Miriam will demonstrate ‘Someone Else’s Shoes’ which  is pilot digital game designed to educate students about the causes and effects of migration and to explore intercultural relations between people in their wider social and political contexts. It also aims to develop users’ critical media literacy skills. The project was designed by a team of lecturers in the School of Communications at Dublin City University

This project grew out of the idea that the type of role-play exercises used in intercultural awareness training might work especially well in a digital game format. Recent reports show that children and teenagers spend a lot of time ‘plugged in’ to games and the internet, and ‘serious games’ are increasingly recognised as valuable educational tools. Projects such as Future Lab and the Serious Games Initiative had started to emerge, and some of the games being produced, such as Darfur is Dying, dealt directly with issues of social justice. Given this, the DCU team wondered to what extent a game could provide a useful intervention into activities related to intercultural awareness education specifically in the Irish classroom.

Because many of the exercises used in anti-racism training are 1) interactive, 2) based on first-person activity / role-play and 3) dependent on the participant’s ability to imagine or visualize situations, they seemed to suggest themselves as exercises that could be easily ‘transmediated’ to game format. The game aims to work by appealing to a universal sense of sympathy / imaginative empathy but is also intended to be a specifically Irish educational resource, looking at a range of legal, economic, historical and cultural realities and enabling the learner to engage at various levels in processes of self-directed learning.

The key features of Someone Else’s Shoes are:

It involves a potentially infinite number of characters and stories
Each game experience is different (or at least there are several possible routes through each character’s story)
It integrates a range of different exercises and strategies into each game
It can be played at different levels of complexity and intensity and at different rates
It provides teachers and students with a range of auxiliary learning resources, encouraging further, more detailed investigation into a range of different issues
It encourages critical thinking and debate, and constantly foregrounds the idea that there are no easy answers to any of these questions – that approaches to cultural integration occur in a contested space

It is intended to pilot the game in a number of schools commencing September 2010 and volunteers are currently being sought for this pilot project. If you are interested in piloting the game in your school please contact miriam.judge@dcu.ie