Developing Video Games to Fight Prejudice

Video games aren’t good.

Video games aren’t bad either. They are designed spaces that have been carefully crafted to encourage certain experiences and behaviours. And when you’re working with designed spaces, anything is possible.

Prejudice is bad. It’s hurtful, it’s harmful. It’s the thing that divides, the thing that says we are us and they are them and they aren’t safe so let’s stick together and keep them far, far away and cruelty is ok because don’t worry, they are not us, they are other, they are lesser, they are in the way.

Prejudice is the thing that’s in the way. It gets in the way of true human connection, collaboration, and real growth towards a better way of life.

Last year the western world woke up to the realities that many of our communities still face at the hands of painfully skewed systems and unrecognised, implicit biases. But beyond the West, overt prejudice still reigns supreme.

Wars split over ethnic and religious lines rage on. In 2021 alone, over five genocide emergencies were declared. These were late-stage genocides, where the massacres had already begun; This number doesn’t include the alerts raised for countries in the earlier stages.

Atrocities like these are spearheaded by leaders who have fed their people a steady diet of propaganda, indoctrination, and us vs them-ism. It starts with the leaders, but it’s fulfilled by the people.

It’s the people who indulge in the hatred they have been led to believe is the natural way of the land or nation or community they have been born into. It’s the people who believe and feel the vast distances between them and the unfamiliar, foreign, faceless other.

But we’re not here to blame individuals.

Evolutionary theorists would say that this is all a natural part of our survival instinct, a way to keep ourselves and our own safe against unknown and potentially dangerous others. But just how unknown these others are can change.

We are living in the age of infinite connection. Now more than ever we are able to get to know others from every tiny part of the world. Previously we might only have learnt about other people through stories told by travellers or academics or historians. But now, as more and more parts of the world gain internet access, we are able to communicate with people directly. We are able to share stories and experiences, to get to know and in turn, to be known. We are able to learn about all the ways in which we are similar and all that make us different. We are able to understand that these differences don’t need to be evaluated as right or wrong, good or bad, but only to be recognised as parts of the fascinating richness of being human.

When you increase contact, you increase familiarity, and so the unknown becomes the known.

This is the basis behind a lot of prejudice reduction interventions — bring people together to interact, to engage in activities together, and to learn about their differences and their own experiences of prejudice.

These kinds of interventions are usually part of government or school programs or more often part of lab-controlled studies. It’s not always clear how well they work. Not all contact is good contact and some enforce stereotypes, highlight differences, and ultimately make prejudice worse. Those that do work are usually conducted over long periods of time with people who are already open to change. But running long-term in-person initiatives requires people to give up their time to both participate and to facilitate, so how impactful they can be is limited.

Another problem comes with who typically conducts these interventions.

School programs don’t work when it’s the schools that are teaching hate. Government programs don’t work when it’s the governments themselves that are fuelling the divide.

We need interventions that can bypass these systems and reach people where they already are. We need them to be accessible, to be entertaining and engaging. We need them to be something that people want to do.

That’s where games come in.

Video games reach audiences from all over the world and the industry is only growing. People engage with them not because they have to but because they want to, because they’re challenging, they’re interesting, and they’re fun.

Now with increased connectivity and the rise of multiplayer games, players who might have never met in the real world can spend hours interacting with each other online. Players have forged incredibly strong friendships through gaming platforms and these online friendships can often be stronger than players’ offline relationships.

On the other hand, multiplayer games also have a reputation for creating toxic, hate-filled communities. A lack of research-guided design practices can lead to developers creating games according to industry standards or their own gut instincts. This can lead to the same problematic design patterns being repeated again and again.

But if we can make games that divide people by accident, then how can we make games that do the opposite on purpose? How can we create games that create bonds between strangers and how can we do it so that these positive effects leak into their real-world communities?

That’s what I’ll be trying to find out in the next four years as part of my PhD in Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence at Queen Mary University London.

For now I have no answers, only questions. But I believe it’s possible.

Video games are an incredible medium bursting with potential. They are everywhere and they can be for everyone. Their interactability means they offer possibilities beyond what TV and film and even music can offer on their own.

Ultimately, video games are designed spaces. Design is all about solving problems, so why not try to use games to tackle one of our largest problems? At the very least, we might learn how to develop better virtual spaces. At the most… well, anything is possible.