As we are approaching the half way mark of our project we have finalized the design for our Empathy game and have started looking into design options for the Growth Mindset game.

The main barriers we wanted to tackle were that the part of a teenager’s brain that supposed to enable them to exercise empathy is not yet fully developed. We developed our game based on that by making it more of a tool that focuses on active listening. The game will reward principles associated with active listening, an important part of showing empathy, in the hope that teenagers will be able to use similar techniques in their daily lives. Basically, teaching them to “fake it”.

Active listening includes several basic principles. It is less about providing solutions and more about reflecting the emotions the speaker expresses. You can read more about active listening here.

In the game the player follows an NPC character in her journey to defeat a dragon. During that journey the NPC will share her personal stories related to the main plot (the history of the dragon’s attacks, her training, how her village has been destroyed, etc.) but each one will include a hint to an additional emotional baggage (imposer syndrome, being excluded, pressure to succeed, etc.). The player can ask questions in response. However, the questions are divided to three categories: questions about the general story, sympathetic responses (“you can do it!”) or empathetic responses (“it sounds like you are worried about something, want to talk about it?”). If the player chooses options that are not empathetic or interrupts the NPC, her tolerance meter will go down and she will ask for more space or even will refuse to continue.

We intend to include the following in our game:

1. Encouraging listening to the full story – the player will get an additional question to ask if they listen to the full story or will get negative feedback if they interrupt.
2. Facial expression – the player can check the NPC’s facial expressions and if they spot the right emotion they get positive feedback.
3. Questions that reflect the mental state of the character and asking for confirmation – part of active listening is spotting the emotional undertone and reflecting that back to the speaker, asking her or him to validate if that is indeed true.
4. Open ended questions encouraging the NPC to share and talk.
5. Tolerance meter – if the player doesn’t choose any empathetic option, the NPC will give negative feedback.

For the story and conversations we used problems that teenagers will encounter in their daily lives but also stories from actual soldiers and their state of mind when going to battle.

The next steps would be to finalize the game and playtest.