Pie-Eyed: Adapting MtG Elements to Create a New Card Came Called Dogs of War

Abstract

Contemporary serious game development remains largely improvised and haphazard. Many hindering aspects are to blame for this, including: project scope, available resources, stakeholder makeup, subject expert consultation(s), etc. Most significantly for this paper, however, game designers typically struggle to imbue philosophical depth into their projects. The popular trading card game “Magic: The Gathering” (Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro) offers remedies to this issue in the form of a central nucleus: the colour pie. The purpose of this research was to investigate the merits of the game design of MTG and to adapt it for our own use in a new card game. A similar framework has been devised for a history-for-education trading card game currently in development called “Dogs of War” (DoW). The research has up until this point only focused on designing DoW, but once the game is complete, a research project will be conducted to study its efficacy. This research reports on the extent to which tangible results (mechanically, and otherwise) can be accrued by formulating and implementing such a philosophical design foundation. Results include giving examples of Dogs of War and how it was adapted from MTG.