The popularity of tabletop games has been on the rise over the last decade and The Game Crafter has been on the front lines of this movement. Our community of game designers and enthusiasts now exceed 70,000 people and in 2014 we produced over 80,000 games for designers around the world. Most games that we produce are for entertainment, but there are many new game titles for education, finance, religion, and self-improvement.
Rocks and Docks is a board game that was designed to help individuals in group therapy situations. We reached out to the people behind the game and asked them to share their story with our community.
The Story
In 2014, Hearken Creative was approached by the Project Return Peer Support Network team in Commerce, California, to work on developing a game for sale. Already in use for people in various stages of recovery from mental illnesses, Rocks and Docks was a handmade game developed by Kate McCauley. She and her colleagues had used the game while working with people in locked facilities, “board and cares,” and in groups from independent living situations. As she developed Rocks and Docks, McCauley discovered that her game worked
To cheer people’s spirits
To improve the quality of their circumstances
To get people to talk and listen to one another (as opposed to always directing their remarks to the staff or peer facilitator)
To pull people out of isolation
Even those who were too afraid to participate became engaged — often they changed their minds and joined in the game. Group participation increased from 10% to over 70% with the introduction of games in group therapy situations.
But the game they first shared with us was a one-off — a single, handmade concoction of elements from other games, a poorly-designed game board (with typos), and a hodgepodge of graphic elements that didn’t hang together. McCauley asked us to explore re-designing the game with the intent of selling it to therapists and other mental health professionals — she felt they had a product that could help anyone practicing group therapy with adults.
Our first job was to ascertain what they had — what worked and what didn’t. McCauley asked for a game as straightforward and recognizable as Monopoly — something that her clients would be able to play and enjoy the very first time they played it. We proposed a two-pronged approach: (1) design and (2) gameplay.
On the design side, we presented three looks to the client. McCauley chose a more photographic approach, because she was concerned that their mostly-adult clientele would not relate to the “illustrative” designs that we had developed. With a few minor design changes, this design is what was used in the final product.
On the gameplay side, we asked if we could film a client session playing the existing game, so that we could understand more fully how the game was played and what improvements could be made. Since Project Return works with people in the welfare system or in lockdown facilities, filming a group therapy session would not be legally feasible. Instead, we assembled a group of staff (including a member of the Hearken Creative team) to play the game and make comments on it. Even in its original form, playing was fun! McCauley agrees: “I have tested Rocks and Docks on adults with no mental illness, and, aside from being fun, they’ve told me that it has raised their awareness about their own lives and the lives of people with mental illnesses.”
However, we noted several weaknesses. Gameplay was slow, and very similar from turn to turn. We introduced some random variables that injected an element of surprise to the game. We also wanted to keep the pace of the game up, so we discussed several scoring options — from assigning a banker, to potentially using chits or another form of currency. We discarded those thoughts in favor of simpler (and cheaper) solutions. Finally, Kate and her staff rewrote all the “questions” that formed the guts of the game. This was a detailed process, but it enhanced the game for the target audience, giving it an engaging and meaningful cohesiveness.
This new (and hopefully improved) game was sent back to Project Return for testing with several more groups and therapists. Minor changes were made, and tested further. Working with The Game Crafter was beneficial because we could produce a single copy of the in-development game for each round of testing.
What we found was that the re-vamped game allowed the players to shed their self-consciousness, and engage more fully with their peers. In these group situations, the therapist/facilitator is striving for an environment that promotes “behavior which is fun, intrinsically complete, person-oriented, variable/flexible, non instrumental, and characterized by a natural flow” (O’Connor, The Play Therapy Primer, p.6). Because of the open-ended questions, the game itself is very open-ended, encouraging the engagement and participation of the players.
As group facilitators, McCauley and her staff understand that gameplay encourages their clients
to respect themselves
to accept their own feelings
to express feelings responsibly
to assume responsibility for themselves
to be resourceful and creative in confronting problems
to learn self-control and self-direction
to accept themselves
to make choices and to be responsible for their own choices
(Landreth, Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship)
The real-world testing we have done assures us that Rocks and Docks can greatly enhance group therapy situations and socialization skills for people a variety of circumstances:
for people in different stages of recovery in mental illness
for ice-breaker and awareness situations
for training classes.
Some lessons learned while re-designing the game (and many of these lessons came directly from reading posts on thegamecrafter.com’s blogs and other blogs and forums):
first and foremost, the game must be fun
don’t let your players get bored - shake it up
make the rules appropriate for your intended audience
make it beautiful. Even though we are a small game and a small audience, we are competing with the big game companies for eyeballs (and, eventually, sales); therefore, graphics and presentation must be top notch.
We are grateful to both Project Return and The Game Crafter for the opportunity to work on such an exciting project.
Click here for more information about Rocks and Docks.
We would like to thank Loren A. Roberts from Hearken Creative for sharing this story with our community.