House Hunt

An educational game designed by Erikheath Thomas
listservices@mac.com

| Instructional Objective | Learners & Context | Object of Game | Game Materials |

| Time Required | Rules | Design Process | References |

Instructional Objective

House Hunt is a multipart game designed to help home-buyers acquire and practice home buying skills. These skills are divided into three related, but distinct subject matter areas:

Learners & Context of Use

The game is targeted toward adult learners purchasing their first home, or to those home-buyers who would like to refresh their home buying skills. This game specifically targets:

The game is designed for optimal use by at least two players with support for up to 4 teams of multiple players. The game could be used at home by a couple or at home-buying parties as a tool to increase potential home-buyers' confidence.

While certain competitive elements of the game are absent with individual use, an individual can successfully acquire and practice the elements of the game playing alone.

Each subject matter area is built into an individual mini-game to focus practice in a specific area. The three games, Mortgage Mambo, Realtor Roundup, and Inspection Perfection, can be played in order, or as individual games.

Because players will have varying backgrounds, the game design makes accommodations for unskilled and moderately skilled users through various devices that allow play to go from multiple choice, to assisted recall via hinting, to recall only.

Determination of a winner reinforces learning acquired in the game by requiring players to complete an analysis of each offer to determine who 'won' the game. For a single player game, this analysis would be determining whether the home buying contract the player ends up with is better than the original home profile.

Object of the Game

The overall object of the game is to be the player with the best deal on a home. The best deal is determined by the total cost of purchasing the home less the total value of the home.

Each mini-game contributes to the total cost and/or total value of the home which is recorded on the home buyer's contract. At the conclusion of the games, the cost and value of each home is calculated, producing a winner(s).

Each mini-game has a contributory goal to the overall goal.

In Mortgage Mambo, the mini-game goal is to get as many loan offers as possible and then to select from those offers.

In Realtor Roundup, the mini-game goal is to get to the best realtor and therefore get the largest number of buyer incentives.

In Inspection Perfection, the mini-game goal is to increase the cost or decrease the value of your opponents Home Buyer's Contract.

Game Materials

House Hunt is designed to be produced on a laser or inkjet printer and assembled together using scissors and tape.

House Hunt consists of:

Time Required

Total playing time is approximately 50 minutes, including five minutes for setup and five minutes for final calculations. Game play is approximately 40 minutes. Game play may be completed in one period or carried over several periods, allowing players to investigate or review any areas they are deficient in.

The Rules

House Hunt General Rules

For both single player games and games of two or more.

  1. Each player should take a blank Home Buyer's contract. Each player will need a pen or pencil to record results on their home buyer's contract.
  2. Select one Home Profile from the set of Home Profile cards. Each player will use the same home profile as a starting part for their home contract.
  3. Each player then uses a pencil to fill out their home-buyer's contract with the information from the home profile card.
  4. For a complete game, play in the following order:
  5. You may also play each game by itself or skip one or two of the games. If Inspection Perfection is played, it should always be played last.

Realtor Roundup and Mortgage Mambo Rules

For two or more players:

  1. Select one side of the draw box for the game you are playing to pull cards from.
  2. Place the END GAME marker in the middle of the draw box For a longer game, place it closer to the side opposite where you will draw from.
  3. All player tokens begin at START.
  4. Select one player to be first. This is the current player.
  5. The player on the right of the current player draws a task card from the draw box and asks the current player the question on the outside of the card.
  6. If the current player requests a hint, the player on the right opens the card and reads the hint (usually a set of multiple choice answers).
  7. The number of spaces a player may move is stated on each task card and depends on whether the current player got the answer right and whether a hint was used. Follow the directions on the task cards.
  8. When a player lands on a space with directions, the player should follow those directions prior to the next player taking a turn.
  9. When a current player's turn is over, play proceeds clockwise to the next player, who becomes the current player.

For single players:

  1. Set up play as for two or more players.
  2. Draw task cards and answer the questions.
  3. If you need a hint, open the task card enough to see the hint while still obscuring the answer.
  4. When you've answered the question, open the card completely to confirm if your answer is correct.
  5. Move your token as directed and record any changes to your home buyer's contract.

Inspection Perfection Rules

For two or more players only.

  1. Shuffle Inspection Deck. Each player should take four (4) cards from the deck, making certain not to show the cards to other players.
  2. There are two objectives to this game. The first is to discard all of your cards. The second is to ask other players questions that you think they don't know, forcing them to pick up another card from the pile and to receive a penalty which will affect their home buyer's contract.
  3. Play proceeds as follows:
  4. Play then proceeds to the player on the left of the player who just asked the question.
  5. When one player has no more cards, the game is over.

Ending The Games

At the end of the games, complete the calculations on your home buyer's contract. The person with the best deal wins.

Design Process

A Little History

I knew coming into this process that I would probably end up designing a game by myself for adult learners. Professionally, I design user interfaces and user experiences for desktop and online based software products (e.g. Intuit's TurboTax and a few online applications for Yahoo! Search Marketing). One of the challenges of designing for adult learners outside of a classroom setting or even a work setting is the lack of homogeneity in background experiences, learning styles, and knowledge. The knowledge gap may be very small to very large for adult learners, and the context of use may also vary significantly. Having dealt with these challenges for many years now, I wanted to challenge myself to leverage fundamental instructional and design methods in a non-computer based way. Since I had also been looking for a home and studying the home buying process, I selected this topic for the game.

Researching and Prototyping

One of my best friends when designing is paper, and usually it's in a bound paper notebook. My other friends are books and/or articles on the subject, and I actually went through five different books on game design by the time I figured out what the game should look like and how it should operate.

I generated various versions of the game including:

By the time I got through the third version, I had focused in on what my criteria were for any design going forward.

  1. Players should be able to determine the actual cost of a house versus its value.
  2. Players should be able to determine the cost of a mortgage and how the various rate and payment manipulators affect monthly and total cost.
  3. Players should be able to identify the top ten home inspection issues and understand how those issues affect a home's value and its cost.
  4. Players should have a working knowledge of general real estate terminology.
  5. Players should have a working knowledge of the stages in a typical home buying process.

While I was creating these versions of House Hunt, I tried various board layouts as well, from Trivial Pursuit circles to a basic linear path. However, all of these layouts had one thing in common. I was designing a race game. By my third iteration of the game, I was beginning to establish common elements that were repeating in the game including:

By the fifth iteration, I had given up on trying to create a model of the home buying process, and instead focused on modelling the three dominant processes with an over-arching theme of players understanding cost versus value. Once I did this, the final game design came together very quickly.

Playtesting

It was hard for me to arrange for appropriate play testing of the game, so I paid special attention to the feedback I received both during class, from my professors, and from my peers at work. Everyone's feedback was invaluable, and actually solved (or rather forced me to solve) three key issues that were plaguing the design.

First, the game was too hard for first-time home-buyers with little skill. The solution to this came during class play testing with the addition of hints - a set of multiple choice answers that a player could ask for. The consequence was simple if you asked for a hint - move fewer spaces with a correct answer. The learning consequence was excellent as a player who requested a lot of hints would have to answer more questions, thus practicing more.

Second, I originally designed the game to be printed on 4 8.5 by 11 inch pieces of card stock. Player's felt that this created a disconnection among the games and at minimum, created a lot of pieces. So I redesigned the game to fit into a two-page 11 by 17 inch format that keeps the rules constantly present and provides visual connection for all of the games.

Third, I altered the game so that a single person could play two of the games by themselves. While s/he would miss the inter-player competition, they could still practice getting a better deal than the home profile s/he began with. I made this change by creating the draw box and by changing the task card format so that the player who drew the folded card did not see the answer until the card was opened and turned upside down. This allowed the player to draw the card and let anyone see the question. It also allowed the player to open the card enough to read the hint without seeing the answer.

Finalizing the Game (for now) and Lessons Learned

While the game actually focused on teaching key elements of the home buying process, it did not provide a very accurate model of the home buying process itself. At first I though this was a significant failing of the game, but as I talked to more and more people about their experience buying a home, I've recognized that each of them is quite different. While these differences revolve around the subjects this game covers, most of the variance I encountered in my conversations focused on more intangible things like:

Ultimately, this game is focused on imparting and reinforcing hard skills - facts, rules, identification - that are pretty common to all home buying experiences. What it doesn't do, and what would be an interesting addition is to allow people to practice soft skills like negotiation, patience, and learning to walk away.

References

Books & Journals

Electronic

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