https://engineeringethics.edublogs.org/2013/11/27/entertainment-as-education-a-group-project-by-eric-ian-alex-and-sangmin/
Entertainment As Education Peer Review
Group 2 | Jack Bang | Alan Christopher | Sean Thomson | Ling Wang
Group 3’s proposal is a video game targeted at a younger audience. The goal is to take the user through the process of making ethical decisions at a young age so that ethics education is normalized. The hope is to make the storyline realistically complex and foggy so that users will more readily see a connection between what happens in the game and in real life.
Overall, we believe this is a very creative solution which uses something that is inherently enjoyable to teach life lessons and promote critical thinking. However, we believe this group still has a lot of details to hash out. The game itself will be complicated both in design and actual implementation and not much was said about how this was going to happen. Also, no concrete examples of story lines/subplots were given. Who will determine good or bad decisions and their resulting consequences? Will the storylines be based off of historical examples? Also, specifically what images will be used in assisting to make gameplay enjoyable and sustain the user’s interest? So while it is completely possible to implement, more details about the exact process and necessary resources would have been helpful in making the proposal more realistic. Something else we were hoping to learn is the hook of the whole thing. Basically, what will make children want to play this game? Video games are popular with the youth, yes. But not every video game is successful so what about this game will make it desirable to the target audience?
It is apparent that the team took into consideration many of the themes we have discussed this semester including the gray scale that is ethics and the need for further ethical education. We especially liked the idea of the user seeing long term consequences to their actions/decisions and the incorporation of a group dynamic. Hence, on a high level, their proposed product is well thought out and mimics reality well. But there seems to still be a lot of work to do on the detail design level which would greatly enrich this proposal.