Video games require players to be mentally engaged at all times so they're a really good vehicle for learning new information, says science communication student Asia Martusia King.
To introduce people to a range of "uncharismatic and ugly New Zealand animals", she made a dating simulator called The Ugly Club.
The Ugly Club, a dating simulator created by University of Otago Masters Student Asia Martusia King Photo: supplied
Asia Martusia King Photo: Supplied
The Ugly Club - which Asia created as part of her University of Otago Master's thesis - takes inspiration from New Zealand's beloved Bird of The Year competition.
It's a visual 'choose your own adventure' style game where players must choose to take a member of the 'ugly club' - an Archey's frog, a wētāpunga or a short-tailed bat - as their date for the Bird of the Year Ball.
Native frogs and bats tend not to be as popular as birds, Asia says, and she recently found evidence she's been backing them since childhood.
In a note written as a five-year-old, Asia made a plea for these less-attractive native creatures: "It was like 'please look after all the spiders and the frogs 'cause people think they're ugly but I don't. Please make sure they're okay.'"
Although she'd never made a game before, Asia used her writing and illustration skills to try and make The Ugly Club more fun than other educational games, which tend to be very boring and low on narrative appeal, she says.
She illustrated some of the backgrounds and designed all of the characters, exaggerating each creature's natural characteristics to create characters such as a hard-partying kererū that loves to "get drunk off fermented berries and crash into windows all the time" and a wētāpunga who's shy and nihilistic.
"He loves to explain movies to you and talk about how clever he is in a lonely, brooding kind of way."
Asia hopes to eventually work in game development or conservation journalism and create more educational content for those like her "who really like science but maybe aren't so good at the whole textbook thing".
The Ugly Club is not suitable for children. You can download it here.
An image from the dating simulator The Ugly Club Photo: Asia Martusia King / The Ugly Club
