Karmatography
Game for Social Impact developed with the support of one of India's premier game design studios.
Mechanics Design
Iterative Playtesting
Art Direction
Collaborating with a Team
Karmatography is a game designed to help you practice empathy. Play in groups of up to 10, as celestial attorneys in charge of redeeming damned souls in your care. The premise revolves around how you build convincing cases that persuade the Judge to your soul's favor, such that the judgement they faced in life, doesn't tarnish them for all their afterlife.
The key insight around which the game is built is,
““Empathy is an algorithm of evoking emotions of another person in you, by conceptually immersing yourself in, or testing yourself against the exact external forces that acted on them.””
In a team with two other designers, this project was developed in a 2-day game jam in one of India's premier game design studios.
We played the final prototype with professional game designers and filmmakers who had deep knowledge of both game mechanics and narrative storytelling.
Players were forced to be creative in stringing together strong Cases and be strategic in choosing which Case to sent forward while keeping competing Cases in mind.
Players exercised their storytelling and argumentation muscles and each round saw passionate debate. The game ended up with a lighter tone in lieu of the situations and contexts we added for the prototype, but could easily be made more serious by adding more complex Context cards in a future expansion pack.
The Outcome & Impact
In Karmatography, each round begins with establishing the Judge for that round. The Judge deals each of the other players a Soul card, containing a mortal sin. Players draw one each from 4 stacks of Context cards:
Crimes, Victims, Backgrounds and Aspirations.
They then construct context for the crime with the Context cards by adding details to the story such as motives, justifications, and sympathy for the defendant soul. If players choose to do so, they may send their case forward to be tried for that round. The Judge receives all forwarded cases, and hears each player's advocacy for their soul.
The Judge decides which Soul is redeemed that round and their vote is kept secret. The Judge roles then rotates, and the player next to them Judges for that round, while the previous judge is an ordinary player in the current round. Each round, players are dealt Souls by the Judge and they must strategically use, trade or save their Context cards to create the best Cases for redemption. The game ends when Soul cards are depleted or when players decide to, at which point the secret votes are counted and the player who redeemed the most Souls is the victor.
The Rules
The final game, as with all creative projects, ended up very different from the initial idea. Working with the strong concept suggested by a teammate: "Players acting as divine judges to pardon the most mortal of sins", we got to work in figuring out how to abstract the essence of such a game into mechanics. We decided that this would be a game that would help people practice empathy.
If players could be given the chance to explore and dig into crimes that seem terrible at face value, that could help them re-contextualize and understand small transgressions in their daily life, and move towards acceptance and forgiveness. Along the way, we asked ourselves two key questions:
"Are players practicing empathy?"
"Are they having fun?"
The Process
A huge problem was fixing on the desired game feel. Players had to feel like the only way they could redeem crimes was by seeking justifiable context and applying it to their case in ways that persuaded a feeling, human Judge. In the first few iterations, we struggled to abstract the mechanics correctly and during actual play the game diverged from what we wanted it to be.
We settled on a system of building Cases with the pieces of Defendant, Crime, Victim, and Era. For example,
"Mohandas K. Gandhi"
"Arson"
"A family of three"
"In the Roman Empire"
However, during play we were experiencing comical cases which were undermining the gravity of the exercise and parodying history in politically insensitive ways. The game was intended to sensitize players to moral nuance and explore varying perspectives of justice - but this was quite the opposite effect.
Another hard obstacle was corruption. Since Judges would rotate every round, the Judge in any specific round is incentivized to vote for players who they are essentially competing against. Hence, leading to bias and voting for personal gain as they would simply play ordinarily next round.
It required a redrawing of the fundamental mechanics. To get some fresh perspective, I detached from the problem for a while. Eventually, I arrived at the solution by looking at the true intended function of the game and by framing it like a step-by-step algorithm (inspired by Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, a book I was reading at the time). We modeled the system around better variables, where Context would be built using Victims, Pasts, Futures and Environs. After testing, we quickly arrived at the intended game feel. The Judge corruption problem was solved by a suggestion from our mentor that we keep the votes secret and tally up at the end of the game - a simple solution that dissolved that obstacle instantly!
With Karmatography, I was able to experience a rigorous creative sprint with a team of other budding game designers in just a span of 2 days. Diviner in game mechanics terms, is a simple tableau-building game that involves matching sets of cards towards victory. The learning here was that, despite having simple mechanics, a considerable amount of real impact could be achieved if the theme and abstraction was done right. The game jam was where I was able to encounter and experience various fundamental game mechanics and expand my vocabulary of game design as a whole. Working with a team required us to self-organize, communicate nuances and do the intricate dance of embracing everyone's contributions equally whilst not getting lost in the weeds, on the way to our final goal of helping chip away at a very real problem: the lack of human empathy.
To conclude,