Day 1: Game Development Camp, Guest Post by Hamed Elmaghlawy

By Engagement Lab

03/10/2015

Over the past year, the Engagement Lab and the Egyptian United Nations Development Program (UNDP) have partnered on a new initiative focused on using games and play to tackle global issues, ranging from environmental sustainability to cultural and political empowerment.

This week, the lab is hosting UN staff and designers and entrepreneurs from Egypt for a week-long, intensive game development camp.

Every day this week, we will share a new blog post written by one of the game makers. Up first, Hamed Elmaghlawy shares his experiences during the first day of the development camp.

Day 1: Game Development Camp

By Hamed Elmaghlawy

Today was the first day in our Boston Game Design Camp. Wow, it really is a different experience to sit with people who know it all, people who have answers to most of your questions, and people who are so friendly you feel like you are home. Thank you Engagement Lab at Emerson College.

The day started with a brief tour of the lab — what a cozy place to work in! This was followed by an introduction given by all the people who work in the lab. Two Arab ladies are among the lab’s team — didn’t I tell you it feels like home? At first we started with our game presentations:

• Sociopoly (raising awareness on social entrepreneurship)

• Story changer (stimulates creativity and imagination)

• Eathoducation (fun learning for children).

We then attended a presentation on “Women in the Games Industry” presented by Nina Hunteman, a professor from Suffolk University. Nina spoke about women in the games industry, identity in games, and the current culture of women representations in games. This talk helped spark our brainstorming for our goal in the game design camp, which is to make an ideation game workshop about the issue of violence against women. The presentation was very inspiring and gave us a very detailed history of female characters in the games industry and what statistics there are in the market about this matter.

At the end of the day we had a very different play-testing gathering: the Game Makers Guild. The people who came to test our games were professional game designers and they had a lot of creative feedback to give and showed us some new amazing tips and tricks.

We are looking forward to our next day! Way to go Engagement Lab. We really loved everything you prepared for us and we can’t wait for more.