Early this morning something capped a surreal few days. The Prime Minister mentioned the game that a few of us made at Rewired State dotgovlabs. I guess now Gordon Brown has mentioned it, we probably have to really do it as a proper product, but for now let’s just think about the why and what of The Bump Game.

It all started off with dotgovlabs and Rewired State organising a 2 day prototyping session, one of the tracks of which was about pregnancy and becoming a parent.This is a subject close to my heart being a dad of two. One thing is clear though, second time round is much easier, partly because you know where your knowledge gaps are and you know roughly where you might find the information. To express this in terms of a Bush-ism:

You don’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t yet know what you may need to know but you don’t know yet.

This is expressed best in the Maslow’s Four Stages of Learning. Parents start in Unconscious Incompetence and you hope in any learning or training exercise to lead them from there to Conscious Incompetence and then into Conscious Competence. If you’re doing a stellar job you may get them to Unconscious Competence but that is often a state reinforced by practical skills and learning by doing.

Pregnancy is one of those points in life where skills and learning/knowledge gaps become immediately obvious. As does the largely immutable deadline. The government has a wealth of information in NHS Choices. The information is great, if verbose and the navigation is pretty good. Trouble is it’s not very user or context sensitive. That’s not NHS Choices’ fault, but it is their problem. If you don’t know what you’re browsing for and you don’t know what you’re searching for how can you use it? This was the problem we set to overcome. 

What we needed was to generate a serendipity engine. People find out the things they don’t know they need to know best via serendipitous means and when interleaved with things they do know. The art of good training is to draw out what people do know by intermingling things they may know with things they don’t. Some boardgames do this well (as does good quality radio, well made televisions schedules, good newspapers etc). Who hasn’t emerged from playing Trivial Pursuit or Scrabble without learning something. So there was the starting point, a boardgame about pregnancy.

Gorgeous image from into_the_fray

So arriving at dotgovlabs with the half baked idea of a bastard child of Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly, the parenting edition, I met several people who thought there was something in there that could be teased out more. Through the wonderful team that emerged, Tim, Phillip, Ivo, Daniel, Josh, Isabell what became The Bump Game emerged. A game where you’re trying to get to the end of the board ahead of your bump which moves forward one space metronomically every time you take a turn. It’s a two player collaborative game, with the mother to be and the partner playing as a team taking it in turns to ask questions. The rules can be found here in Phillip’s lovely blog post.

Each of the cards is a miniature and fun information leaflet in itself and carries a shortened weblink to more information making it instantly a physical link between the offline and online worlds (and yes we did suggest that nhs.uk could make a good URL shortener, playing with the NHS Choices URLs early on showed that if printed no one would type them in successfully). 

Some of the cards revolve around your postcode, telling you and questioning you about the services nearest to you (fantastic work from Tim). They pull in data from different parts of data.gov.uk, some of the services made available to us for the weekend and also, for the version to come, some other parts of the web to make the game truly relevant and truly empowering. For some mothers-to-be this could be the first time the internet or information from the internet touches them so we wanted it to be pertinent and to give you places to go next rather than to just drop you in the middle of a website without a torch or a map. It draws a lot from thinking about the work that Martha Lane Fox is doing on digital inclusion and how to try and give people first places of information where the value of being online is shown, in this case printed and in black and white - show, don’t tell. They also have maps on and so can serve other purposes. For the mother-to-be or partner in the game having a map that fits in your wallet of where the appointments will be is of exceptional use.

On day 2 I worked a lot on scraping data and the Facebook game element, in some ways I wished I hadn’t. We didn’t show it as time was short and it was glitchy in places. Playing it through also shows you the wonder of gameplay in the real world. It was a copy of the game mechanic. You signed up and asked a partner to play and then you took turns with the bump moving on, but so much was lost through playing online. The conversations which started as a result of playtesting the physical cards never had the space and the gameplay felt hollow, being in the same place and in the same shared experience, your partner asking you the question, telling you if you were right or not and then the conversation which emerged are almost as important as the information delivered itself. Many questions and answers lead to choices. The question on ante-natal classes could lead to an invitation to go to them and so forth. This gets lost in the online version and much more work would be needed to make it really feel right. It may however have another use as the game does as part of lifeskills classes in schools.

So what next, watch this and many other spaces, I think this is a go project.