Game Changers

Among the many notable things about the game: Three Mawrters were involved in its creation. Liz Newbury ’07, director of the Serious Games Initiative at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., worked with the Center’s China Environment Forum to lead the development of “The Plastic Pipeline,” which involved a nearly four-year collaboration between researchers, policy experts, and technical types. Melissa Schoeller ’12, then a producer at multimedia company FableVision Studios, helped with the first wave of production on the game. (She has since moved on to Meta’s Reality Labs division, where she works on augmented and virtual reality research.) Finally, Sonja O’Brien ’21, a program coordinator at the Wilson Center, assisted with research, project management, and outreach on “The Plastic Pipeline,” which was also named “Best Game for Government Audiences” at the Serious Games Showcase and Competition Europe in Bristol, England.

“‘The Plastic Pipeline’ was designed to make environmental policy come to life,” says Newbury, who shares that there are more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic waste in the ocean, with at least 1 million new tons each year. (The top polluters? The U.S. and China.) Players “interview” video game characters about plastic pollution and environmental policy by choosing from a selection of questions with preloaded answers.

“The whole idea,” says Newbury, “is that you decide what you want to learn about these policies, and you make your own decisions."

"The overall goal is to help people understand how we can mitigate plastic pollution and help save our oceans.”

Another goal was making the game accessible for non-gamers, she says. “We wanted a game that could be played on a phone or Chromebook and wasn't daunting technologically for any experience level. This is a global issue, and everyone deserves to understand what is at stake.”

A Bryn Mawr anthropology major, Newbury is a gamer from way back. In fact, her honors thesis was an ethnographic study of a women-only gaming guild for “World of Warcraft,” the massively popular multiplayer online role-playing game that came out in 2004. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in communication at Cornell University, where she focused on game studies.

The first video game Newbury led at the Wilson Center, which hired her in 2017, was “Fiscal Ship,” which challenges players to balance the federal budget and reduce the national debt. “That’s been played millions of times,” says Newbury, who jokes that “more people have probably played my game than have read a 25-page policy brief on the federal budget.”

In the Center’s “serious games” work, Newbury, who did beta testing of “The Plastic Pipeline” in college classrooms in the U.S. and Vietnam, plays a producer-like role. “My experience is in audiences for technology, so I try to understand what’s going to resonate most with players," Newbury says. “There’s no point in making a game if it’s not going to be fun, and if it’s not going to also balance what we want them to learn.”

The testing process has been the most exciting part, says O’Brien, who learned of the Wilson Center job through a note Newbury posted on Mawrter Connect. “I’ve loved seeing everything that has gone into creating the game end up in a player’s hands and seeing them ask the exact question that you’re hoping the game will spark in people’s minds.”