Virtual Law Practice

Category: Games

  • Game for Legal Services Launched. Giving Away Virtual Practice Materials for Donations.

    The RocketHub crowdfund campaign was launched yesterday to raise funds to build out the estate planning game, Estate Quest.

    Funds will be used to build out four additional levels of the game, playtest, refine, and provide to the public to play for free. In exchange for donations, I’m giving away some signed copies of my books, a bundle of books, legal tech resources, legal tech consulting time, and some other interesting gifts.

    I’d like to make this a game that’s free for the public to play and learn about some basic estate planning concepts. I’m also doing this to learn about how the crowdfund process might be used for other legal services related projects.

    Building a high-quality game that would be more easily distributed and catch on with the Facebook crowds, is expensive. But that’s the audience we need to reach to really share this as a tool for learning legal concepts. I’m still working with Illinois Legal Aid Online on a game related to eviction and landlord/tenant issues. There is something here in terms of increasing engagement with the public online through games. The legal profession needs to experiment to see if games are one way of increasing legal knowledge and access options. Below is me taking a chance on this. Please consider joining in. Thanks!

  • Video: Estate Quest Game

    Below is a video walkthrough of the Estate Quest game.

    I’m learning many valuable lessons about how to design and build a game related to legal services. If my team and I can build this game out to additional levels, it will be cross-platform which means playable in a browser and published for play on mobile devices and on Facebook.  The final game will have a rewards system built out that rewards the player after successfully completing a level with a discount or access to real-world legal services or resources.

    You can read my other posts about why I am experimenting with games for legal services. I’m also still working on a game with Illinois Legal Aid Online on the topic of eviction. More details coming soon.

  • Get Your Game On: Presentation on Legal Games

    Below are the slides for a presentation I’ll be giving at the annual LSC TIG conference this week with Teri Ross, Program Director at Illinois Legal Aid Online. They cover basic info about games and why we believe they can be used to educate and direct the public to legal services. We will also be going into an explanation of the two games in development and how to go about developing other games for legal services. At the event, I’ll finally have a prototype of my Estate Quest game to share!

  • Connecting a Mobile Game to Real World Legal Services

    MobilegamerHere is an update on my game project. In my previous posts I’ve explained why I believe we can use the power of games to help us engage and empower the public to learn basic laws and legal issues. I’ve also explained the difference between gamification of the law and games that involve legal topics. The next step is to explain more specifically how a game like what I’m building with my team can increase access to real-world legal services as well as educate the public.

    According to my game designer, this concept is a little revolutionary for the game industry and I’m guessing it will be for the legal profession as well. Please read all the way through before jumping to conclusions.

    The game we are creating is intended to teach the public basic estate planning issues. These are not state specific legal issues. These are very basic. For example, level one of the game addresses this basic, simple fact: If you have children, you should name a guardian in your Will.

    Yes, as a lawyer, I know full well how you can take a simple statement, add a bunch of “but what ifs” and make it the most convoluted and complex thing in the world. But that’s not what we are doing here. Rest assured there will be the usual disclaimer at the start of the game stating that this is not a substitute for legal services provided by a licensed lawyer – as if anyone would actually be misled into thinking that a mobile game featuring a time machine is going to really be able to do that. But still, just in case and mostly for the lawyers, we’ll have those disclaimers on there.

    That aside, now for the fun part. (more…)

  • Balancing Fun with Legal Nuance in Game Design

    BalanceLawyers are trained to over think things to the point of taking the fun out of them. I’ve learned I am no exception. This was one of the first obstacles in the process of creating a game for legal services.

    The game design document, the blueprint for the actual game, is almost finished. We will take this doc to the developers and rest of the team necessary for the next steps in production. Getting the theme nailed down was the first step in the process. The second was to present legal consequences in a way that is humorous and instructs through problem solving.

    I provided my game designer with a variety of different legal scenarios related to estate planning and administration. I have practiced estate planning for ten years and had done estate administration before going into solo practice. I have seen the damage done to families and loved ones when they fail to handle their estate planning. Many Americans should have their wills and medical directives drafted, but most do not know that they need these documents in the first place or the value that they have to protect their families.

    We are dealing with a depressing topic that not many people are eager to discuss. Who wants to think about their eventual demise? How do you make that fun? We are going to try humor.

    I tried to analyze all of the potential ways the player could solve the legal issues that were being presented in the game. This is where my training threatened to take the fun out. This is part of the reason I wanted my team to be made up of individuals from the game industry who do not have a legal background. One lawyer throwing cold water on the production is enough.

    Of course the necessary disclaimers will be slapped on the final product to provide notice that we are not providing legal services and so that no one will assume that the solutions in the game play are the actual solutions the player should take in real life. We are trying to reach players on an emotional level to engage in thinking about estate planning and, through sharing components in the game play, engage in a dialogue with their friends and family about it as well.

    My game designer has her own analysis of the mechanics of the game play that she must work through. That type of over thinking through the process is practical. My analysis as a lawyer needed to stop at a certain point in order for us to proceed with making a good game. In fact, the deeper we went into the “but if this, then that” or “but also this is a possibility”, the closer the game got to becoming a traditional, educational legal game. This game is intended to be broad in scope and to provide basic legal education. The game rewards the player with access to real-world legal services if they choose them and at that point the player can seek assistance that goes deeper into their personal legal needs.

    Then came another issue in the game design when we thought about levels and rewards. How do you rank or assign points to personal choices? How do you place values on choices in game play that result in a reward when the choices made in solving the problem are based on the personal values and priorities of the player?  One potential good solution to a legal problem may not be a priority to another player based on personal preferences or individual circumstances. (more…)

  • Gamification vs Games for Legal Services

    As I’ve started talking about the game I’m developing, I hear people throw out the phrase “gamification of legal services” to describe my project. That’s not what I’m doing, and the terminology does make a difference. There is gamification, serious games and simulations and then there are games. The difference really has to do with the design goal.

    This is a running debate that gets pretty heated in the game industry. The best known example is the “Gamification is Bullshit” position statement given by scholar Dr. Ian Bogost at the Wharton Gamification Symposium. He has since been featured in several pieces explaining his position that have been published in Wired, The Atlantic, and Kotaku. If you want a good book on gamification, one written by a couple of lawyers even, check out For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize your Business, by Dan Hunter and Kevin Werbach. And if you are into that, just re-read Drive by Daniel Pink and you’ll notice how ridiculously connected those books are to each other. (There are also some wonderfully brilliant presentations by designer Sebastian Deterding which help explain what is going wrong currently with gamification efforts in the business world.)

    Again, that’s not what I’m doing with my game. Although concepts of internal and external motivation discussed in Drive hang around when we think about the game design and what will motivate better and recurring game play, but those concepts were around in game design long before Pink’s book. In fact, he references the same American psychologist and creator of the concept of “flow”, Mihaly Csikszentmialyi, that Jane McGonigal (of the “games” camp) writes about in her book, Reality is Broken.  Here is Csikszentmialyi’s TED Talk on flow. Really worth your time. There is overlap here.

    When games cross over into the area of “games for social good” they get classified as “serious games” and that throws them into this semantics debate. If you are trying to do good with your game, such as educate people about their rights, then is it a game if there is an agenda built into it? It seems to come down to the design goal and the game mechanics.

    If you are taking existing process, such as the business of delivering legal services, law firm operations, the judicial process, rules of civil procedure, the process for a criminal or tort case, and adding game elements to those processes to help people learn about them or to encourage them to be handled in a different way, then that is gamification.

    Most of the existing “games” around the law or legal services fall into this camp. They tend to be card games, simulations, text-based walkthroughs or quizzes. Most of them have the goal of teaching civics, legal procedures and basic law practice skills to citizens and law students. Here are a few of the better known ones: (more…)

  • Game On!

    DiceI’m making a game and it involves legal services.

    For the past six months, I’ve researched the idea of creating a game that would engage and empower the public to learn legal issues surrounding personal legal services.

    Why am I doing this? When I was ten years old, I didn’t dream of being a lawyer, I dreamed of being this woman, a well-known computer game designer. When I went to college, computer science as a major was in its infancy and a class in game design was unheard of. Life happens. About six months ago, a friend pulled me back into gaming as a hobby – something I had sacrificed to give attention to my children when they were babies. Now back into gaming full force, I remembered how powerful it is as a tool of engagement. That made me start thinking about how cool it would be if we could use games to engage the public to learn about their rights and the law in a way that would help them prevent legal needs before they occur.

    I starting researching the use of games for social good. Yes. There is a small segment of the game industry that develops games that will have an impact on society. It’s not all about first person shooters and role playing games. There is even a Games for Change Festival that showcases these games and those who work to create them. I read Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better nad How They Can Change the World. Watch her impressive TED talk video if you don’t have time to read the book.

    I also have immersed myself in game design and theory, exploring a “playcentric” approach to design which emphasizes playtesting and user experience before hard core development even begins. I also started exploring the tutorials on different game engines, including Unity, LiveCode (big thanks to the brilliant David Johnson for this one and for the brainstorming sessions), and MIT’s Scratch and using Code.org to start learning JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I also started researching and understanding the marketplace for games (the legal services marketplace I think I know pretty well by now) and the different platforms for publication.

    What has been done so far surrounding legal services is focused more on educating school children on the legal process or it is geared towards law students. There are a few others that are focused on educating the public, but they tend to be heavily text-based, and frankly, I got pretty bored playing them.

    Here is an example of a game for social good. In March, a game called Half the Sky Movement was launched as a Facebook game to help end world hunger. The game play is a compelling story about empowering women, and allows the user to donate to a variety of causes as he or she plays through. The game allows the user to unlock free rewards. For example, one of these might be that a real world book would be mailed to a girl in India from a foundation which donated to the nonprofit, Room to Read Foundation. While learning about a social situation, the player is rewarded by connecting with real-world individuals. There is a sharing component and multiple layers of engagement throughout the game.

    This, and games like it, inspired me to think that what we really need for legal services is increased ENGAGEMENT – before a legal need arises. That is exactly what games provide when they are done right. The game we are creating isn’t going to be an iCivics or any courtroom-based legal education game. It isn’t going to be preachy or overly full of text. It is going to be a game you would want to play and it will have an unique connection between the legal services marketplace and the players. That’s teasing. I’ll reveal more as I go along. (more…)

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