We got to it right away with ideas, the first thing was that we wanted there to be multiple choices that the person can take, to make it feel more real. From that we started thinking of how video games do that, and roll playing games like Dungeons and dragons, how they don't make you do things but give you options, and for a while we had an idea of using dice to determine some factors, like how much money you get, etc. But we all realized that was kind of nerdy and got rid of it. We thought of things like what if they died we could slap a red sticker on them so people know they died. An idea was to have them be in a briefing room where we explain to them what this is, and etc, then towards the end ISIS breaks in and does something, and a debriefing room where people go afterwards to ask questions and what not. |
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All text in blue was placed down by me.
I worked mainly on Specifics on Refugee Crisis. Although I did figure out some stuff that would help out with "Civilians". I remember finding a video of an interview with someone who had escaped Syria, which gave me everything I needed to know, that actually something I've realized is that videos (from reliable resources) especially interviews are stuffed with useful information. Google Doc |
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My contribution was everything you see in blue. Most things in here are similar to what was in simulation. Except of course the destroyed buildings. Something that we had for a long time but got rid of at the very end was having cardboard guns. We decided not to keep that in because we could be scary without a gun, and the fact that it's cardboard and it's obvious, could take away from the experience. We also had the idea of being able to stay with ISIS. We got rid of it permanently around the 3rd play test because we never expanded upon the idea farther than that, and I never came up during the later play-tests. There was also the choice to be smuggled to Greece without having to go through Turkey, but at a higher cost. We realized that the Turkish camps in Turkey was a big contender in the refugee experience, so to skip it would not be in our best interest, and also location reasons. All of this were early draft ideas. The light idea of having them sit down for 10-15 minutes was never incorporated.
Google Doc |
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I made the drawing map, helped gather the photos of Syria, the story of Ahmad Hajjar, and the amount of money it takes to be smuggled. I am proud of the story I made up for this guy. My character wasn't based off any person, but events that happened to multiple people from different stories. I just tried to think what would a man who went through all this be thinking in every situation. Some things that changed was to make ISIS persuade you talk about how good ISIS is, ISIS was very mean. And again we changed making Greece a choice.
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So after making some general ideas, we were ready to do a trial run (we really weren't) so we went out to the courtyard and set up for our simulation. It went...decent for where we were at, for my station, I could see the potential in it, but at the time it looked not so great.
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After we did some work we did it again, but with cardboard props. This time there were some teachers going through it so there was a bit more pressure and so I accidentally made a joke killing the vibe a little bit, but we got one of our group members playing ISIS to step it up a tiny bit and be more choreographed when they were "beating" someone up.
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