Educational activities involving student’s living expirience

Intervention description and expected results

This intervention is based on a research project I am working on with Leland Masek, titled In Our Shoes. While the original project focuses on the experiences of refugees, this intervention does not directly address that topic. Instead, it draws on the project’s methodology. The aim is to create a safe space for students to share the complex life situations and decisions they have faced. These experiences often impact their studies, so building trust is essential in order to understand each student’s context.

The capacity for fictional spaces to communicate essential life stories as a form of scientific inquiry is an established and rapidly growing field. The field of games is showing exciting work in this direction, but with only limited methodologies in implementation. This work will also develop and test a novel methodology termed “Ludic Inquiry”. This leverages the principles of narrative inquiry into game design so that players empathise with and fictionally experience real human stories.

Storytelling and writing are fundamental parts of human life and our study of it. Narrative is not merely a research method but an integral part of life. Leavey 2020 P. 43

The capacity for fictional spaces to communicate essential life stories as a form of scientific inquiry is an established and rapidly growing field. Numerous scholars in therapeutic (Reissman & Speedy 2007), artistic (McGarrigle 2018), and social scientific (Clandinine & Caine 2013) contexts have argued for the value in using narrative as a tool for people to communicate their subjective experience of life in its meaningful wholeness (Richardson,1997, p. 27) above and beyond a simple rational vs. emotional dichotomy.

In this way, the intervention fosters empathy, emotional engagement, and a sense of social identity, allowing for the sharing of compelling and authentic personal narratives. This approach is supported by prior research, which has outlined design principles demonstrating how games can be uniquely powerful tools for inspiring empathy in players (Belman & Flanagan, 2010).

Additionally, the intervention contributes to the field of game studies through a research-through-design methodology (Gaver, 2012), incorporating Narrative Inquiry as a systematic method within the game design research process (Leavy et al., 2020). It offers scientific value by advancing understanding of students’ complex life situations through empathetic engagement. Ultimately, the project aims to establish a grounded approach to designing serious, artistic, and necessary games that address sensitive and timely topics.

Intervention set up

Invite students to:
1.  Play 10 min game LARP game
2. Discuss the experience
3. Write a script for complicated decisions that students or someone they know made

Cards to prepare:

-Scenario set up.
-Decition to make in 10 min.
-Character A-E
Desire:
Constraint:

Ethical Considerations Guideline

1. Anonymity.
   Don’t use real names or identifying details. Anonymise anything you share or refer to.
2. Confidentiality.
   Respect others’ stories. Don’t share outside the group without permission.
3. Emotional safety.
   Share only what you’re comfortable with. Some topics may be painful or personal
4. Boundaries.
   No judgment. Be kind, sensitive, and supportive.

In Our Shoes is a project prepared in collaboration with Leland Masek — Game Scholar and Serious Game Designer. His work focuses on Playfulness across culture, wellbeing effects of play, and games as art. He is a PhD student at Tampere University’s Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies and a member of the HEAL play lab at Oregon State University. He is the founder and lead organiser of the Games As Art Center, which hosted 170 public events for 2700 attendees from September 2023-2024.

Citations

Belman, J., & Flanagan, M. (2010). Designing games to foster empathy. International Journal of Cognitive Technology, 15(1), 11.

Clandinin, D. J., & Caine, V. (2013). Narrative inquiry. In Reviewing qualitative research in the social sciences (pp. 166-179). Routledge.

Gaver, W. (2012, May). What should we expect from research through design?. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 937-946).

Leavy, P. (2020). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice. Guilford publications.

Lindley, C. A. (2002, June). The Gameplay Gestalt, Narrative, and Interactive Storytelling. In CGDC Conf..

McGarrigle, J. G. (2018). Getting in tune through arts-based narrative inquiry. Irish Educational Studies, 37(2), 275-293.

Perzycka-Borowska, E., Szczepaniak, C., & Gruntowska, D. (2023). Multivocal stories about caring during the war in Ukraine, as told by Polish researchers. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 23(5), 486-493.

Petitmengin, C., Remillieux, A., & Valenzuela-Moguillansky, C. (2019). Discovering the structures of lived experience: Towards a micro-phenomenological analysis method. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 18(4), 691-730.

Riessman, C. K., & Speedy, J. (2007). Narrative inquiry in the psychotherapy professions. Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology, 426456.