Emergent dialogue

TLDR

Games for Change is a community that uses digital games for social change, yet its prevailing Information Deficit model assumes that providing facts to children will lead to behavior change, an assumption with little evidence. The authors aim to develop a game that enables children to discuss values about sustainable development tradeoffs during play, guided by the Emergent Dialogue model. They summarize guidelines based on Emergent Dialogue, apply them to design Youtopia—a tangible tabletop learning game about sustainability—and evaluate it using video, survey, and questionnaire data. The study provides evidence that the Emergent Dialogue model and Youtopia design effectively support value‑based dialogue during collaborative gameplay, addressing the lack of evidence for the Information Deficit approach.

Abstract

Games for Change (G4C) is a movement and community of practice dedicated to using digital games for social change. However, a common model of persuasion built into most G4C, called Information Deficit, assumes that supporting children to learn facts will result in behavior change around social issues. There is little evidence that this approach works. We propose a model of game play, called Emergent Dialogue, which encourages children to discuss their values during interaction with factual information in a G4C. We summarize a set of guidelines based on our Emergent Dialogue model and apply them to the design of Youtopia, a tangible, tabletop learning game about sustainability. Our goal was to create a game that provided opportunities for children to express and discuss their values around sustainable development tradeoffs during game play. We evaluate our design using video, survey and questionnaire data. Our results provide evidence that our model and design guidelines are effective for supporting valuebased dialogue during collaborative game play.