Alec Patton:
This started off second semester. I did not feel like I had the trust of the group.

Dany Francis:
Oh, you did not have the trust of the group whatsoever, Dr. P. Sorry to say that.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton. Today, I’m going to tell you about the Syrian Refugee Survival Simulation, which is a project that I did with 56 10th graders in the spring of 2016. And in order to understand it, you need to experience the exhibition the way the audience experienced it. The experience starts a week before High Tech High Chula Vista’s Festival Del Sol when you get an email inviting you to take part in a simulation in which you will take on the role of a Syrian refugee. You are asked to sign up for one of three time slots spaced 15 minutes apart. After you get your spot, you get an email from a student. Here’s what it says.

Dany Francis:
Hello, thank you for taking the time to come to our exhibition. I’m one of the lead designers of this exhibition, and it was a blast organizing it and making it come to life. Now we need you to help us. On the day of the exhibition, you’ll be playing through our exhibition as a refugee going through the current Syrian refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe. You will be going through a simulation built upon weeks and weeks of research on this crisis and you will experience what a refugee grows through in a smaller scale. I want to remind you, this is not a regular exhibition. In this exhibition, you will immerse yourself and your character with a goal in mind. Some people will help you. Some people won’t. I’ve taken the liberty of attaching the character you’ll be playing in the simulation alongside our project sheet that we received at the beginning of the project, which outlined our initial goal. As a reminder, you marked that you will be coming at 4:05 on Wednesday and you will start at 4:15. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email me. All the best, Dany.

Alec Patton:
Your character sheet identifies you as [Nejilah Al-Sheik], a 36-year-old woman from Raqqa, Syria who fled with her two young sons after her husband was imprisoned by the Assad regime. You read that your character objective is to get somewhere safe and learn to be a teacher, and that you have $2,000. When you arrive at the exhibition, you see a section of the outdoor cafeteria cordoned off with yellow caution tape and a 10th grade student escorts you behind the middle school, where she gives you an envelope with a printout of your character sheet and $2,000 in monopoly money. The student starts to explain how the simulation will work, but before she can finish, two students dressed in black interrupt her and announced that the town has been seized by ISIS. A student next to you starts whispering to you that you don’t need to do what they say that you could fight back. Before you know what’s happening, the two students in black, pull them out of the crowd and take them away.

While they’re gone, another student runs in and says he can smuggle 10 of you to Turkey, but it will cost you $1,000. You pay him the thousand dollars, half your money, and you follow him. He takes you to a refugee camp in Kilis, Turkey, and now you need to decide whether to stay there and apply for asylum somewhere else, knowing that even if you’re successful, it could take years, or to continue to Izmir, a port city on the Aegean Sea to pay a, smuggler to take you to Greece in a boat. If you survive the voyage to Greece, you’ll continue making your way through Europe through a twisty path delineated by caution tape, homemade barbed wire, and overturned picnic tables. On your way, you’ll try to reason with guards. You may pay another smuggler and you’ll try to ignore the taunts of anti-immigrant protesters until you either die, run out of money or find your way to a safe country where you can start a new life. Whatever happens, you end by sitting down with a member of the UN high commission on refugees to debrief your experience.

And that was the Syrian Refugee Simulation. It was probably my most ambitious project, certainly my most stressful. And though I’m proud of it, when I look back on it now, there’s stuff about it that makes me uncomfortable. So I sat down with Dany Francis to chat about it. You already heard Dany’s voice at the top of the episode, and he’s the one who wrote that letter to participants in the simulation. Dany is now a senior at the University of California, Santa Cruz studying game design. But in 2016, he was in 10th grade and he was the lead designer on this project. In fact, I would not have done this project if Dany weren’t in my class. Even though he’s an undergraduate, Dany’s already working as a tutor on introductory game design classes. So he now looks at this project from the perspective of a teacher, as well as a student.

Dany Francis:
Looking over the materials for this, I find it eerily similar to the kinds of materials that were given in design classes, these playtesting back and forth. I didn’t realize how important it is, but playtesting and iteration is 99% of the job. You’re going to be playing the game and then fixing it whenever it breaks.

Alec Patton:
Quick definitions so we’re 100% clear. Playtesting just means testing the game by playing it. That’s it. Okay. Back to Dany.

Dany Francis:
I can recall when we were just designing before our first playtest, it was like a train wreck. People were asking so many questions. They didn’t really know what was going on. And then after we got out there physically and set up all of these different locations, things started to just fall in place, which I think people who haven’t designed a game before, don’t realize that’s kind of how it works, is that you’re going to be in this space of, “I’m not quite sure if this is going to work,” or “I’m not quite sure if what I’m intending is how I’m actually going to feel while doing it.” And I think it’s a good thing that we did two tests, three tests really before we actually went out to the other High Tech and did our performance there. Yeah. And then looking over this calendar that we have, I think we did a really good job of making sure that we’re educated on the topic beforehand, as educated as a high schooler could get with such a nuanced subject. But I think it’s a very good idea that we spent a month essentially talking with each other, developing kind of the theory behind the actual game.

Alec Patton:
Let’s get into that. All right. Let’s take it back to the beginning.

Dany Francis:
Okay.

Alec Patton:
It was January. This started off second semester. I did not feel like I had the trust of the group.

Dany Francis:
Oh, you did not have the trust of the group whatsoever, Dr. P. Sorry to say that, but it was a very… I think what I noticed at the time was ideas were being stated and no one was really implementing them until someone came in and told them, “You need to implement this.” I think that’s what kind of happened during this creation. I think towards the tail end of it, it got a bit better, but at the beginning, it was very much kind of confusing to nail down. How are we actually supposed to make this experience is I think the question on everyone’s mind at the time.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And I was even talking before we’d even decided on doing this, coming into like, “Hey, we’re doing a thing about refugees.” I would say I made a massive mistake that year. I am not proud of the first project we did that year.

Dany Francis:
Was that the book?

Alec Patton:
No, no, no. The book was the third. That was the one that sort of show thing.

Dany Francis:
Yes, I remember. Yes. Oh my gosh. Wow. Nice. I remember that.

Alec Patton:
And so what I think I did, and this is… I don’t know. Now that you’re tutoring, I’ll pass this wisdom on to you. I was like, “Oh, I think this will be cool. I don’t really understand how to do it, but I think it’ll make sense as I go.” What I would just say to any teacher and it’s like, that’s so painfully obvious… I don’t know what I was thinking, but I’d say 2020, start with the thing you’re most confident about. Do a thing that you know is going to work, because the first thing we did that year was kind of a train wreck. When I was like, “Hey, we’re doing a project,” nobody had any reason to think that it was going to be successful.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. I can see that sentiment being… I definitely saw that being shared. I don’t know. I think a lot of it… When I talked to other students, a lot of the time we think of freshman year… At least for me, I was very new to the High Tech system. So freshman year, I was okay with the projects. I didn’t really think they’re that amazing. And then I remember we read Absolutely True Diary and I really liked that. I liked the idea of this tribes project.

Alec Patton:
Okay. I need to interrupt Dany really quickly to explain. In the tribes project, we read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, and the students devised a performance that was about their own lives using the metaphor of tribes, which, looking back on it, was problematic for a number of reasons. Okay. Back to Dany.

Dany Francis:
Looking back on it now, I think that it’s kind of hard to expect a lot of 14 and 15-year-olds to really dive deep on who they are and really look at themselves because they’re not going to take it seriously, or at least the majority of them are not going to take it seriously. A lot of the difficulty, I think, came from the performance at the end. I think that’s what people were confused about.

Alec Patton:
Yes. And they were right to be confused about it.

Dany Francis:
I think people like [Lily Moon 00:08:37], I think she did a great job. She really knew what she wanted to share about herself, and she’s very true to herself. And I think that a lot of the time, high schoolers don’t want to go on stage. I didn’t want to go on stage. I think at the time, a lot of people were not too excited and I think it’s hard to get them excited about themselves, which is what the whole project was about. The High Tech is so focused on reflection and we reflect so often there on everything we do and having a project entirely surrounded around that idea of introspection and kind of seeing who you are, it can be exhausting, I think. And I think that a level of exhaustion was definitely felt towards the end of that semester.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. So I came in with basically zero capital.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. Zero trust in the student body.

Alec Patton:
And so we started off with this talking about refugees and as you said, we started out learning.

Dany Francis:
I think our first thing was kind of watching news reports and finding articles of people who had been traveling and living these experiences. And then we would dive deep into those and kind of pick them apart. Before we even started the idea of a game, that’s what we were thinking about.

Alec Patton:
And am I right in remembering that your family are refugees from Lebanon?

Dany Francis:
I think Dylan mentioned that at some point. I am not comfortable with that one. I think that other people have definitely more intense experiences that deserve to be labeled like that.

Alec Patton:
I kind of feel bad looking back on it that-

Dany Francis:
I can see how you can feel bad about that. Don’t worry about it. I don’t think it’s an… I didn’t have an issue. I was very laid back surrounding the whole thing. Well, I think that touching to a similar point, looking back, I think now, if I was a 20-year-old looking at a high school do this project, I would be very hesitant to look into it because I would just be unsure if the high schoolers would be able to actually represent the situation. I think that’s something that was probably in your mind, like are we going to be authentic and real to the people who are experiencing this? I think that a mishandling of this project would have been quite detrimental, but I would say it actually went really well. I think a lot of people really resonated with what we were doing, which I found surprising.

I personally was not too invested in the idea behind it. I know the situation and I knew people in the situation. So it had emotional value to me and I had actual attachment to it, but I can see how other students who don’t have that sort of similar attachment. They don’t really put in as much, and I think having a lot of students work on something so sensitive, it can result in a very mixed message, but I think we had a pretty straightforward message at least on the end.

Alec Patton:
One interesting thing about this project was that we did not have any kind of agreement about how the US should be responding to the Syrian refugee crisis.

Dany Francis:
I think it’s a good thing we didn’t do that. I think it’s a really good thing that we didn’t really bring politics into it, I think. I think politics are involved in it because of just the base scenario, but I think that we did a pretty good job of taking all that information in and synthesizing it into these different locations that we had.

Alec Patton:
There’s something that I need to mention here. When we launched this project in January, we had two essential questions – why is the Syrian refugee crisis happening, and what should we do about it? These were good questions, but we also had two possible products, either we’re going to write a play modeled on other non-fiction plays, like The Laramie Project and The Color of Justice, or we’re going to create a museum-style exhibit designed to educate visitors. Giving two choices to a team that was split into two classes turned out not to be a great idea. Do you remember the stalemate between play versus exhibit when one class decided [crosstalk 00:12:39]-

Dany Francis:
I do remember that. I remember that was a very big debate. A lot of people had a lot of opinions about that, and I think we reached a good middle ground that nobody expected.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. I learned from that, that if you have two classes and you give them a binary choice, it is basically a guarantee that they will split. When it was clear that everyone was dug in and whatever choice we made, half of the team was going to feel like they lost. Dany and I started talking about the possibility of doing a live action role play or LARP and convened a secret lunchtime meeting of students who were familiar with games – Dungeons & Dragons, Magic cards, Call of Duty, all of that. And if you take away the drama and the secrecy of the moment, according to Dany, that meeting was pretty authentic.

Dany Francis:
The sit down meeting we had during lunch, I look back on that and I think that’s very, very similar to what actual developers do, and I think that’s… I’m very happy we took a picture of the board to see what our ideas were beforehand. We were essentially designing the end idea and then working our way backwards. We had this idea in our head that we wanted to share this experience that we wanted to create. And I think that because we knew it was going to be physical, because we knew we had a set amount of time, it was very easy for us to think of something realistic. I tutor a bunch of game design students and something I say a lot is making sure that your scope is actually feasible and making sure that you’re not creating something that you intend to finish in March, but it finishes in the next March. Do you get what I mean? You want to make sure that you’re able to do what you set out to do. And I think that we did a pretty good job of having these goals for us. I don’t… I think we had to cut a few things, but I’m pretty sure our original idea is what happened.

Alec Patton:
Hey, do you remember when we launched this?

Dany Francis:
Didn’t mean to go to the other High Tech and then we did the simulation there?

Alec Patton:
Oh, that was at the end. No, I’m talking about when we pitched it to the rest of the team, because we knew… Because one of our tricky things was we were like, we know this is the right thing to do and we only get one chance to convince everybody to do it.

Dany Francis:
I get the feeling that we pleaded with them. I don’t remember, but I think that’s what happened. We basically just asked them to please accept this as your project.

Alec Patton:
There’s definitely a little bit of that. Do you remember though when I gave a [crosstalk 00:15:03] and you guys took over?

Dany Francis:
Oh my gosh, the little performance we did. I do remember. I do remember. Oh my gosh. How could I forget that? Oh wow. Oh, I’m going to have to remind people that that happened. Oh wow. That’s a blast. Oh, I’m grinning right now.

Alec Patton:
Here’s what Dany’s remembering. After that secret lunchtime meeting, we scheduled a time after lunch where we open the wall between my classroom and my teaching partner’s classroom and set up all the chairs in rows so that all 56 students could fit. I then announced that we were taking a test on the information we’ve been learning about Syria. While this was happening, Dany and the other students who’d come to that secret lunch meeting crept in behind all the other students. As I told everyone to get quiet and start the test, Dany and his team started shouting and rushed to the stage, and a slide came up on the projector screen saying the class had been seized by the democratic Republic of Studentia.

Then the assembled students were told that each one of them had three choices. They could choose to take the test in my classroom, thereby declaring their allegiance to the old regime. They could join the Studentian rebels in my teaching partner’s classroom, or they could leave and seek asylum in a classroom in another hallway. Before anyone could actually run outside, we paused and told the team they just experienced what our audience would experience if we spent the rest of the project creating a simulation. And like Dany said, we also kind of begged because we didn’t have a backup plan. The team went with it. So now we had to learn about making a game, which meant we had to play games.

Dany Francis:
A lot of the eyeopening stuff happened when we were playing the games and looking at the game-related stuff. And that could be either just because I’m more inclined to focus on those kinds of scenarios or because they had a real impact.

Alec Patton:
I mean, I think one of the things you’re getting at is that writing a play requires specific skills that are different from writing a novel. Writing a novel requires different skills from writing a non-fiction article, and designing a game has its own literacy.

Dany Francis:
Oh, yeah. Designing a game has so many moving parts and systems. And we didn’t know it, but we were making a very large system of games, the system where you move from place to place and you could move backwards or you could move sideways. We were making a lot of things in a naive perspective.

Alec Patton:
One of my principles for the project was that everybody was going to be responsible for something in a small group so that everybody would be doing something and people wouldn’t be getting lost in the shuffle, but also that every step of the way had one in and one out. So if Germany were a total match, which it wasn’t, Germany, it was great. But if the group that was Germany really dropped the ball, we could have just kind of finessed people getting in there and getting out, and it wouldn’t have messed things up for anybody else. It was all interconnected, but it wasn’t exactly interdependent.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. I think we had these little mini projects within this big project. Getting 56 people to work on one thing and deliver an experience that is authentic and satisfactory is very difficult. And even now, I still struggle with small group projects. Obviously, they’re different, but it’s still a struggle, and organizing such a large project is definitely something that helped me moving forward, at least organizing all of these groups and making sure everyone’s on track.

Alec Patton:
I think that’s one of the really hard things about project-based learning that people underestimate. Nobody has ever hired a team of 50 people to design something. You hire a team of five and then you have a bunch of people to implement it, but the people who are implementing it aren’t doing-

Dany Francis:
The design, yeah.

Alec Patton:
As much as you’re trying to be authentic, it’s really hard to create that kind of authentic project because you just wouldn’t have that many parts. And I mean, that was what was cool about this was because to a certain extent, we weren’t-

Dany Francis:
We kind of split the class a little bit.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. We had teams of four designing stations and then we had a small team of people overseeing the whole thing.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. And I think looking back on other High Tech projects, I think other High Tech projects that were extremely successful follow a similar format. I think back to that same year when we did the casino project for math, we also split into five different groups and that project was extremely entertaining and informative. And I think that when you have a lot of people doing the same role, inherent laziness is just going to take over because their role… Because there are so many others doing it, it is, by definition, less important. And we kind of forced everyone to tell everyone in this, they’re not just like a gear in the cog. They are… Specifically if their section doesn’t work, then that is a problem on everybody else, and that got a lot of people working. I think that social pressure to not be the group that messes up definitely had a lot of people working together, which I think is something that some projects don’t have. They don’t have that fear and that induces laziness in terms of work ethic, I think, at least in my experience. When I feel that someone else can do my work, I definitely feel a lot lazier than how I would feel if I was the only one doing it.

Alec Patton:
Sharp-eared listeners may have noted that Dany and I just contradicted each other. I said the project worked because it wasn’t interdependent. He said it worked because it was interdependent. I think in this case, both are true. As a teacher, I knew we could make the simulation work even if not all of the countries were up to scratch, but for a student, there was a lot of pressure to make sure their country delivered a good experience. Sometimes, the sense of pressure got people engaged. Sometimes as Dany will explain, it did the opposite.

Dany Francis:
When I was at the meeting, I remember having all of these ideas and having pre-project jitters where you have all these ideas that you want to do, but you know you’re not going to get them all done. So I was excited about the project’s planning stage. And then I lost a lot of interest when I saw how much pushback there was.

Alec Patton:
What do you think that pushback was about?

Dany Francis:
I don’t know. I talked to my friends about this project, the others who were in the class, and we think that a lot of it was just kind of out of nowhere. We don’t really understand where it came from. There has to be some sort of roots, but I think that my hypothesis is a lot of people were suddenly in a situation where their influence on the project was measurable, and I don’t know how people felt about that. I can see how… We gave them a lot of choice. We got them to choose what station they wanted, what they wanted to do, and I think all the other lead designers and I were pretty open about anything that the groups wanted to do. I didn’t know about the whole escorting refugees over. That whole mini game that we had, I didn’t even know about that until the playtest. I thought that was interesting.

Alec Patton:
Are you thinking of the… Was that the Aegean Sea one? The boat, yeah.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. I think that was something that we had… I don’t know. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think that’s something that you wanted to see when making the project, is that you want to see these students take it in and really get into the roles. And I think the pushback comes from a lot of students not knowing how to do that or not being comfortable with doing that. We asked them to do a lot. We asked them to kind of plan out this whole experience and make sure that everything fits. And there was a lot… Riding on this, we had mentioned a lot of times like, “Oh, people are going to see this. We’re going to go to places to perform this.” And I think there’s just a lot of stress on people and that’s just inherent in such a large project. I think when we got the costumes, people were a lot more into it.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, definitely. I’ve seen a lot of lackluster exhibitions where I just thought, “If everybody were dressed up right now, it would feel really different.”

Dany Francis:
Yeah. I have a similar thought. I think that what happened in this is they’re no longer student A. They’re this person that they’re inhabiting. So they can be a bit more ridiculous with themselves. They can be a bit more outside of who they really are. And I think that having people in costume was definitely step in the right direction in terms of getting user engagement and getting student engagement. A lot of people had some fear when playtesting with strangers or even in front of their friends. I think that it’s something that’s scary to ask of someone, and I think that’s why we got a lot of pushback on the theater idea. It’s just a lot of people didn’t really want to be out there when making this.

Alec Patton:
Do you remember the three smugglers?

Dany Francis:
I don’t remember, but I know there’s a picture.

Alec Patton:
Because what was interesting about that I remember is that they developed these characters and they chose names for themselves that were… I mean, problematic is probably the word. It was interesting for me. I remember talking to them about it. I was not comfortable with that. I also knew that they actually had created this whole thing about they were three brothers, I think.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. They made these stories.

Alec Patton:
They got into drug smuggling because the fishing industry had collapsed. One of them was kind of a mess and the other two were kind of propping them up, and they sort of built this whole thing up. And I remember just kind of being like, “Just don’t tell anyone what your names are.”

Dany Francis:
Yeah. I feel like if we were 23 and doing this project, I think that’s a totally… Having these crafted backstories where non-PG things occur and… Definitely don’t want any problematic names or slurs or anything like that in somebody’s story for this game, for a high school specifically. Yeah, for anything. In high school, I think that it’s like two parts to a pie. The first part is them making a joke out of it to themselves to allow themselves to live in that person’s body. And then the other half is them actually getting invested and immersed in the idea, whether they realize that part or not.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And they came up with a really good game too.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. They came up with a really good idea, which I think back, having everybody tied together and crossing safely is something that’s pretty good. And all those rocks, that’s a very real game within our game. I think they definitely carried a large part of the project. I think after they were successful, a lot of the other groups started to look at that.

Alec Patton:
Do you remember when we had the problem because the America was turning everybody down?

Dany Francis:
Yeah. I remember taking a picture of [Kaia 00:25:43] just sitting there and then no one at her table because no one would make it. And I think that’s very accurate. No one’s going to make it.

Alec Patton:
I can’t remember who it was. I was like, I totally get it. You’re a hundred percent right, and Kaia’s got to do something.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. It’s like, you can’t just have USA flag and no one there.

Alec Patton:
The simulation premiered at Festival Del Sol, High Tech High Chula Vista’s annual whole-school exhibition, which took place the week before spring break. Actually, the simulation took place an hour before the rest of the festival because we needed the whole team to be there at the same time and they also need to take part in their math and their chemistry exhibitions. So at four o’clock in the afternoon, our first participants arrived, received their character sheet and their money. The simulation started and to our delight, not to mention surprise, it worked.

Dany Francis:
I’m just surprised that we managed to have so many people really get into it and actually sign up to go do this thing.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And people were keyed up when they came out. I remember it was like a really visceral thing. People who’d through it had this real energy.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. Which I thought was… Even looking back on it now, I wonder how I would react if I had gone through that.

Alec Patton:
I mean, one thing that was really interesting for me is I remember somebody came through and they were like, “I finally got through. I kept getting turned away and I finally got through because I just lied and nobody checked my papers.” And my first response was to feel really annoyed because I was like, “This person just got the message that a refugee can get to America just by lying. That’s not accurate, and it’s really kind of a hateful idea.” But then I kind of thought the message this person got was give me this character and I will do anything to get-

Dany Francis:
Yeah. That person got really immersed. If you saw outside of the context of the game, that’d be quite a terrible thing to do, but within the context of the game, him lying to someone to go forward is very much what people are looking for.

Alec Patton:
And I think that was the… To the extent that gaming can have social value, I think that experience of empathy is the powerful thing.

Dany Francis:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
One of the people who went through the simulation was a teacher at another High Tech High School, and she asked if we could run the simulation again for her students. We were pretty evenly divided on whether that was going to happen or not. I think I put it to a vote and I didn’t know what was going to happen with the vote. And ultimately, people were kind of like, “Yeah, I guess if they want us to, we should do it.” And then that was tough because we then had a bunch of ninth graders who were getting led out into a field by their teacher. It’s hard to-

Dany Francis:
Not a lot of supervision.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Not a lot of supervision.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. I definitely remember the situations that happened that day.

Alec Patton:
I probably don’t even know about all those situations.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. I mean, that was on them. I think that we came there to do our project and we did our project, and I think the students, our students were pretty happy with that, at least when I was there. I think what people enjoyed from that one was a new environment to do it in because suddenly we all had to quickly decide and everybody had to coordinate, which I didn’t see at any other time in the project, everybody coordinating at once, which I thought was pretty nice. I think that what we were doing towards the end there is kind of what the students wanted to do more often, and we just didn’t have the time to do that.

Alec Patton:
Tell me about that. Expand on that.

Dany Francis:
A lot of the students wanted to do the simulation. They just don’t want to make the simulation. I think a lot of people were having fun when you’re shuffling a bunch of ninth graders through a series of rocks. I think people have fun doing that. I think people have fun when they’re inhabiting their roles and playing the game that they’ve made and seeing other people play it. And that’s definitely what I get the most fun out of when I make a game is watching other people play it and the social experience that comes around it. And I just think a lot of people were unprepared or naive to the fact that game development is a lot of, we sit here and we’re going to kind of swing our pick over and over until eventually it works, or we’re going to completely scrap it and try again. That idea of scrapping something entirely and trying again is scary and people don’t want to do that. And I think that some groups had to do that and that was not enjoyable for them.

Alec Patton:
Definitely. So let me put you on the spot now with your game designers experience. What are your game designers tips for teachers designing projects?

Dany Francis:
The number one piece of advice is playtest, playtest, and playtest over and over again and get a lot of people giving feedback and get a lot of people implementing feedback. I think that’s something that’s missing a lot of the time in these projects, is just actually performing it and fixing where you mess up.

Alec Patton:
And that’s one of the hardest things to convince anybody of, I could say teenagers, but I think it’s true for all human beings is that they’ll say, “Well, I can’t perform yet because I’m not ready.” And you’re like, “Exactly.”

Dany Francis:
Yeah, exactly. It’s you are not ready and that is on purpose. That idea is scary. I’m currently working on a short game for a game jam, and that idea of me putting it up there in a state that’s not complete is scary. You have to teach them that they are going to display things that aren’t complete and the feedback that you receive needs to be received in a way that you understand that. And I think that like any other skill, that is improved by getting critique and by doing it over and over again. It’s very similar to something like writing or art. It’s very hard to get these students to do this kind of dichotomy where we want them to get attached to this and really invest themselves into creating it and also don’t take it too harshly when someone critiques you. That’s difficult to do, but that’s kind of what’s necessary in game development. They have to be okay with essentially their egg being broken by someone. That has to happen for growth to occur.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. You got to be kind to though.

Dany Francis:
Yeah. You have to be kind. You have to be kind about it. And obviously if there’s a group of mature students who understand the idea behind the game and how like… Okay, we’re making a game. Everyone’s just pitching creative ideas and we’re not going to socially make fun of someone for it. I think that’s something that’s important. That’s why a lot of people make games and don’t show them off is because of the feedback they’d get. And I think if you were running a project that was based around a game, making feedback is something that shouldn’t be scary. It should be something you look forward to for improvement. And you should tell your students that it’s okay to (a) ignore feedback and to (b) specify what kind of feedback you’d like to receive. Say you have one section of your game that you really like and you’re not going to budge on it, it is okay as a designer to be like, “I’m not budging on this. This is staying. Give me critique on everything else.”

Alec Patton:
All right. So when are you going to collaborate with a High Tech High teacher on the next iteration?

Dany Francis:
Listen, I’m in San Diego. I am perfectly fine collaborating with someone. I just need someone to reach out to me.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and produced by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. If you’re interested in collaborating with Dany on a project, email unboxed@hightechhigh.org and we’ll put you in touch with them. The Syrian Refugee Simulation is one of the projects featured in Changing the Subject, a new collection of projects from the first 20 years of High Tech High. You can find the whole collection online at changingthesubject.org. I also want to thank some of the people whose advice made the Syrian Refugee Simulation possible. I dreamed up the original idea with Matt Simon, whose approach to project design had a huge influence on me. Jamie Antonisse and everyone at Sirvo Studios showed me what game designers actually do and help me think through the components that make a game entertaining and satisfying. And Aaron Vanek explained how LARPs actually work, particularly the dimensions of time and space within a live action game. Thanks for listening.