Abstract:

Prejudices are a result of normal human functioning, and everyone is susceptible to them to one extent or another. People have the possibility and the need to categorize objects, events, individuals, and are convinced that their perceptions of the world around are true and adequate. One of the main reasons for studying prejudices is the well-known periods in the world history of discrimination and horrible abuse of certain groups of people, such as Jews, African Americans, women, or homosexuals. Nowadays, prejudices and discrimination based on race are still widespread that very often lead to the emergence of prerequisites for inter-ethnic and inter-racial conflicts. Hence, it is very important to have a tool for detecting and treating prejudices of an individual person in an easily accessible, effective and ecological way. This paper addresses a novel and ecological approach for this research area, using a rich maze video game with embedded personalized puzzles of various type. We focus on prejudice based on race and how this type of prejudice of individual persons can be effectively measured and mitigated through playing a serious game.

Serious games are a proven paradigm for building ecologically-balanced environments where users perform different tasks in a more natural way than filling questionnaires or solving assessment tests with closed questions. Thanks to their nature, serious games can serve as a tool with ecological validity that permits to elicit and measure the human behaviour in a more confident way taking advantages of the positive effect of multimedia, emotional effects, immersive engaging, and involving. The current study proposes a maze serious game to be used in order to be substituted the standard instruments for measurement and reduction of prejudice in terms of racism such as questionnaires, involving in hypothetical or actual situations, or measuring psychophysiological parameters in situations involving pre-determined stimuli. Measurement and identifying of prejudice based on the race of an individual will be achieved by a combination of tracking and monitoring of reactions and responses of an individual person to various stimulus and situations that are part of the game scenario. The serious game will be constructed like a rich maze using the APOGEE open software platform.

The APOGEE platform allows an easy construction and generation of mazes games. The mazes of the platform have a planar graph, where a graph node represents a hall of the future maze and an arc signifies a door between two halls. The platform provides an opportunity for each hall to have a different audio-visual interior, didactic content and game assets and to apply virtual players for different purposes. In the maze halls, players will be placed in various cultural situations that will be created by means of puzzles and virtual players. These situations will substitute the standard questionnaires and tasks used for measuring racial prejudice as well as therapeutic sessions for its mitigation. In the beginning in maze halls will be measured the racial prejudice. Then, it will be available to be open these doors that lead to halls containing appropriate game scenario for prejudice mitigation depending on the received measurement results from the previous step. Hereby, the maze game will provide an easier accessible way for prejudices measuring and its mitigation independently of each one person without any intervention by psychologists.

Keywords:

Rich maze game, serious game, APOGEE, racial prejudices.