Leveraging Procedural Narrative and Gameplay to Address Controversial Topics

Social justice issues are often controversial in nature, and require an appeal to emotion and empathy—rather than lists of facts—to solve. Serious games can be effective pedagogical tools, but often focus on short minigames (providing fleeting “aha” moments) that eschew the empathetic power of narrative, or vice versa. This paper presents a framework that dynamically generates sequences of short narrative and gameplay pairings, in the style of Molleindustria’s Unmanned. A playtest of an initial prototype of the system in the domain of climate change speaks to the framework’s potential of being an effective means of nurturing players’ empathy and curiosity for controversial topics.

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