Coven
Empowering Negotiation Card Game
game design | literature reviews | persuasive design | playtesting
Problem Space
Women in tech face both external and internal biases that can affect their work performance and inhibit their ability to obtain leadership positions and advance their career.
Goal
We embarked on this project to help empower women (and other underrepresented groups) in negotiation by reducing self-biases and strengthening players self-schema as a negotiator via a card game.
Context
This project was done as a group assignment for our Persuasive Design Class. As a group of five women in tech, we are especially passionate about helping our peers solidify their skills in self-advocation and representation.
Team
Stephanie Wong • Emily Yang • Lorraine Zhang • Neha Chopade
Team members each contributed to all aspects of the projects.
Solution
Coven is a mystical, witchcraft-skinned game where the players objective is to create a potion using ingredient cards. To encourage negotiation we used the embedded techniques
To get the players to take on a more assertive persona, we wrote an intro in our rules that framed the players of the game as a group of powerful and clever witches. This also served to prime them to be more open to be creative with their game play.
ReseARCH
Literature Review
Before we started development of our game, we started an in depth literature research to learn more about women and how they negotiate in the work force. We read several paper’s, most notably several written by Linda Babcock including: “Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide,” “Gender-Relevant Primes Improve Women’s Economic Performance,” and “Constraints and Triggers: Situational Mechanics of Gender in Negotiation.”
Findings
Women do not frequently make requests for themselves, because they have learned that they may ultimately lose more than they gain.
Studies found that women when faced with situations that need to be resolved with negotiation felt more vulnerable and chose to avoid conflict.
Women can negotiate better for others than themselves. However, when the situation is less ambiguous, the effect of gender triggers decreases in negotiation performance.
We also did research into how we could utilize the medium of a game to encourage women to develop their negotiation skills. We read “Creating Stealth Game Interventions for Attitude and Behavior Change” by Geoff Kauffman et al. This paper laid out the foundations of embedded techniques for creating games that engaged the player and did not make the underlying goal of the game to obvious or forced.
Findings
Games that use more an embedded (stealth) approach are more likely to succeed in changing attitudes.
The embedded technique of obfuscation (hiding the true purpose of the game), help create a more open mindset, leading to “increased accessibility of players’ self-concept and predispositions, attitudes, and beliefs.”
Distancing, another embedded technique which uses metaphorical representation, helps the user creates a safe space to explore difficult topics.
We used the insights we gained from these reading to shape the way we approached the creation of our game. We ultimately decided to incorporate the elements of distancing and obfuscation in our game.
Game Research
To create an effective and fun game we needed to understand what makes a game fun, and what constitute effective game mechanics. We studied several games with gameplay that revolved around bargaining, negotiating, and taking on a different identity. The two main games we focused on were Settlers of Catan and Avalon.
Negotiation: To learn more about bargaining we watched people play Catan, a game in which players compete for limited resources and use negotiation tactics to trade for the resources they need. We studied what made the game so effective at pushing and forcing negotiation amongst players.
Roleplaying: We wanted to explored roleplaying as a means of distancing. We specifically wanted to explore the idea of having players take on a sort of persona that could encourage them to be more assertive, or act in a certain way. So we played Avalon, a game where players are assigned an identity with roles that they must hide while trying to win.
Findings
In Settlers of Catan, negotiation was forced with limited resources and players having only access to some of the resources they needed to win.
We found in playing Avalon, distancing allowed users to readily take on the characteristics of their character whether they were good or bad.
These findings helped guide the creation of our game and influenced the mechanics we ultimately ended up utilizing.
Game Design
Iterations
Designing the game was a very intensive but very fun process. None of us had any prior experience in game development so it was very much a trial and error process.
Design Process
Crazy Eights: We conducted a crazy 8 ideation session to generate ideas on possibilities related to helping women achieve more confidence in negotiation.
Features to test: As a group we picked out the aspects that we liked about the different ideas we generated. These included reducing the stakes of the items being negotiated, providing players with a narrative to follow, allowing players to pair up and conceal their interests, and possibly having a neutral person in the game who can act as a judge.
Rapid Prototyping: Based off these features we started rapid prototyping and developed an initial game:
An office supply trading game: each player has to acquire a different secret combination of office supplies. All cards are randomly distributed and players trade with each other until one player achieves their goal.
Iteration 1: After playing the games a couple times and making tweaks after each round, we kept the mechanic of hidden goals and trading resources. Based on these changes we created a space trading game that:
has the addition of an in-game currency to keep players for trading a card for a card, which reduced the number of trades. We gave these value by making them redeemable for cards.
action cards to increase player interaction and trading. (We initially used Monopoly chance cards to test the effectiveness.)
More Playtesting: Though our continued testing both with ourselves and our peers we discovered:
players who were more reserved were still less comfortable advocating for themselves in game.
with the current hidden goals it was too easy for players to determine not only the cards players held but the cards they needed.
the game needed to engage players through a backstory.
ending the game could be too quick and lopsided, depending on the random distribution of cards.
Considering these finding we developed our final iteration of the game….
The Game
Coven is a mystical, witchcraft-skinned game where the players objective is to create a potion using ingredient cards. To get the players to take on a more assertive persona, we wrote an intro in our rules that framed the players of the game as a group of powerful and clever witches. This also served to prime them to be more open to be creative with their game play.
The Cards
Potion Cards: These are the players secret goal cards- they tell the player what ingredients they have to collect to win.
Ingredient Cards: These are the cards the player has to collect to win. There are five ingredients: wolfsbane, dragon scale, unicorn tear, dragonfly wing, and phoenix feather.
Diamond Cards: These cards serve as the in-game currency. Ten of these can be traded in for an ingredient card. Additionally, each turn a player rolls to determine if they will redeem diamonds or and action card.
Action Cards: These serve as the “chance” cards of the game and exist to encourage player interaction, with some cards using negative or positive reinforcement to get players to trade.
Interest Cards: Each time a player wants to trade, other player indicated their interest by flipping the card to “interested” or “not interested.” For players who might feel more reserved these cards would enable them to gain a foothold in negotiations.
Fire Cards: To address the issue of the game ending to abruptly, fire cards were added to add more of an element of “chaos.” Once a player is in an “uno” situation, with only one ingredient card left to acquire they must declare fire. Players each draw and play one fire card immediately. Often these cards can unbalance the leader, or benefit a dark horse.
Takeaways:
Future Iterations
For the next iteration, I would want to conduct a long-term study on our game to track a) how often players trade over the course of the games, b) the types of trades players make, and c) how often players advocate for themselves during trading.
As for game mechanics, I feel the fire cards are an improvement, but the ending can still be anticlimactic. I would want to test out different end-game mechanisms to see which create the best experience for players.
