Project Overview
Epigame is a game that facilitates teaching Epidemiology and Forensic Anthropology, the study of human skeletal remains to understand the propagation of disease. The game has been used since 2015 at Sheridan College to provide students with a greater understanding of the subject matter such as infection vectors of a disease.
Project Details
| Timeline | 3 months |
|---|---|
| Contributors | 7 |
| Dev Team Size | 4 |
Roles and Contributions
| Game Designer |
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Built Using
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Unity
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Excel
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Word
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WAMP
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Illustrator
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Photoshop
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Perforce
The Problem
Education is more effective when it's engaging. When the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Sheridan College introduced a new online Forensic Anthropology course slated for fall 2015, they knew they would have to do more than their field typically does if they wanted that engagement. The study of epidemiology, the spread of diseases such as COVID-19, is critical to the health of our societies. However, the type of data it presents to any aspiring student is essentially a spreadsheet with logs of various events with very little to engage with.
Project Vision
Translate the processes of a forensic anthropologist into gameplay interactions which clearly communicate the relationship between data points. The game takes advantage of interactions and feedback loops in order to enhance the learning experience. Moreover, the game provides the player with the appropriate toolset to inspect and analyze the same kind of data set found in real-world analyses.
Game Design
The stance on the design philosophy I held was that data needed to be exposed to the player in a way that made it both visual and interactable. Tangibility enables the player to understand the relationships between data nodes and construct a mental model of the situation they are trying to understand. For this reason we focused on showing relationships of data over time using a timeline and links between data points. The player interacts with people and locations, gathering information through dialogue, then interprets those responses in order to model how they believe the disease has spread.
Timeline
The timeline displays a high-level overview of overall infection. By selecting a day, the player can view and define relationships between data points such as physical encounters between individuals. This reduces the cognitive load of the player has to bear. This is done to enable them to devote more mental capacity to analysis of relationships. The timeline ultimately becomes the way the player can see and project events in order to understand the underlying causes of the epidemic.
Connections
Whenever the player creates a connection between two points through the timeline, a line connecting those two points will be shown to the player. Additionally, the connection changes colour when there is a possible infection between those two points. Scrubbing the timeline using the mouse updates which day the player is viewing, thus visually displaying the propagation of disease between these points. The player can experiment with this system to understand cause and effect within the simulation.
Progression
The game progression follows the course curriculum over four weeks with each week introducing a more data to the player. This is done to create cadence, allow opportunities for discussion of the content in class, and allow the information to mature with the students.
We included a digital notebook for the player to write notes about what they see per infection vector (person or location) to facilitate parsing the data and connection. As they return to the game each week, they have the previous weeks' notes there to help them jump back into their analysis with minimal friction.