EmotrionsOnCards : An innovative tool to educate and enjoy

A VISION OF GAME AIMED AT TEACHERS, PARENTS AND TRAINERS

EmotrionsOnCards is the game of emotions.

The ability to show our emotions is a sign of maturity. Unfortunately, modern society does not emphasize the developement of intelligence and emotional intelligence as it should. That implies a dangerous lack of emotional awareness in the current generation. It is actually an issue difficult to address directly (compared to, for example, scientific or technical education), for it invades people's most private field of knowledge.

EmotrionsOnCards is in itself an excellent and innovative card game, but it is also a very useful tool to dive deeply into emotional training and lead players of any age to reflection throughout the game.

In Emotrions every card is a symbol for an emotion or feeling : Goodness, Fury, Love, Hatred, Joy, Sadness, Indecision, Hunger. They are all powerful pillars of everyday motivations. Emotrions reflects real life: you must handle your positive or negative emotions. Educational games do not usually reflect negative human feelings. Nevertheless, these are as present and sometimes as dominant as positive emotions.

The solutions is not, indeed, hiding or ignoring negative feelings, but learning how to manage and overcome them using our positive emotional resources smartly.

The logic in Emotrions is different from that of any other card game. In Emotrions you must balance your negative emotrions with the positive ones. As in real life, you may get a lucky or unlucky hand. The objective is to "get by" with our lot and try to make it better on our way. The winner is usually the player with a higher ability to " positivice" their hand, but in each trick, the game puts us in the position of having to consider strategically which emotion responds suitably to the other player's.

Several games in one

The learning of emotrions is based on ten simple rules of the Standard Style, with a careful balance between luck, psycology and strategy.

From there on, more experienced players will be able to increase the depth of the game, incorporating the many options available in the rules.

These aditional options allow us to modulate the length, complexity and intensity of the game. Especially, an intelligent usage of The Winner's options, the Emotrions Lead or The Naked Style will provide a different balance strategy- psychology- luck from The Standard Style, favouring one of these elements.

A different educational value according to the players' age

Besides its intrinsic value as an "magnet" of attention on the issues of education, intelligence and emotional management, there is an especific value attached to each age-group:

-Children from 6 to 8 will learn how to discern and identify different feelings. It is important to get children into the habit of talking about their feelings, because a great part of adult problems in communication are rooted into an "emotional dumbness" , an inability to identify and talk about the emotions which are affecting us, and also to express them properly.

-The Mathematical logic from the Standard Style is perfect to help 10-year-olds to practise the addition of positive and negative numbers.

- Teenagers will benefit from understanding the need to manage the extricate mixture of emotions ( their own and other's) which makes up the adult social life.

- Emotrions forces adults and teenagers to develope an awareness of the processes of negociation, goal priorities, seduction. They'll pay more attention to apparently equal options implying different global results.

- It leads adults into a level of reflection on the importance of the control of emotions and the shady lines which separate success from failure.

The cards

One of the main difficulties when developing the game was to represent emotions graphically. Being such a universal and "eery" issue, each person would represent their emotions in different ways. We have created an iconography which contains the semantic values of emotions, but have as well a hint of ambiguity intended for each player to interpret according to their own imagination. Each card can be identified by its picture, as well as its name and staking worth. They have the name of the emotion/feeling they represent in 9 different languages ( Spanish, Galician, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese, English, French, Italian and German), as a means of expressing the global and intercultural nature of emotions.

Learning Process

Experience shows that it is only necessary to play once or twice to get familiar with the game. It is difficult for some people to grasp the logic of the game, as you play with cards that either score points or take them away. In the second game you should have got the general meaning of the game well enough to start using your own tactic or strategic planning. Of course the game can get to be as complex as chess or bridge when you use advanced strategies against expert opponents ( good leading, mid-game strategies, working out difficult last cards...)