Pro-social games

In my lecture to the BA Digital Game Design students around usability / user experience and qualitative research methods for interface design I invited via teams Professor Priti Chopra to speak about the design intentions of the pro-social game Danielle.


Danielle is a game, which allows players to experience the life of a female teenager, who experiences signs of an abusive relationship. The aim of the game was to create awareness around gender issues and teach about the prevention of gender-based violence.

In this video, Prof Chopra introduces the pro-social games she was involved in to prevent gender-based violence against women. 

To role model an activity that I do when working in the UX industry I gave Priti three questions to answer:

  • What are the organisational goals for the Danielle game?
  • Who are the target users for the Danielle game?
  • What do you think are the users’ main goals when playing the game?

Students had later the opportunity to review the game for its user experience. On the day of the lecture, only a few students had previously installed the game and therefore access. Yet, one of those students had positively noticed the integration of icons and posters, which displayed affirming messages for girls, and which were intended to educate all players subtly. The same student explained to me after the lecture his view, namely that the issue with the game would be that they (the BA digital game design students) were not the right target audience. In his view, it would be unlikely that those who need to learn about gender-based violence will not play this game. Reflecting on his comment I do agree that the greatest issue around promoting the game would be to find the right audiences to distribute the game to. At the same time, I believe that pro-social games are overall an engaging form of providing learning to players around social issues, which in my view can be categorised as a transformative learning experience when embedded with follow-up activities to assess learning goals. Maybe because games are usually considered a leisure activity, they are not necessarily included in an HEI context.       

In feedback received from the students via Mentimeter about the lecture, several students were positive to learn about pro-social games and some had not even heard of them before. 





go back to introduction
jump to conclusion




 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ChatGPT

Image
Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) ChatGPT causes a lot of worries and also excitement with people. As an educator I can see AI being used in teaching, learning and assessment in positive, yet also problematic ways.  Jimmy Lo presented in our course in May 2023 the discussions held on ChatGPT. He presented HEI’s policies around the use of AI tools and how the generation of content by e.g. ChatGPT is considered between academic malpractice and plagiarism. He further carried out a swot analysis, in my view mainly from the student's perspective. For me as an educator, the greatest worry is that students are simply using ChatGPT to generate written work rather than engaging with writing themselves. The latter I consider a key aspect of learning as writing is a reflective and creative process, through which deep insights and understanding can emerge (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015). In the following video, I present what I recently learned from a colleague and how C...
Read more

Moodle

Image
Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment MOODLE In my educator role, I use Moodle only sparingly as I am not leading a module or course, although I'm added to the Moodle sites of the courses I'm involved in, so I can see what the students have access to. Now having been enrolled in the PGcert course as a student I was able to experience a few more functions of Moodle, that I had not used before or was not aware of. For example, I enjoyed using the small group forum function and I appreciated that our educator Suzan Koseoglu had posted a video there to show how to embed video into the forum posts.  Before I returned to Academia, I worked in User Experience Design, and I have to admit Moodle's user interface presents many issues that I would have flagged up as counter-intuitive design if I were employed to critique it. The layout and the order of information can be confusing, with certain sections not clearly enough delineated. The submission link(s) appeared as t...
Read more

Ms Teams

Image
  “ Microsoft Teams allows individual teams to self-organize and collaborate across business scenarios." ( Microsoft learn  2003)  I became aware that MS Teams was adopted in our institution during spring 2020 (when Lockdown started in the UK) to facilitate online video calls and course content delivery, which was much needed to reduce the spread of the COVID 19 virus.  Although there are a number of other video conferencing platforms such as Zoom or Googlemeet or Gotomeetings, our institution, which uses mainly Microsoft Office products decided to include MS Teams. The benefit of using the whole MS Office Suite means that MS Teams is smoothly integrated with Microsoft Outlook to set up and schedule meetings. It was in Summer 2021 I started supervising postgraduate students, so meeting them online rather than face-to-face has been the norm for me since.  In this respect, MS Teams is very instrumental as an online space to learn and collaborate. Apart from face-t...
Read more