Enhance Imagination: Prioritise creative resources and imaginative, open ended play over pre-determined pathways built on popularity metrics or driven by advertising or other commercial pressures.Be Welcoming: Prioritise digital features that are inclusive, sociable and welcoming to all, reducing hateful communication and forms of exclusion and reflecting multiple identities.To claim the label ‘Playful by Design’, digital products and services should adopt seven principles:
The team from 5 Rights Foundation and Digital Futures LSE set out ambitious expectations for children’s free play in all contexts. The Digital Futures Commission's A Vision of Free Play in a Digital World report that outlines the key qualities of "free play" for what "good" looks like in a digital world. Strategy games played in Open Worlds are a chance to innovate techniques that take advantage of the landscape and terrain in which you find yourself. Simulation games that offer large explorable worlds offer a chance to experiment with how the games physics, political, economic or even religious models work at scale. Adventures and Role-Playing in large open spaces invite exploration and create a sense of grandeur. The appeal of these games is that when a particularly exciting moment of play occurs it hasn't been pre-ordained by the developer but has emerged from the interactions of the player with the game world. These games populate their open worlds with architecture, characters, quests, items and discoveries. As opposed to games that funnel your movement in a particular direction to create a directed experience, Open World games let you wander in any direction. Open World games offer a space that is very large, and possibly unlimited. Video games create space in which to play. In this entry we are looking at Open World games. This is designed for people new to gaming, and aims to identify games with the least barriers. In this series, we are learning how different aspects of video games work by playing games that offer an easy introduction to this one concept. Whether it’s collaborating to identify and store stock in Wilmot’s Warehouse or getting the furniture into the van neatly in Moving Out, how we work together and treat the people around us is important. Then there are games that make us aware of our co-workers. Like the game Good Job encourages us to do. This might be conversations with customers, but also the other people we work with in the office or workplace we find ourselves in. Other games, like Coffee Talk and Neo Cab help us consider the people we serve at work. Trying to manage crunch time with Going Under, or not succumbing to Tom Nook’s invitation for ever bigger mortgages in Animal Crossing, there are lots of games that can help us find some balance.
Whether it’s escaping for a lunchtime walk with A Short Hike. Some address the world of work directly, while others enable us to consider our choices about how we spend our working hours. But not only to get some distance, but to play something that shines a light on why we do what we do. The games in this list offer space to reflect and escape work for a while. Most recent is their Level Up campaign that challenges businesses within the video games industry to unite and commit to change.
They have some excellent resources available for free and global helplines for a range of emotions and stresses people might be feeling, not to mention some great training resources for companies. “The worlds we create are a refuge for many,” they say about video games, to highlight the importance of also looking after those people who make these amazing spaces. The Safe In Our World charity addresses this world of work and video games to foster positive mental health wellbeing and deliver support for players, developers, publishers and retailers. Not, that is, unless you work in the video game industry. Video games and work don’t usually go together.