As myself and Harrison were in charge of the graphic development we made some joint research into existing meme card games. Surprisingly, there is only one meme game available on the market - 'What Do You Meme?' - Whilst Harrison analysed the imagery, I looked at the content, typography and layout of the game. Essentially, the game consists of players matching a caption card to a photo card. A judge then picks the funniest pairing and the player with the most won cards wins. Overall, this game is a little too similar to Cards Against Humanity - the same typography and layout has been used on the cards and the entire gameplay concept is almost exactly the same. To make our meme game unique and distinguishingly different from Cards Against Humanity I thought that it would be interesting to incorporate my guessing game idea into the meme party game idea.
For the meme card game I proposed four rounds - a pure-question round, a fill-in-the-gap round, a picture round and a fact round. These would all be meme focused and aim to add more of a variety to the game. My main idea was that two teams would take it in turns to ask another team a question. One meme question thought of was 'What is "Damn Daniel" known for?', relating to a current trending online meme at the time. If the opposing team answers the question right they get to keep the card, but if not, it is discarded. The winning team would be the team with the most amount of cards at the end of the game. This could be agreed on before the game starts, giving the game a more flexible, laid-back approach to the rules. The group really liked this concept and thought that it was the best concept to use when pitching our party game to a crit of 19-21 year olds.
Before the crit, Grace and Oli made some some illstrations of current, well-known memes to show for the image round. Harrison and myself pitched the proposal to the crit group to gain some feedback on a few issues we wanted to resolve.
The first issue was regarding what we should call the card game. To make it instantly identifiable we had already agreed that we wanted to incorporate the word 'meme' into the name; however, wanted some feedback. One extremely useful point suggested was that we should make the name a single word hashtag, that players can use to share their game experiences online. This would allow the game to be promoted by the players, as opposed to by Hasbro.
The second issue was where to put the answers to questions. One piece of feedback given was that the answers could be done in a similar way to trivial pursuit, where answers are hidden by a small flap. Whilst this was a good idea, it would be quite difficult for us to physically produce, which we will be required to do if we manage to get through the first stage of the competition. Instead, another piece of feedback highlighted that we should simply put them at the bottom of the card in small, as the team asking questions can hide it with their thumb when showing the opposing team the card.
Overall, the proposal received fantastic feedback. Everyone loved the idea of taking online memes and incorporating them into a physical card game. People thought that the concept is very clear and easy to understand, which was one aspect I really wanted to achieve after identifying the importance of simplicity in the research stage. As the feedback suggested that the proposed game is suitable for the 16-26 target audience, we chose to develop this concept forward as a final resolution.
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