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.
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