Playability Podcast Episode 0: Lauren Woolsey and Rebecca Strang Run time: 16 minutes, 50 seconds Podcast recorded by Rebecca Strang. Playability is produced by Mike Risley. Transcript auto-generated by YouTube and edited by Rebecca Strang. 00:08 Lauren Woolsey Hello and welcome to Playability, where we hold conversations at the crossroads of gameplay and accessibility. 00:14 Rebecca Strang For this first episode of Playability we want to introduce ourselves and our various connections to the board gaming community. We’ll also discuss briefly accessibility and what it means to us. 00:24 Lauren Woolsey I'm Lauren Wolsey. I teach astronomy and physics at Grand Rapids Community College and I've always been interested in game design. I was a member of game makers guild in Boston when I was in graduate school and then when I moved to Grand Rapids I joined the Grand Rapids Unpublished Board Game Society and it's just always a pleasure to work with other game designers to help develop their ideas and give input from a different perspective. I think everybody can benefit from multiple perspectives. 00:58 Rebecca Strang And I am Rebecca Strang. I currently work as a youth services assistant at a public library in the Chicago area and my current interest in games stems from using games as educational tools. I think it's important in educational settings that the lessons fit the learner and I think games are a great way to use a variety of different learning formats so that if someone is a visual learner or a hands-on learner or they just need to read everything, games can kind of approach different topics and all those aspects. So, I love using games for educational programming at the library and accessibility ties into that for me too because different learners can approach games from a variety of different angles and get what they need out of those. 01:44 Lauren Woolsey We have both also carved out a portion of the board gaming community with our gaming content. I've made CGS unit into a tiny personal brand. It's my twitter handle and my company name, CGS, is the Centimeter Gram Second system in physics but for me it also stands for Crafts Games and Science. I have three games at various stages of production: an astrophysics board game called Stars Inc. that has been a long time in the making; an astrochemistry card game called Amino that can be found on Drive-Thru Cards; and a crafty quilting card game called Match Quilt which is set to come out at the end of this year with Greater Than Games. I'm planning on getting into play testing more - you can check out more information about all of that at CGSunit.com. 02:26 Rebecca Strang I've started collecting my gaming content into a website called To Play Is Human where you can find game reviews, bibliographies, reading reflections, and some convention coverage. I will soon be adding some of my reflections and resources for creating educational gaming programs at libraries as well. One of my favorite things on my blog right now is a fun series called DIY Crafty Gamer that features creative folks who make and build things for their games like accessories, component upgrades, miniatures painting, terrain building. I love to see the projects that are born out of people's passion for gaming. If you'd like to find me online you can go to toplayishuman.com or find me as @toplayishuman on most major social media platforms. 03:12 Lauren Woolsey In the past couple of months, years maybe, there's been a much bigger conversation brewing in the board game community about accessibility. I think it's useful for us to talk briefly about the sort of general way that we picture what that term means, and that will certainly be a question that we have every episode, because it's not just a dictionary definition that you can look up. It's how that term applies with all of those different perspectives that people will bring. For me I think it's about making sure that whatever you build, whether you're a game designer or an art director or a publisher, whatever you're making includes as many different people as possible. That's something that I take to heart too when I'm building course materials for my classes because it's not just board games, it's every aspect of society that we need to be doing a better job keeping in mind that whatever we experience is one particular perspective and one particular set of experiences and abilities and everything that goes along with that. 04:20 Rebecca Strang Yeah, I think you want to maximize the number of people who can enjoy whatever it is you're doing, whatever program or game you're making and for me, accessibility comes from not just the physical aspect of accessibility but also the social aspect of accessibility: does a game or a situation feel approachable to a person, do they feel like they're going to fit in playing this game, or that the space is going to be welcoming. I like to look at that aspect of accessibility especially when I'm designing programs that I'm inviting the community in to come participate in these activities I want people to feel like I want them there, that they're welcome, and that they're actually going to be able to do the activities that I have set out for them. 05:01 Lauren Woolsey When you're designing those activities, what have been some of the aspects of things that you built something and then a particular person interacted with it and you realize that you could have changed something to make it more accessible? 05:16 Rebecca Strang I currently have a program where I have kids creating their own hardcover storybooks that they can then take home with them and if they don't have an idea for a story I don't want them to feel pressured that, you know, they have to come up with this great story for this program right away, so I use Rory's Story Cubes as a means of providing them with a way to generate prompts and if they don't like their first role, they can keep rolling until they get something but not everybody connects to dice and that imagery in the same way so I've also started incorporating the story cards from Once Upon a Story [Time] for people who need the more verbal cues like: this is a character card this will represent a character or this is a thing card so this will represent a thing in your story… It's not as nebulous as the dice and it's more concrete for them. Being able to incorporate that was helpful for some of those folks. 06:15 Lauren Woolsey Yeah, definitely it's been an interesting experience. I have finished two years of teaching now and it's one of the best parts of my job is having a really wide range of experiences and the students that come to community college and just being able to take all of those perspectives and have that sense when I'm building materials for classes or when I'm working on game design or game development with other designers and just keeping in mind that the way that we approach things is not the same and it's based on so many aspects that we just don't think about in our day-to-day life. And part of that comes from a variety of different privileges that we just aren't aware of except for this, as we mentioned, this ongoing conversation that's starting to open people's eyes to these aspects and hopefully will help make an impact on board gaming as a as a whole. 07:10 Rebecca Strang Yeah, one thing I have to look at what I'm doing the programming is ,especially with the hardcover storybooks, it's not necessarily something they're going to fully complete in that session where I have them at the library so I want to make sure I'm using materials that are easily accessible outside of the library and something that's not going to be a huge burden on parents when their kids get home and want to finish these books. So keeping it to simple things like crayons and colored pencils and not bringing in a whole bunch of like glue and tape and additional stickers and papers that they would then have to go get. Keeping it so that it's simple and easy and it's not gonna put a burden on finding those resources once they're outside of the program 07:54 Lauren Woolsey Definitely, and that sort of reminds me of one path that part of the board game design community is moving towards is just bigger and flashier and lots and lots of different components and there's certainly a place for those games but those tend to, it seems, might be tougher to make accessible in the different ways that we can think of people interacting with those components and with those games and ideas and rule books too for those bigger flashier games. I think we're starting to get to the point where there are so many games coming out every year and they're just coming out so quickly that it's hard to keep up. 08:34 Rebecca Strang Yeah, definitely, there's this huge Cult of the New that I think is really big right now and everybody is wanting the flashier, fancier components in everything that they're getting and I think we can get a little ahead of ourselves sometimes focusing on the look of something over the usability of something. 08:56 Lauren Woolsey Exactly, if our foundation in the community isn't solid, especially on this accessibility side, where the fact that we're making so many more games means that we need to have a community that is growing at a similar pace for that to be sustainable, which means it's even more important a discussion to have on how we can bring new people into the community and be a welcoming place for those new people. 09:24 Rebecca Strang Definitely, and as time goes on, I mean, we're all getting older and so all of these accessibility issues that aren't a concern for some of us now certainly will be as time goes on and so thinking about how to make games as accessible as possible while we're making them now will be helpful later on when these issues do become relevant to more and more people. 09:49 Lauren Woolsey Yeah, that's a really good point. One of the other things that this community has started to talk about are some of the aspects of inclusivity and it's good that that conversation is starting. It's one that I can see certain aspects being focused on most prominently just gender in games and the representation there but that's just one aspect of including people and the conversation is starting to get broader, which is an excellent, excellent thing, but it seems it seems somewhat difficult to figure out how to convince the majority of the community that what we've had up until this point in all of these different realms isn't going to cut it. 10:34 Rebecca Strang Yeah, it bothers me when people, you know, say that making games inclusive isn't a priority because why would you not want to invite more people into your hobby that you love and you clearly have fun doing it, so why wouldn't you want to share that with other people and I think that making games, and gaming spaces in particular, welcoming can only benefit the hobby as a whole and having more perspectives in the hobby, more people from different walks of life, different experiences than yours can only make the hobby richer and the people in it richer, too. So, I think trying to find a way that can make games and gaming spaces welcoming for new players is key moving forward for the hobby. I know when I first started gaming and I was trying to find gaming groups to play with, some of them were not friendly spaces, you know. I didn't feel comfortable sitting at tables in some of those gaming groups and finding a group that was welcoming and fun for me to play with was a huge step in me developing my love for this hobby and I want to make that process easier and friendlier for other people going forward. 11:46 Lauren Woolsey Yeah, absolutely, I definitely hope that there is a sort of set of changes moving forward in all aspects, both at game nights and gaming spaces like local game stores, that can be more welcoming, as well as the two game designer groups that I've been a part of. We don't have a whole lot of variety in who attends those. I never had any bad experiences in terms of not feeling welcomed either of those groups but often I was one of two or three women out of dozens and I don't recall any meeting where there was more than one person who wasn't white and so it's something where you can see in the makeup of both local game stores and game design groups and things that we do have a way to go. The sort of first step is getting people into the hobby playing games and being welcoming at that level and then we can get people to realize if they've got these game ideas that they want to move forward with or at least feel welcome to just attend these sorts of things as playtesters to give that perspective, it is something that's worth looking into if you're in a fairly big city or or area if there are these game designer meetups and if they're public to just attend and play test people's games. Even if you're not a game designer, even if you've never thought about game design and aren't even planning to but being able to give those perspectives is huge especially for these incoming games that will start to shape the sort of next wave. 13:26 Rebecca Strang That's a great idea: getting involved in the beginning stages of a game when you can provide feedback that will be critical to what that game is going to look like in the end can be really helpful and it's fun to attend the prototype sessions and chat with designers and kind of, you know, get your feet dirty a little bit and be able to see that creation process is a lot of fun. 13:51 Lauren Woolsey Yeah, more and more, recently, I've decided that I enjoy that aspect of being able to give helpful feedback and find things in the game that I can help tweak to make better that's been more rewarding to me than trying to come up with new ideas of my own beyond the several that I've been working on. So game development is for anybody who can play a game and see what the strengths and weaknesses are and almost all of those game groups are completely public and open. 14:24 Rebecca Strang Yeah, there's the prototype convention here in Chicago this fall. I haven't been to it previously but I'm thinking about checking it out just because I think it would be great to be able to play test and get some ideas out there on how things can be improved from the player's perspective, not just in the mechanics of the game but in the feel of the game and how the representation that is in a game that might be able to be improved as well. 14:54 Lauren Woolsey Yeah, any listeners in the Baltimore area: every early spring there's Unpub, as well, and that's completely free to the public and is a phenomenal place to just see a huge variety of games at all different stages that you can provide feedback for and give that perspective and help show designers what is and isn't accessible based on your experiences and your understanding. 15:26 Rebecca Strang Yeah, the one in Chicago is Protospiel, that's going to be in Northbrook in September. 15:33 Lauren Woolsey A lot of the topics that we've mentioned in this conversation are ones that you'll hear in our episodes as we release them, so it's really our goal to just get those voices recognized that are working towards accessibility or have identified changes that they've made as the community's getting better at recognizing these sorts of things so that we can highlight some of the progress that we've been making. 16:00 Rebecca Strang Thanks for listening to our first episode this has been Rebecca Strang 16:04 Lauren Woolsey and Lauren Woolsey. If you're interested in tuning in to more of our conversations focused on accessibility and inclusion, Rebecca and I will be taking turns as hosts for interviews with many different creators in the board game community. 16:16 Rebecca Strang Episodes of Playability will be released every other Wednesday. For more information about topics or events discussed in this episode please see the about this episode section on our website at PlayabilityPod.com. 16:30 Lauren Woolsey If you have any questions or comments you would like to share with us, please email us at PlayabilityPod@gmail.com and find us on major social media platforms as @PlayabilityPod. Thanks again for listening! Play with a new perspective.