Serious Games Showcase Challenge Announces 2024 Finalist Games
Answer Campus is one of 17 finalists for 2024!
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Answer Campus
Receiving accolades from the BEA Festival of Media Arts, International Serious Play Awards, and the Serious Games Showcase and Challenge, Answer Campus is a game that takes you on a journey through a college campus to explore challenging scenarios around identity markers such as race, gender, sexuality, ableism, and more. As you navigate the interactive stories, you'll have the opportunity to respond to challenging scenarios and choose from a variety of actions, including being supportive, diplomatic, combative, or disengaged. You'll be able to explore different approaches and learn about the impact of your choices.
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Squawker
This mobile game prototype was developed to raise awareness about anxiety among college students. Through educational dialogue and conversation tree matching, players engage with an NPC who presents negative beliefs reflecting common concerns about seeking mental health help. The player's goal is to guide the NPC by selecting positive outcome beliefs, ultimately encouraging the NPC to seek peer or professional support. The game promotes the importance of recognizing and addressing mental health concerns through conversations. The player succeeds when the NPC agrees to seek help, reflecting a positive outcome for mental health advocacy. Development on this project has stopped, but the prototype is shared as open source to inspire further development or adaptation in mental health simulation and education.
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Unsavory
Unsavory is an award winning mobile game designed to put the player in the precarious position of choosing between their personal health, public health and their financial well-being. Like other activist games, the intention is to create awareness and empathy around an issue that is best understood as part of a larger system. Additionally, the game seeks to be a catalyst for change by embedding a social media campaign into gameplay that encourages players to share meaningful facts and statistics regarding restaurant workers, access to health care, and paid sick day legislation. The original version of Unsavory was released on Google Play and the App Store in 2013. This version centered around the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 and attempted to simulate what that outbreak might have looked like from a fast food employee at that time. An updated version takes a look at life in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe.
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Zoo Rush
Zoo Rush is a running adventure mobile game that seeks to raise awareness, destigmatize and create empathy for people with sickle cell disease. In the game, you take on the role of a zookeeper with sickle cell disease. It’s your first day on the job and all of the animals have escaped. Due to your condition you must avoid infections, hydrate often, check in with your physician, and take your medication to deal with chronic pain and potential crises. With your net in hand, it’s up to you to save the day.
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Atlantis
Atlantis is a multiplayer local network game experience meant for play by groups in a cinema space through a smartphone controller. Through a series of collaborative and competitive mini games, players experience the collapse of a city and the will of its inhabitants to survive. Together, by tapping, swiping, and yelling, the audience will decide the conclusion of a civilization in a unique co-operative gaming experience.
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Dreamy
Dreamy is a dating simulator that places the player into conversations with potential suitors where physical appearance matters. The objective of the game is to find a date during a 30 day trial of a dating service. The central game mechanic in the game is choosing how to respond to potential suitors. These conversations highlight the choices and reasons for risk-taking behavior associated with indoor tanning. Components and content in Dreamy are based upon two behavioral prediction models: Integrated Model of Behavioral Prediction and the health belief model. The game mechanics have been designed to target salient beliefs and attitudes to determine behavioral intention to engage in tanning behavior and discourage indoor tanning.
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Don Grey Cafe
Don Grey Cafe is an endless tea pouring game that was initially conceived at the 2016 Global Game Jam. In the game, you serve different types of tea to customers based on their shirt color. We decided to highlight a local Miami startup, Lemon City Tea, as a way of exploring games for advertising purposes. The original game was developed in less than 48 hours. When the game jam concluded, we polished the game a bit more so we could release it on Google Play.
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Dwell
Dwell is a tabletop simulation game to teach about situational poverty and its impact on one’s choices, health, livelihood, communities, and families. Players perspective-take as a provided character who must support and care for themselves and possibly an entire household. Dwell™ is primarily intended to be a facilitated game, particularly when played by multiple sets of players concurrently, as a curriculum module or part of a workshop.
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Eradicate!
First, there was Humans vs. Mosquitoes, a physical game commissioned by Red Cross Red Crescent to teach children how to prevent mosquitoes from breeding. This iteration is a single-player card game that places players in the role of a human defending a village from mosquito breeding grounds. This game was designed to offer a human-centric perspective, focusing on the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases and prevention techniques. Eradicate! emphasizes learning through strategic decision-making, teaching players how to manage environmental and health challenges. The game was recognized with a Bronze Award for Games for Good at the International Serious Play Awards in 2019 and was showcased at Meaningful Play in 2018.
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Cops and Rubbers
Cops & Rubbers is an interactive simulation game for health and human rights advocates, health practitioners, academics, and policymakers to perspective-take as sex workers and that advocates against the criminalization of condoms. The game demonstrates the real consequences related policing tactics have on sex workers – including violence, extortion, and increased vulnerability to HIV infection.
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