Citizen Z: A Fantasy Video Campaign Game

Citizen Z is a video production campaign game where teams create a persuasive video demonstrating a particular fictional agenda in an attempt to sway the population towards a policy choice.

Setup

Materials:

*1 device per player *Before the game, all players should make a Storify account *At least 9 players

Play:

Setup:

Divide the players into 3-4 even teams (depending on # of players). Doesn’t need to be exact. Game Master reads the the Citizen Z scenario out loud and defines the two opposing viewpoints Game master assigns each team a viewpoint to support. Each team must select an “editor.” The Editor is a team leader and has responsibility of inputting the final product in storify

Planning Phase:

The players have 5 minutes to talk about their position and plan their storify story. They should talk about ideas for different media and websites to support their side of the argument. It is the Editor’s responsibility to determine the overall flow of the story and what kinds of media should be included.

By the end of the planning phase, each player on the team should have an assignment and a direction.

Creation Phase:

The players have 10 minutes to put together their storify story. Each player must find at least one piece of media (video, picture, social media post, website, etc.) and write a caption to put it into the context of the story. The storify story must have at least 5 pieces of media.

All media must be sent to the Editor and put into the storify story. At the end of the 10 minutes they must hit “publish” and publish their story.

Example Story: https://storify.com/sliberty/citizen-z#publicize

Presentation phase:

Each team gets 90 seconds to present their story. At the end of all presentations, the entire playerbase votes (secret ballot-style) on which position should be enacted as policy.

Learning Goals

Students will learn how to construct a meaningful persuasive campaign video from storyboarding, to shooting, to editing, to polish. These skills are transferable to real world contexts, even though the instanced game deals with a fictional somewhat silly idea.

Game Development Progress

1/22/16 We created three distinct scenarios to play through and settled on Storify as a story-telling medium. The three scenarios are located here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xtH4FhxROBGxDKCjDSWurVMHomqkhAUIJOFrobq-BwQ/

**1/21/16 ** We have the concept, but haven't put together the playtestable setup yet. I think for this one we will need more specific digital tools to use.