Expert Consulting   
in Playful  Media

This paper aims to provide 5 lenses from which game jams can be perceived as supporting diplomacy and creative practice in the context of examining complex social issues. These lenses demonstrate how game jams can serve to encourage communities to think creatively and pro-socially through a myriad of global problems. Drawing from the first-hand experience of helping to lead and support social-issues-focused game jams in India, Japan, Malaysia, Turkey, and the United States, this brief paper highlights the ways in which game jams are a means for encouraging engagement with complex social issues through creative practice. The work highlights how both the pressures and constraints of game jams not only encourage a deeper understanding of social issues, but also entice participants, subject matter experts, and localized communities to engage with topics in ways that expand established understandings of them. The observations emphasize the value of the creative process of digital game-making in games jams as a means for encouraging dialogue, solution finding, and furthering understanding on topics participants and their players may not have engaged prior. The lenses provided are game jams as art therapy, safe discussion spaces, experimental spaces, solutions focused praxis, and as relatively neutral spaces.

This case study investigates the value of game jams in enhancing the understanding of social impact topics, in addition to their well-documented benefits for learning technology and design. Unlike traditional game jams focused on developing game design skills, this study explores how participants' perceptions of both the game-making process and the selected social impact topics evolved. Given that game jams often center around specific themes, the insights from this research can guide the organization of future game jams, emphasizing their role in fostering deeper reflection on various social issues. The study aims to position game jams as a reflective educational tool, comparable to writing papers, creating videos, or other common educational activities. The findings from a 48-hour game jam involving 76 participants, primarily female-identifying with an average age of 21, indicate that the event significantly enhanced their perceived understanding of game design and deepened their knowledge of social impact topics. These results support the idea that game jams can broaden participants' knowledge beyond just game design and implementation.

This paper offers lessons learned about appeal and potential efficacy in the design and implementation of three distinct small-scale game interventions to help increase audience resilience to health misinformation and disinformation. Applying elements of inoculation theory and transportation theory, collecting appropriate aims for the interventional context, and applying fundamentals of microgame design the researchers created three games to help increase resilience to misleading health information. Semi structured interviews with the target audience and their health care providers, and community educators offered positive feedback on the potential to address misinformation and disinformation in a health vulnerable population through microgames. This paper outlines the design process, implementation, and appeal feedback collected from the intended audience. Feedback indicated strongest appeal and potential for a narrative based interactive fiction, secondarily for a social media simulation and least for a trivia game.

Drawing from the theoretical underpinnings of prior work in interactive narratives to explain complexity, playable explanations, and newsgames this work aims to expand the impact and accessibility of comprehensive investigate journalism to a wide audience of North, Central and South Americans. The goal was to apply the benefits of ludic interactive narratives to explain the complexities and systemic biases in the United States immigration system for differing immigration scenarios between 2017-2021. The game combines elements of documentary games, persuasive play, and the fundamentals of interactive narrative to provide a playful explanation of explicit and implicit policy. It is, in short, an interactive system about a system. This interpretation of the system was derived not from a top-down view of the system, but by the reverse engineered understanding informed by two years of investigative journalism research informed by the data in both the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers. This paper articulates the development process, release, and subsequent observations from an experienced engaged by more than 45,000 players. This case study is understood as the first ever playful interactive based on the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations.

Effective interpersonal and cross-cultural communication relies on pragmatics – knowing what to say to whom, and under what circumstances. Nevertheless, pragmatics is generally absent from formal second language instruction. The current effort describes a game designed to assess people’s pragmatic ability. In the game, Awkward Annie, players are asked to intentionally select the most inappropriate things to say within conversations (i.e., be inappropriate and see what happens). Thus, players are able to escape from reality by being inappropriate. This work presents a between-subjects study designed to evaluate this twist using two versions of the game (selecting inappropriate versus appropriate responses). Participants in both conditions experienced the same content, but were provided with different goals (be inappropriate, be appropriate). The results indicate that users enjoyed both versions of game equally but performed better within the appropriate version of the game.

While much research has been done on games as engaging strategies for assessment and education, little has been done to address the specific human computer interaction questions relating to the impact of player engagement in game experiences. This case study examines a section (284 adults) of a larger study on play preference of over 700 participants who were given four versions of an assessment game. While the content remained the same, the versions varied by their structure (rewarding players for acting either appropriately or inappropriately) and by play perspective aesthetics (direct or indirect character embodiment). The results indicate that player preference was for the aesthetics of indirect embodiment and the goals of negative behavior. While this is perhaps unsurprising to makers of commercial games, this is contrary to typical education assessment game design. The case study also demonstrates a difference in player character embodiment that should prove useful to those determining the perspective of their player environments.