Saturday, 8 February 2014

Trying to explain Invoke to someone who speaks English as a second language.

Some things that you never think about till you have to explain it to someone who English is not their first lanugage.

So I have a very good friend of mine from Japan named Maaya. Later on when we start working on more video you will see more of her. (Well you are going to see a lot of her work... she does video editing) .. So we were talking about the video project today and she had asked to play Invoke because it will give her a better idea how she wants to set up the various shots. We started to play..  I want to mention that her English is really good.. But there are some words and phrases that slip through the cracks now and then.. So explaining a game like Invoke can be a bit of a challenge. During the process, I started to have to really think about how I explained the game. I really had to take a step by step and explain the "Why" you do something and not so much if the how you do it. Then I started to think, at what point is this different from having to explain to someone who has never played before.. What is a better way of expressing the concepts of the game... So I took some notes

  • The why you do something is harder to explain then how to do something 
  • Clearer and constant terms are needed .. such as subject vs target .
  • Colours of the cards are a huge help. 
  • Images on the cards are priceless. 
  • A well written manual is helpful no matter how good you are at explaining a game. 
  • Playing through 4-5 hands showing all the possibilities with out actually competing is also helpful . 
  • Sometimes its better to have a group so they can watch the others play. 
So it was not long before she started to understand some of the more complex parts of the game. Once i described the game as a sentence it started to make sense. (Though the use of target cards needed some better explanation on my part) 

So there you have it.. what I learned from trying to teach someone how to play Invoke. 

Yes this means Invoke will be translated into Japanese soon ! (once the english version is working correctly) 

No comments:

Post a Comment