Utility

A game for students to explore a transition to renewables as an energy company CEO

Project summary

This project was born out of a faculty grant from NYU Stern Learning Science Lab in partnership with Vignesh Gowrishankar, an adjunct Stern faculty member and Associate Director at NRDC teaching a course on the transition to renewable energy.  

Our goal was to provide students taking a graduate level course with with an engaging and interactive experience of running a utility company in order to intimately understand the growing complexity in the energy market.  Players make decisions each turn about their company’s energy portfolio, investments, advertising, research, and government lobbying activities.  Players must keep their overall emissions low and a diverse cast of board members happy in order to keep from being fired. 

Role

Project manager, learning experience designer.

I also recruited and managed 3 student fellows who contributed to the project, 1 designer and 2 developers.

Getting game balance juuuust right

In the real world, energy utilities have challenging decisions to make about what types of energy to invest in.  While we could not reproduce all of the strategy and tradeoffs present in real world conditions, we still wanted players to come away from playing the game with a strong sense of the key tradeoffs of each energy type.

In a series of interviews with our faculty partner, we channeled that real world complexity into three main metrics of evaluation for each energy type available to players.  Players are not presented with this data directly, but instead need to discover it through playing the game and evaluating their strategy as they are successful, or are fired.

Tackling complexity with gamification

The client presented our team with a robust list of feature requirements for this project.  During  a given turn in the the game, players would have to choose energy to buy, research to complete, new technology to invest in, all while balancing the requirements of board members. While we were excited to create such a rich real-world environment for learning, we also found that all of these choices presented confusion for early play-testers.  "Where do I start?" was a common questions we were getting during usability sessions.  To tackle this challenge we used a technique game developers sometimes call "tutorialization."  Good video game tutorials remove complexity in the earliest stage of the game so that players can learn as they play rather than having to look things up or struggle via trial and error.  

In our game we decided to utilize the board member characters to help provide guidance as players do things for the first time.  During the first turn of the game, players can only purchase energy, and only from limited sources.  As players begin to understand the game mechanics, board members introduce them to new requirements.