A Design and Development of Serious Game for Raising Awareness About Human Trafficking

Abstract

This project presents a design and development of a serious game, which aims to raise awareness about human trafficking. Traditional educational methods often fail to translate passive knowledge into an understanding of the victim’s vulnerability. To address this gap, the game is designed based on three educational and psychological frameworks: situated cognition, experiential learning, and empathy-driven design. The paper explores how these frameworks guide the game's tone, mechanics, and difficulty to create stealth mechanics (i.e., restricting combat options and emphasising evasion). Consequently, players navigate a non-violent environment to experience the vulnerability and loss of control inherent in trafficking scenarios. We argue that stealth mechanics as interaction agency can serve as a potent pedagogical tool for embodying a victim's perspective, transforming passive awareness of social crises into an internalised understanding.