DATE: 2014

ORGANISATION: Preloaded

ROLE: Producer

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Amplify are a US-based organisation creating digital products for the K12 educational market, ranging from educational content to professional development for teachers.

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One of these products is Story cards, a collectible card game which pits authors and characters from literature against one another in order to encourage children to read.  Incorporating mechanics such as status effects, card combination and action tokens results in rich and deep gameplay, which allows for very varied styles of play. A Preloaded case study of Story Cards can be found here.

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I came on late in the development cycle of the Story Cards game, but was the producer responsible for ‘re-booting’ the game concept for a younger audience who would find the original Story Cards gameplay too ponderous and subtle.  The result is Story cards ‘Duel’, a tablet version of Top Trumps with a twist.  Players can only build a deck of powerful characters by reading the books in which those characters feature; the game connects with other Amplify digital E-reader products and quizzes to ensure that a pupil who has read Black Beauty and answered a quiz question correctly unlocks character cards from the novel.

 

This creates a virtuous circle - collecting more powerful cards allows a player to do better in the game, which in turn encourages them to read more books. Additionally, the statistics from which a player can choose are designed to encourage conversations about the literary characters: ‘Who’s more brave, Captain Hook or Frankenstein’s monster?’