How to encourage co-operation instead of competition?

Lord of the Rings is definitely proof that you can have a tense, exciting and yet cooperative game. The key is to give the players something challenging to compete against besides each other, whether it's the clock, a growing pile of loss conditions, or perhaps a list of rankings (in the computer game Civilization, your score is compared to a shameful or glorious historical figure, and the higher rankings are secret until you earn them).

As Tom Vasel has pointed out, the environmental game Terra's problem is that because it allows for individual victories, some people would rather destroy the world than let someone else win. The best variant for Terra I heard was that players must throw money into a pot before the game. If the game ends normally, they get the money back. If the world is destroyed, they have to send the money to an environmental charity. Probably not a good solution for 12 year olds though. :)

If you're not familiar with the above games, be sure to check http://www.boardgamegeek.com/ for rule overviews and pictures.

You have lots of people here who would be happy to brainstorm game ideas for you, if you want to share more of your theme. Which human rights and gender issues are you hoping to focus on?

Tim Mitchell
Yogurt

I think that something along the lines of the Lord of the Rings idea would work well. Maybe a collective race against world corruption and dictatorial governments. Each player could represent a member of a UN type organization aimed at preventing and/or relieving humanitarian disasters and atrocities. I think that for your purposes, it could be a good idea for players to be able to work against each other, just punish them for it.

A game turn could go something like this
1. Determine what disasters or atrocities occur for a turn. Maybe through a card draw or die roll.
2. Players take turns performing "relief actions" from a list of actions or from cards. This could be limited to one action or card per player per turn or it could be that each player can perform multiple actions per turn. The goal would be to collectively provide enough relief to take care of all of the humanitarian issues for that turn. To make it competitive without turning players against each other, try using a point system. Example: 1 point per successful relief action for the player performing the action and bonus points for every player for each disaster / atrocity successfully relieved.

Relief actions could include things like emergency food, medical care, peace keeping troops, world bank loans, etc. As cards, these actions could also have different values assigned to them. I think that cards would work best.

Disaster / atrocity cards could be things like famine, epidemic, earthquake, genocide, etc.

Example turn: An Epidemic, a Civil War, and a Famine have reared their ugly heads. Each issue has a set of requirements to be met collectively by all players to overcome that issue. Each player gets a hand of relief cards to play to help with the disasters / atrocities relief requirements. Say a Civil War requires x points worth of peace keeping troops, x points worth of medical care, and x points worth of food to resolve. Each player would have a chance to play a card to help meet these requirements. Play could continue in rounds until all players have played as many cards as they can to help with the relief efforts.

I need to go now but I will post more on this idea later.

Xan

I think that given the type of audiences that you are shooting for you should go with as few rules as possible. Another game you might consider mimicing is Truth or Dare Jenga.

Kids of that age enjoy dexterity games.

The various blocks would have the various other activities, improvisation, question and answer etc, associated with them, and successfully completeing a task would allow them to build the structure upward. This helps the game appeal on several fronts, including a tactile/visual one. So even if you have a player who couldn't care less about gender issues. (something that is likely to happen in a school/camp setting) they will still be involved in the game, and hopefully learn something along the way.

I would certainly avoid games where you roll a die and move a little guy.

Hey, my grandparents were from Finland, so we could be long lost cousins or something! Welcome to the forums!

I've designed a number of group games to be used for educational purposes, and a number of them deal with the role of the individual in larger groups. Each of these games is a freeform negotiation session, without turns or other tight structure. The players all have their goals, and work toward them at all times, with the periodic "administative" phase that updates the global situation. In your case it might be to change the status of various oppressed groups in various nations, for example. These might happen every five minutes or so.

In my experience, cooperation games are most effective when the players really could go their own way, but are constrained by the victory conditions, rather than the rules. In this way, most players play for the common good most of the time, but get as much extra for themselves as they can. This, unfortunately, is the way most real organizations work, and it's just a matter of how much of this "side gain'' the others will allow. Too much, and the real world brands it as corruption.

I think that the conflict between individual gain and the greater good is what makes these games interesting. but I'll admit, it can be a tightrope act to design them.

Keep the gameplay as simple as possible. The interplay between selfishness, the greater good, and trusting others is complex enough without introducing complicated gameplay elements. For instance, I usually have each player gat a limited number of points or tokens to influence events, and these they commit to various causes as they see fit. Everyone needs the help of others to make headway on their problems, and the players spend most of their time trying to convince others that they should be given priority. Every player, of course, sees a given problem as paramount, and percieves the others as less important.

These interactions between competing views make for great discussions afterward, which is the point of these games, rather than a super-duper game as such. As long as your game is fun, engaging, and makes the players connect the game event to the real world, you've done your part.

I agree with screech..., that you might want to consider some form of real life influence on the game. To me it seems like the best way to build actual interest.

What I might consider would be a murder-mystery dinner party style game. This style of game is largely based on Acting mechanic, which oddly enough I have been posting about recently. It allows for large group interaction since you can use as many people as needed to act out the actual event, while the rest attempt to uncover what is being acted out. One hard issue about this style of game is the lack of interest to actually act out something in front of other people. Not to mention, I am not sure what human rights type of material you are trying to promote and if the conent that you are trying to promote would be morally "OK" for students to actually act out. (obviously there are things that school frown upon so content would need to be suitable for the environment)

This might be a direction for your game idea, since you could have teachers or educators direct half of a class, for instance, to act out a real life human rights event, while the other students and observers could attempt to solve what they are trying to portray.

Beyond this style of game, you could always attempt to build games that target specific topics of human rights. But I think the difficult part of doing this would be to make it interesting enough to promote interest after the game play.

Actually to think about it, interest in general might be that hardest item to resolve with this game. From what I remember, kids in school dont care to play games that deal with "learning". So you might really need to focus on what would be appealing to your target audience. Figure out what types of games the target audience would be interested in playing.

Not sure I helped you much, but best of luck,