claytical

Unsavory is a mobile game designed to put the player in the precarious position of choosing between their personal health, public health and their financial well-being. Like other activist games, the intention is to create awareness and empathy around an issue that is best understood as part of a larger system. Additionally, the game seeks to be a catalyst for change by embedding a social media campaign into gameplay that encourages players to share meaningful facts and statistics regarding restaurant workers, access to health care, and paid sick day legislation.

My work with ROC United put me on the path to design Unsavory. With funding through a School of Communication Creative Award, I assembled a team of three graduate students and a local composer to develop the game. Unsavory was extremely well received by the serious games community. It was accepted into numerous peer reviewed and juried exhibitions, including Meaningful Play and Games+Learning+Society 12 where it was among the top 5 games in the showcase. Unsavory also received a gold award at the International Serious Play Awards in the main competition, even though the majority of the team was comprised of students. For its innovative use of social media, the game also received a special emphasis award at the Serious Games Showcase and Challenge, which is part of I/ITSEC, the largest training and simulation conference in the world. Additionally, the game won the Best of Category in Mobile Games at the 2015 Horizon Interactive Awards.

Advocating for social issues through games was new territory for University of Miami. I was invited by Academic Technologies to talk faculty and staff about the game as part of a workshop on narrative techniques and the game is part of their examples for simulations. Unsavory received a healthy amount of press coverage, including Eater Miami and the Seattle Times. At the university, it was a featured article on UM News and E-Veritas. It was also mentioned in various press releases for award shows.

In the year 2020, to say that life in the United States was upended by a global pandemic is a bit of an understatement. Everyone dealt with challenges in their own way. Living in the middle of a crisis, news and events get blurred together. As a designer, I wanted to use this opportunity to look at the life of a low wage worker in tandem with the timeline of the pandemic.

To do this, I repurposed my game Unsavory, originally released in 2013. For the new release, you continually receive letters from 4 sources: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an aggregation of mainstream media outlets, Donald Trump, and your employer. This creates a timeline of where the United States was at in terms of dealing with the pandemic of 2020.

It’s an exploration and documentation of a great time of uncertainty. I see this game as bit of a historical record and I hope that years from now, people will be able to play it and reflect on what a challenging and shitty time it was when our government completely failed us.

Squawker is a dialogue based game where players talk and guide characters through a process of discovering mental health issues. The game presents as social network where characters congregate to talk about college life. The player must read through the messages and respond appropriately, guiding the character to seek professional help.

The conversations presented in the game are designed in consulation with health communication experts and are under evaluation for efficacy. The game will be released after the study has been completed.

Moonlight Flight is a physics based puzzle game where players use touch controls to fly around in space. Your touches create magnetic forces that pull your spaceship across the screen. By crashing into rings, you collect their light. You must avoid hazardous debris, but you can bump into platforms for an extra boost. Players receive points for collecting light. Light translates into points which turn into achievements and unlockables.

It is a casual game. It can be played slow or fast. It is meant to be played for a few minutes in any given play session while being addictive enough to draw the player back time and again with new challenges. The design is minimalist yet playful: exploring physics through touch, objects that react, with high contrast colors, a procedural soundtrack and sound effects that are reminiscent of playing pinball in an arcade.

Atlantis is a multiplayer local network game experience meant for play by groups in a cinema space through a smartphone controller. Through a series of collaborative and competitive mini games, players experience of the collapse of a city and will of its its inhabitants to survive. Together, by tapping, swiping, and yelling, the audience will decide the conclusion of a civilization in a unique co-operative gaming experience.

LAN Parties were frequent during my teenage years. My friends and I would lug our desktop computers to one house, setup a router, and play games like Doom and Warcraft late into the night. As networks became faster, large-scale multiplayer games became a strangely solitary experience. You were surrounded by other people but only virtually. As local multiplayer games like Sportsfriends have proven, there is something special about playing games together in a physical space. With Atlantis, my goal was to create the local multiplayer experience at a very large scale. Movie theaters provide a perfect physical location for this to happen.

As smartphones become more and more ubiquitous, they provide the perfect option for a universal controller. With a team of students, I developed a mobile application for both Apple and Android devices that relies on a set of standardized Open Sound Control (OSC) messages and an OSX game server that is projected on the theater screen. The theater only requires a PC and a wireless network. With their phones connected to the same wireless network, players now have their own game controller that can communicate with the game server. Sharing a large screen with up to 200 people is an interesting design problem. To explore this, we have created multiple mini-game prototypes to see how different systems to work.

Our first prototype, Sea Nibbles, is the most straightforward. In the game, everyone has their own avatar that they can move around the screen to collect plankton. The players are assigned one of ten different shapes with a random color. Our second prototype, Tanks, pushes the number of people upward by combining functionality of each avatar into separate roles. A set of three players is assigned to a given tank. One person drives, another aims the cannon, and the third person controls the shooting. We re-skinned the mini games into a 3 part game about the destruction of an underwater civilization titled Atlantis.

Don Grey Cafe is an endless tea pouring game that was initially conceived at the 2016 Global Game Jam. In the game, you serve different types of tea to customers based on their shirt color. We decided to highlight a local Miami startup, Lemon City Tea, as a way of exploring games for advertising purposes. The original game was developed in less than 48 hours. When the game jam concluded, we polished the game a bit more so we could release it on Google Play.

Eradicate! is a single player card game that builds on top of Humans vs. Mosquitoes. In the game, you play as a human in charge of a village where you must defend your people and clear breeding grounds filled with mosquitoes. The game was developed to emphasize learning through a first person, human-centric perspective. Eradicate! teaches about the transmission of disease passed through mosquitoes while also introducing ways to prevent habitat and population proliferation.

Vanity is a tabletop game designed to reduce the intent to use tanning beds and prevent melanoma in adolescents and young adults. The game was funded by the Division of Dermatology at the Ottawa Hospital and the University of Ottawa. It is the precursor to my more recent digital game Dreamy.

In 2014, a team of UM School of Communication researchers conducted a pilot study on the efficacy of Vanity as a public health intervention promoting indoor tanning avoidance. This team was comprised of myself, Dr. Nicholas Carcioppolo, Lien Tran, Dr. Katharina Lang, and David Beyea. The preliminary results of the study were inconclusive yet promising. The mean score for tanning intentions was marginally significantly lower (t(59) = -1.74; p = .09; equal variances not assumed) in the Vanity condition than the control condition, suggesting that Vanity may be an acceptable preventative tool to keep people from engaging in tanning behavior that could lead to skin cancer.

The World Bank commissioned the design of Uwezeshaji kaya kuhimili (which translates as enabling households to withstand), a tabletop game simulating a real-world, Bank-funded development program, with the goal of synthesizing knowledge about the program’s social protection impact for managing climate-related risks. The original prototype was designed for Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) management staff to better understand the program, and this lead to the adaptation of the game to explain the program to rural Tanzanian farmers.

As a consultant for the World Bank, I was hired as part of an international interdisciplinary team of social scientists, climate experts, and humanitarian workers to design a facilitated game modeled after the Tanzania’s Productive Social Safety Net Program (PSSN). The program is a welfare system approved by the Bank Board in 2012 and implemented by its partner Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) at the national level in Tanzania. To our knowledge, this was the first time a game has been used at this scale in a development program and I was grateful to be part of it. The game was very well received by the World Bank, an our team received an internal Knowlympics award for innovation. An updated version was commissioned by the World Bank and piloted in a few villages led by my colleague Lien Tran. The locals that were part of the pilot enjoyed the experience and it’s my hope that a national roll out will happen eventually.

Dreamy is a dating simulator that places the player into conversations with potential suitors where physical appearance matters. The objective of the game is to find a date during a 30 day trial of a dating service. The central game mechanic in the game is choosing how to respond to potential suitors. These conversations highlight the choices and reasons for risk-taking behavior associated with indoor tanning. Components and content in Dreamy are based upon two behavioral prediction models: Integrated Model of Behavioral Prediction (IM: Fishbein, 2000, 2007; Fishbein & Yzer, 2003) and the health belief model (HBM: Rosenstock, 1974; Rosenstock, Strecher & Becker, 1988). The game mechanics have been designed to target salient beliefs and attitudes to determine behavioral intention to engage in tanning behavior and discourage indoor tanning.

Dreamy is the first game I have designed from the ground up with a researcher to incorporate behavioral prediction models into the core mechanics. Using the integrated model of behavioral prediction and the health belief model, we set out to create a game that targeted salient beliefs and discouraged indoor tanning. I worked with my colleague in the School of Communication, Dr. Soyoon Kim, who created the logic flows of the models in the game. Our preliminary findings were presented at Meaningful Play, which have shown that with our target audience of women age 18-25, the game has an extremely positive effect on changing attitudes about indoor tanning. Further analysis is underway with an expectation for multiple publications based on the extensive data we collected. We plan to release the game on multiple platforms when we have fully verified the effectiveness of the game.

The inherently interdisciplinary nature of games brings scholars from various fields together, so assessing impact can become a contentious issue. In order to move the field forward, some games need to be designed and studied using theoretical frameworks so that we know what works and what doesn’t. Dreamy is my first attempt at this design method and I hope to continue this line of research with other games.

Hustling Health Care is a strategic board game that uses real world insurance claim price data. The game aims to teach players the actual cost of health care in the United States through play. Each player takes on the role of an insurance company. They play the game by selling plans to patients and paying claims. The players try to avoid bankruptcy while keeping their patients happy and healthy. Knowing what claims have been paid for and how much each person paid for them gives players an advantage, so the better the player is at the game, the more informed they are as a health care consumer.

Humans vs. Mosquitoes is a simple non-digital game for social impact that educates players about the relationship between humans, mosquitoes, vector-borne diseases and the environment. Originally designed in 2011, the game has been used by facilitators in at least 4 continents as a fun and engaging way to teach audiences about vector-borne diseases. The game has been modified and adapted to work in various geographic regions as well as with different audiences. Humans vs. Mosquitoes can be played as an active physical play-based game, a thoughtful card game, and even with nothing but a set of instructions and a set of gestures.

The game has been referenced in several publications, which highlight the academic value of participatory games in humanitarian work around the world. Humans vs. Mosquitoes has been exhibited in a range of games festivals and continues to be used in workshops and interventions internationally.

Brutal sewing at it’s finest! Sweatshop Superstar is a bloody rhythm action game in the vein of Guitar Hero. After being sold to Mr. Enojado by his mother, Pepe starts work in a factory. Players guide Pepe, an 8 year old boy with a heart of gold and the fingers of an arthritic corpse through 25 seams of 5 different garments!

Sweatshop Superstar was submitted to the App Store in 2009 and promptly rejected. Multiple times. Due to compatibility issues, the game can only be played at the Longwood Art Gallery or on Clay's old iPhone 3GS.

This game was the first project I worked on after graduating from Parsons. As an aspiring unseasoned programmer, I wrote the entire thing in openFrameworks for iOS. After submitting it to the App Store in 2009, it received a swift rejection. Continued attempts to rectify the situation were shut down consistently. With no quick way to port the game, it faced immediate obsolence.

Two years later, Littleloud released Sweatshop, followed shortly by Molleindustria's Phone Story. Those developers were smart enough to program their games in something that could be ported to Android easily. The lesson for me, however, was the power Apple and other platforms censor content that critique their business model.

Every year Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United catalogs wages, benefits, and promotion practices of 150 of the most popular restaurants in America and publishers the Diners’ Guide to Ethical Eating. Using this data, I designed and developed an interactive mobile version of the guide. The interactive version of the guide allows users to search by labor practice preferences and location. Users of the app can join in a social media campaign and tweet to restaurants based on their labor practices. Additionally, users can submit reports of restaurants not on the list to be verified and added by ROC United. In late 2012, I released the first version of the app for both Android and iOS devices. In early 2015, I released a redesigned version of the app that took shifted ROC United’s strategy to crowd sourcing information about restaurants.

In order to provide up to date results, I also developed a web interface and database for ROC United that allows the organization to maintain restaurant listings as well as verify crowd sourced reports from users.

I have stepped away from developing the app, but ROC United continues to release updates.

*In 2015, I entered both Zoo Rush and the Diners Guide into the AEJMC competition. I won first and second place.

Queso is an award winning open source web based gameful learning management system. Using principles found in game design, the software seeks to create a simple and engaging experience for students and teachers.

The market for learning management systems is dominated by Blackboard. While Blackboard is rich in features, the ability for an average user to find and leverage them is low. When it comes to teaching a gameful classroom, existing software suites could be customized by instructors to get the job done but it’s not a small task. Furthermore, instructors that decide to experiment with gamification are often presented with solutions that promote badge systems and leaderboards as the miracle solution for increasing engagement. For me, Queso is a design research process where I could distill ideas from my own gameful experiments in the classroom into solutions for other educators.

The Personal Exposure Reporter is a web based application that allows firefighters to keep a digital record of each incident they respond to. Other systems exist for reporting, but their focus is broadly on health and not specific to cancer. After extensive user research, the app will be ableto capture variables of on-the-job exposures that can be used by researchers to find evidence of cancer related to firefighters. The reporter is one of many projects funded through the Firefighter Cancer Initiative (FCI) headed by Dr. Erin Kobetz and funded by the state of Florida. FCI is a large scale interdisciplinary project that includes teams across the University including the Miller School of Medicine, School of Education and Human Development, College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Communication. My hope, which is shared by the team, is that this project will provide an overwhelming amount of evidence to push Florida legislators to pass a presumptive cancer law.

SCAN 360 is an interactive platform that describes the burden of cancer throughout the state of Florida, with an emphasis on Sylvester’s catchment area. The site uses historical and comprehensive data from health, environmental and socio-economic sources to visualize and interpret incidence and mortality of specific cancers at the state, county, and zip code level. I was responsible for designing and developing the initial prototypes that led to the current website. The current website was not designed or developed by me, but the the link is included to get a better understanding of the project.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I found trying to teach the remaining classes on Zoom limiting. Over the summer, I took the slides from my course Internet, Media and Society and turned them into podcast lectures. The first part of these lectures look at the history of the internet to provide context for today's technology ecosystem: from the birth of the internet to the evolution of the hellscape that is social media today.

Zoo Rush is a running adventure game for mobile phones that seeks to raise awareness, reduce stigmas and create empathy for people with sickle cell disease. In the game, you take on the role of a zookeeper with sickle cell disease. It’s your first day on the job and all of the animals have escaped. Due to your condition you must avoid infections, hydrate often, check in with your physician, and take your medication to deal with chronic pain and potential crises. With your net in hand, it’s up to you to save the day.