The thesis takes a research through design approach to identify the potential of a storytelling board game concept to raise awareness about societal challenges. Knowledge of existing serious game examples illustrating the social issues, designing a board game prototype iteratively, and evaluating with co-creation sessions helped to comprehend the potential of the subject. The thesis, with an iterative process, focuses on one case study, designing a board game called “Can you survive?”. The game uses storytelling to relay stories about refugees’ hardships caused by language and communication barriers to its players. The research process was supported by several co-creation workshops, including game playing and focus group sessions, to advance the board game in terms of making it more impactful and evolving the rules while gathering insights about the game and the players’ thoughts about the game topic. As a result of the research process, the final version of the board game was designed. The study demonstrates that a board game using narrative elements can be a cooperative tool to communicate societal issues with the goal of raising awareness. The results show the players agree that the game drives them to understand the challenges based on the subject and develop different points of view. Even if the case study focuses only on the experience of the ups and downs of the language barrier refugees deal with, it may also be applicable to some other social issues. The study also shows that co-creation sessions to test the prototype with the target groups brought unconsidered perspectives that advance the game mechanics and help to make it more impactful. Having a limited amount of research and design about storytelling game concepts illustrating the serious topics by using board games, this thesis offers that serious game design researchers should consider the storytelling board games aimed at raising attention on societal issues since it helps players to engage, motivate and create empathy. Moreover, it stresses the possibility of serious game design concepts to be used to promote awareness of social problems, not only for training or education purposes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-188168 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Terzioglu, Mustafa |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för ekonomisk och industriell utveckling, Linköpings universitet, Tekniska fakulteten |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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