Decreasing Racial Bias Through A Facilitated Game and Workshop: The Case of Fair Play

2020 ◽  
pp. 104687812098338
Author(s):  
Christine Maidl Pribbenow ◽  
Kyrie Eleison H. Caldwell ◽  
Donald Dejon Dantzler ◽  
Percy Brown ◽  
Molly Carnes

Introduction. Fair Play is an avatar-based role-playing video game in which Jamal Davis, a Black graduate student at a research university, navigates implicit forms of racial bias to reach the win-state of earning his PhD and becoming a professor. Fair Play was designed to educate players on the existence of racial bias in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields in an experiential way and to encourage perspective-taking. Research has found that taking the perspective of another can induce empathy, which improves the empathizer’s attitudes towards individuals and groups. Paired with a facilitated workshop, Fair Play was also designed to teach bias concepts to increase participants’ bias literacy. Intervention. Research on workshops to reduce gender bias suggests that it increased awareness of personal bias, the motivation and self-efficacy to practice bias-reducing strategies, and a more welcoming department climate and the hiring of more women faculty three years after the intervention. Capitalizing on these findings, a 3-hour workshop was developed to reduce race-based bias against Black/African Americans in STEMM using Fair Play. Conclusions. The facilitation of the workshops and Fair Play requires particular competencies due to its topic (racial bias) and player’s skepticism about the reality of the bias incidents. Our data suggest that participants who identify as a person of color are more likely to believe that bias exists compared to White players, which can lead to a discussion about how the incidents in the game were designed and scripted. The facilitator also needs to be versed in a number of intentional design choices, such as Jamal not having voiceover and his success. Finally, this paper describes the Facilitator Game, which was developed as a complement to the game and allows a facilitator to jump to bias incidents quickly while debriefing and discussing the game to further participant learning.

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. ar27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Kaatz ◽  
Molly Carnes ◽  
Belinda Gutierrez ◽  
Julia Savoy ◽  
Clem Samuel ◽  
...  

Explicit racial bias has decreased in the United States, but racial stereotypes still exist and conspire in multiple ways to perpetuate the underparticipation of Blacks in science careers. Capitalizing on the potential effectiveness of role-playing video games to promote the type of active learning required to increase awareness of and reduce subtle racial bias, we developed the video game Fair Play, in which players take on the role of Jamal, a Black male graduate student in science, who experiences discrimination in his PhD program. We describe a mixed-methods evaluation of the experience of scientific workforce trainers who played Fair Play at the National Institutes of Health Division of Training Workforce Development and Diversity program directors’ meeting in 2013 (n = 47; 76% female, n = 34; 53% nonwhite, n = 26). The evaluation findings suggest that Fair Play can promote perspective taking and increase bias literacy, which are steps toward reducing racial bias and affording Blacks equal opportunities to excel in science.


Author(s):  
Emory S. Daniel, Jr. ◽  
Gregory P. Perreault ◽  
Michael G Blight

This chapter features a game from the Shin Megami Tensei series called Persona 5. This chapter examines how the case of role playing video game Persona 5 depicts agenda setting through the use of an in-game audience-oriented polling systems and comment system in order to understand to a greater degree the ways in which games contribute to our understanding of media processes and explores the idea of fandom as integral to the agenda setting process. The case chapter addressed in this manuscript represents a unique narrative featuring a daily life simulator, a turn-based Japanese role-playing game (JRPG), and complex in-game media vehicles to drive the story.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
T. J. Laws-Nicola ◽  
Brent Ferguson

Omega Quintet (Idea Factory International, 2014), a role-playing video game released for the Sony PlayStation 4, centers around the concept of weaponizing musical entities and apparatuses to combat threats in a dystopian universe. Omega Quintet weaponizes music literally, supernaturally, and economically, both inside and outside of the game narrative. In this article, we interpret these types of weaponization as an extended allegory for consumption. On one level, the surface narrative denotes sound as a murder tool, on another level the player enables violent consumption of these tools, and yet another level reveals the weaponization of agency within a gendered labor market. The story of Omega Quintet is set in a dystopian Japan overrun by monsters known as the BEEP. Protagonist Takt and his childhood friend, Otoha, join an organization that develops special idols known as Verse Maidens to fight the BEEP. Surviving members of humanity provide the fan base for the Verse Maidens. The Verse Maidens depend on fan support to fuel their powers. Battles in Omega Quintet feature an assortment of musical weaponization. Examples include Sound Weapons as the main conduit for physical attacks, Verse Maidens’ unique songs to play during extended attack sequences known as Live Mode, and special joint attacks known as Harmonic Chains. The battles take the commodification of idols to such an extreme that they are simultaneously consumed and used as weapons. Presented as a duality of fragility and strength, beauty and brutality, art and war, the Verse Maidens are consumed in a complex system of cultural and narrative implications.


Author(s):  
Esteban A. Durán-Yañez ◽  
Mario A. Rodríguez-Díaz ◽  
César A. López-Luévano

This chapter describes the insights towards a proposal to integrate a procedural content generation strategy in a computer role-playing usable and accessible learning video game for gaining replayability to encourage engagement and motivation in learners. In order to explain the contextual issues of the topic, the chapter includes a discussion on how computer role-playing video games impact the skills considered crucial for the work in the future—abstraction, system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration—emphasizing the importance of usability and accessibility to ensure effectiveness of the proposal. A first approach of a computer role-playing video game is presented to provide an illustrative example. The prototype will serve for future evaluations with people for usability and accessibility.


Author(s):  
Cerys Elizabeth Eckersley

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt Red, 2019) is an award-winning role-playing video game (RPG); the third instalment of The Witcher game series inspired by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novels. Centring upon the protagonist Geralt of Rivia, The Witcher 3 has been praised for developing a complex, authentic, and immersive game environment that combines magic and fantasy elements within a broadly medieval setting. A central aspect of the game’s success is its soundtrack – the fusion of music, sound, and voice – which further contributes to building the game’s overall narrative and the complex construction of its central characters. This paper explores how The Witcher 3’s soundtrack constructs identity, focusing in particular on its use of neo-medievalist signifiers and its contrasting representations of masculinity and femininity. Neo-medievalist sounds are a central concept in building the game’s identity; these sounds draw on folkloristic elements surrounding the choice of instrumentation and the recurrence of folk music throughout the game’s narrative, thus increasing the player’s immersion within The Witcher 3’s world. Regarding gender, female vocalisations are used within the soundtrack to add depth and emotion to male characters – particularly Geralt of Rivia, who due to his mutations lacks in conventional emotional capabilities. Despite the inclusion and emphasis of female voices on the soundtrack, the placement of women in influential roles is limited through other musical scoring techniques, which effectively reduces the agency of these characters, thus suggesting an imbalanced treatment towards gender. Through exploring these aspects, I argue that the soundtrack is a crucial part of how gender and identity are constructed throughout The Witcher 3, further exploring how these elements affect the player’s overall in-game immersion.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Mustofa Mustofa ◽  
Sidiq Sidiq ◽  
Eva Rahmawati

Perkembangan dunia yang dinamis mendorong percepatan perkembangan teknologi dan informasi. Dengan dorongan tersebut komputer yang dulunya dibuat hanya untuk membantu pekerjaan manusia sekarang berkembang menjadi sarana hiburan, permainan, komunikasi dan lain sebagainya. Dalam sektor hiburan salah satu industri yang sedang menjadi pusat perhatian adalah industri video game. Begitu banyaknya produk video game asing yang masuk ke dalam negeri ini memberikan tantangan kepada bangsa ini. Tentunya video game asing yang masuk ke negara ini membawa banyak unsur kebudayaan negara lain. Ini semakin membuat kebudayaan nusantara semakin tergeserkan dengan serangan kebudayaan asing melalui berbagai media. Maka dari itu peneliti mencoba untuk menerapkan Finite State Machine dalam merancang sebuah video game RPG (Role-Playing game) yang memperkenalkan kebudayaan. Dalam perancangan video game ini peneliti menggunakan metode GDLC(Game Development Life Cycle) agar penelitian ini berjalan secara sistematis. Dalam suatu perancangan video game tedapat banyak elemen, pada penelitian ini penulis lebih fokus pada pengendalian animasi karakter yang dimainkan pada video game ini. Dari perancangan yang dilakukan, disimpulkan bahwa Finite State Machine dapat digunakan untuk pengendalian animasi yang baik pada video game RPG. Diharapkan video game ini dapat menjadi salah satu media untuk mengenalkan kebudayaan nusantara


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 104
Author(s):  
Siti Hannah Padliyyah

Indonesia is ranked 56th out of 65 participating countries in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) based on data 2015. According to PISA results, the average science score of Indonesian students is 403, where this number is categorized as low. This is because students are still in the process of understanding and have not yet fully recognized the location of their mistakes. Students can diagnose the location of their mistakes through self-diagnosis activities. Self-diagnosis activities require the active role of students during the learning process. One approach that can increase the active role of students is STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics). However, research at this time is still rarely found self-diagnosis activities that are applied to the STEM approach. Therefore, this research has the aim to find out the increase in mastery of physical concepts and self-diagnosis of students on the STEM learning approach to the theory of poscal law class XI High School.This study uses a One-Group pretest-posttest design with a sample of 30 ini 11th grade highschool from one schools in Bandung. . Based on the findings, there is an increase in mastery of concepts [<g> = 0.51] from pre-test to post-test. In self-diagnosis activities identified that there are differences in scores [z = 1.75; p = 0.9599] student assessment results of researchers and self-scoring results. Deeper self-diagnosis triggers a series of implicit steps that encourage them to rearrange their cognition by correcting the mistakes they make when solving problems. So that learning activities using the STEM approach that involves self-diagnosis activities can improve students' mastery of concepts.


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