and gamification. Inspired by projects like Reality Ends Here and Just Press Play, these higher educational games helped inform several elements of our capstone. You can read more about our ideation, prototyping, and presenting in our project proposal.
After Hours is a design intervention aimed at promoting student engagement by encouraging creative endeavors with the community around them. Taking place over a six week period during the start of the Spring semester, After Hours uses a web platform to facilitate physical experiences through a series of challenges.
With this project being positioned as an experiment, we knew going into it that we would change things up week to week depending on real feedback and cues from those involved.
Game Mechanics
The pilot season took place over a six week period during the start of the Spring semester where a central web platform encouraged physical experiences through a series of challenges. The backbone of this game lies on afterhoursgame.com. This platform was the epicenter of the game; updates, challenges, content shares, leaderboards, and prizes were all posted to keep players connected.
Ten challenges, ranging from 10 to 100 points were released bi-monthly to all the players. Challenges fell into categories of craft, community, and collaboration that encouraged students to create, collaborate and go out in their community.
Players could pick and choose which to complete, such as crafting a logo for the After Hours game or even creating a silly product video. The only way for players to collect on challenges was by submitting content to the game’s platform. At the end of each game round, a player with the most points was crowned champion and received a prize. During season one, we had 45 players and about 25 project submissions to the site.
You can view specific website details in our post-launch update.
Maker-Event
We hosted an in-person event to bring together the members of the After Hours community. Our goal for the event was to increase engagement in the game and encourage to continue the momentum.
Book
A product that came out of the experience was The Guide to After Hours: A game for students, by students that is to live on after the games ending. We wanted to leave this piece of valuable information to others interested in recreating and building upon a similar experience in educational environments.
Closing Notes
Some of the insights we found through the creation of After Hours include:
Storytelling: After Hours took a risk by lacking one of the key components to successful game design, an underlying storyline. It was found that a game that entices players through prizes, gain experience and competition is not an incentive that provides recurring engagement. However, a plot that players can uncover clues, secrets and information about will provide more reason to play the game.
Integration: Allowing After Hours to run wild parallel to TAM courses allowed players to have their own agency in completing challenges and quests. Many players explained that they could not find the time to play with a heavy course load. Thus, more integration into the TAM curriculum could have offered increased player engagement by allowing the game to be apart of the course work rather than competing with it.
In-Person Interaction: Offering an event in the final weeks of The Game allowed interaction offline where players were able to make and share in a physical space. The event style competition proved to be the most successful part of the game that allowed for fear to fail, rapid feedback and progression through the nature of the making challenge.
The outcome of the game, although small, was a start to making true impact in the environment around us. Education is not just learning from our scholars before us, but it is taking initiating upon yourself get in the habit of creating, seek out your collaborators, and cultivate future communities.