Reaching Racists: Discrimination Education Through Play

Jessica Hammer · Pazit Levitan · Azadeh Jamalian

Thu., June 11, 11:00–12:30, Class of ’24 (4th floor, East Central)

There is a problem with many prejudice-reduction interventions: They target a selective population who willingly participate in multicultural or anti-bias education (Paluck & Green 2009). Because this audience is a self-selecting group, it is hard to gauge the impact of anti-bias interventions on more prejudiced populations.

Our approach, therefore, is to design a prejudice reduction intervention that a broad audience will want to participate in — namely, a game. Advance targets an audience of game-players who do not otherwise care about racism and sexism, but are willing to play Advance for the pleasure of playing. Therefore, our design must carefully balance player enjoyment with effective anti-discrimination education. In short, the game must be worth playing for its own sake.

As Voerderer, Klimmt, & Ritterfeld (2004) argue, enjoyment has both an affective and a cognitive component. In designing a prejudice reduction game, therefore, the two components must work together to create a coherent system of pleasure. At the same time, both systems must reinforce the game’s central learning message. In the game Advance, the player takes on the role of a head-hunter faced with a biased organization, and must learn to exploit the system’s bias in order to succeed.

The cognitive component of enjoyment in Advance is rooted in a puzzle. The player must place their clients into jobs with the game's organization. Each job acquired for a client gives the player points — but the player has limited resources and time. This forces the player to detect and engage with the bias of the organization. While dealing with emergence is a difficult challenge, combining this challenge with clear goals helps create a sense of flow (Czikszentmihalyi, 1990). Even if the game is intellectually challenging at times, Voerderer et. al. (2004) point out that players are willing to engage with frustration in order to achieve their in-game goals, and eventually pass into a state of pride and pleasure.

Affectively, not only does the player experience pride, pleasure and flow, but also a sense of identification with the characters in the game. The player identifies with their head-hunter character, feeling pride when filling a position for a client or frustration when an investment of resources does not pay off. However, we also attempt to humanize the clients our players serve, allowing players to empathize with the experiences of victims of bias. According to Gee (2005), this sort of emotional identification promotes the extended commitment required for deep learning; Niemeyer (2006) explores its consequences for transforming behavior, which is exactly what we hope to do in the long run.

These two systems reinforce each other and work together to create Advance’s central argument about the problem of systemic bias. The game’s cognitive puzzles generate feelings of pride, frustration and empathy, while those feelings in turn provide motivation for the player to engage with the game’s goals. By using cognitive and affective design together, we believe that we have created a strongly motivating game — with the puzzle of systemic bias at its motivational heart.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. London: Harper Perennial.

Gee, J. P. (2005). Learning by design: Good video games as learning machines. E-Learning, 2(1), 5–16.

Niemeyer, G. (2006). Games and Art. Retrieved on March 1, 2009 from http://www.citrisuc.org/publications/presentations/how_games_and_art_might_close_service_loop>

Paluck, E. L., & Green, D. P. (2009). Prejudice reduction: What works? A review and assessment of research and practice. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 339–367.

Vorderer, P., Klimmt, C., & Ritterfeld, U. (2004). Enjoyment: At the Heart of Media Entertainment. Communication Theory, 14(4), 388–408.