Making it personal in critical games to affect reflection and have a two-way dialogue

Abstract: This thesis project explores the capacity of digital critical games when it comes to conveying socially relevant messages and making the player reflect on the real life outside of the game, with a specific interest in self-reflection. Starting with critical analyses of the vast field of existing online socially critical games, this research exploration continues with an empirical evaluation of selected few samples of such games by recruiting people to playtest them, followed by interviews. Identifying design qualities and openings based on the findings, a prototype is then implemented and iterated based on playtesting with more participants, again followed by interviews. The sought out novel aspects of online critical games, that are explored via the prototype, are: 1. Making the critical game experience personal by incorporating real life information from the player’s own life. Seeking in this way to ensure the flow outside of the magic circle and into the real life, this also aimed at supporting a stronger impact of the message conveyed by communicating it on the player’s “own ground”, i.e. in the terms of their own real life and personal feelings.2. Allowing a space for the player to express disagreeing with the message coming from the game and giving them the possibility to enrich it collectively by sharing through the game what their own view on the matter is. This was an attempt for exploration in the direction of supporting a two-way dialogue between the game designer and the player in the sense of giving the player a voice and a stronger agency both in the game and in the message conveyed.So these two: 1. self reflection via making it personal and 2. self expression via allowing space for a two-way dialogue, were the two main topics incorporated in the artifact that came out of this research. Consequently the contribution of this thesis are the reflections from trying to incorporate such critical game’s qualities and the analyses of it, along with all the other factors that came out from the earlier investigation and evaluation of similar games concerning what exactly makes people reflect on real life and think outside of the magic circle while playing a critical game.