Serious Games for Teaching Conflict Resolution: Modeling Conflict Dynamics - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 436

bounded nature of game worlds is a useful affordance for exploring, experiencing,
and practicing conflict behaviours and resolution approaches. In addition, our
focus is on the practice and internalization of skills that are highly relevant to
real-world behaviour, and we note that the literature on games and role-play
indicates that learning achieved within gaming contexts can be transferred to real-
world knowledge and behaviours (Pedersen 1995 ; Raybourn 1997 ; Simkins and
Steinkuehler 2008 ). Finally, games are a ubiquitous media form of our time, and are
played widely within the target population we are hoping to reach with our work,
namely, young people between the ages of 9 and 12. As such, games are highly
promising as an intervention mechanism.
There are a number of existing serious games that deal with topics related
to conflict. The Global Conflicts series developed by Serious Games Interactive
concern games set in different locations around the world dealing with major
conflicts for the purpose of challenging players' beliefs and ideas about conflict. In
Global Conflicts: Palestine , for example, the player takes on the role of a journalist
who is collecting information for a newspaper article, and must balance trust
building with information collection (Serious Games Interactive 2007 ). FearNOT!
is another example of a serious game about conflict, but specifically focuses on
bullying. In this game, the player is an invisible friend of a virtual character who is
a victim of bullying, and the player's task is to interact with the friend and advise
him on how to cope with bullying-related problems (Aylett et al. 2007 ). Choices
and Voices is a role-playing game in which players can experiment with peer
pressure management and resistance strategies, decision making in moral dilemmas,
and critical assessment of advice (PlayGen 2010 ). The interactive scenarios are
integrated into a narrative, where players must make a range of decisions and
consider different points of view. Quandary is a digital card-based game that
presents ethical issues and conflicts involving non-player characters (NPCs) for
the player to reason through from a mediator perspective, requiring critical thinking,
perspective taking, and decision making (FableVision 2012 ).
Several design and research opportunities become apparent on examination of
these games. Firstly, they are all single-player games, thus not requiring players to
deal with other people in exploring and resolving conflicts. A multiplayer game,
in theory, can lead to richer, meaningful, emotionally charged, and memorable
game experiences and social learning, especially if the players are familiar with
one another (Egenfeldt-Nielsen 2007 ). Secondly, many of them put players in an
advisory or mediator role. On the one hand, this relieves players of encountering the
effects of conflict directly, and invites them to approach decision-making in a more
objective manner. On the other hand, it does not place players in situations in which
they genuinely experience conflict. Formulating and enacting conflict resolution
behaviours when there are personal stakes involved is considerably more difficult
than simply being knowledgeable of possible response behaviours. Finally, these
games present conflicts that have been pre-established and set during the game
design phase. There is no adaptation to a particular player's sense of conflict: what
one player perceives as a situation of high conflict may not be perceived as such by
a different player.