On 14 October I’ll be in Lancaster running an all day workshop about how we can communicate messages through games. It’s with local Quaker activists, and I expect to be looking at some of their key concerns of peace, climate change, sustainability, and economic justice.

The workshop will be focused on the question of effective communication. If we have something we want others to know, how can we improve the chance that they hear it? What words should we use? Where should we put our message? What’s going to reach other people and encourage them to consider what we say?

Using games to get messages across is fun and enjoyable — and it often makes the message easier to understand. It is a great form of communication! In order to create such a game, i think you need to first pin down three very important elements: the message, the audience, and the components.

The very first step is to be clear about the message. A game needs a relatively straightforward message. A book can contain plot twists, character reveals, and all sorts of nuance, but a board game or card game is generally more atmosphere than narrative. So, the message might be that plastic rubbish is bad, or that players need to work together to win, or a particular animal or habitat is endangered.

The second step is to think about the potential audience. Who is going to be playing the game? will it be children in primary school? Will it be adult activists at a protest? Will it be played by teams of people, or a small group, or just one person alone?

The third step is to consider the materials or the components. What do you have to play with? Will this be a game on a leaflet? (If so, I encourage you to look at some of my greetings card games, as these are simple games which fit on to an A5 greetings card.) Perhaps it will be on a large poster. Perhaps it will involve some element of the landscape around the players — I Spy is a classic example of this. Perhaps it will be a pack of cards with special challenges, or trivia, or collectable pictures. Perhaps it will be a puzzle.

When you have all of those three things, you can start putting them together. Each needs to complement the others. The message, the audience, and the components are all vital, and they need to feel as if they fit together. What sort of mechanics might work well? Perhaps a race game, or a collection game. At this stage, you might want to look to other games for inspiration, particular traditional games. If your audience is primary school pupils then there is no harm in building on a game they might already know — so perhaps your game could be Snakes & Ladders with a twist?

It’s also usual to need to go back and re-draft your game, possibly many times! Test it out with a few people and see whether it works. Change it a little and test again — and repeat until you think you have it right!

A workshop about games and communications could be exactly what you need to get your creative inspiration flowing. By the end of the workshop on 14 October I expect Lancaster Quakers to have a draft of a possible game, whether it’s on a poster, leaflet, or something else entirely.

UPDATE: If you’re interested in seeing how this session worked, read my later post about Lancaster.