Goodwill Grind: A Career Simulation Game for Civic and Professional Education

Abstract

Young people in urban India tend to imagine professional life through markers like salary, job title, and social prestige. What gets left out of this picture is the texture of everyday working life: the morning routines, the commute, the fatigue, the small ethical decisions made under time pressure, and the constant negotiation between ambition and personal wellbeing. Career guidance programmes address some of this, but they typically operate at the level of aspiration and information rather than lived experience. This paper presents Goodwill Grind, a career simulation game designed to address that gap by turning the daily routine of a working professional into a playable learning system. The game targets players aged 12 to 25 and is built in Unity for Windows desktop. Players begin with a job acceptance letter and navigate a repeated daily loop of waking, preparing for work, commuting through an urban environment, completing workplace tasks, and making evening choices about rest, study, exercise, and social life. Progression moves through five career levels, from Intern to Head of Department, and is governed by four interdependent resource systems: money, energy, Grind Points, and a career Level bar. Civic and moral choices, such as waiting at a pedestrian signal or offering a bus seat to a vulnerable commuter, are embedded directly into gameplay rather than delivered as instructional content. The game compresses real time so that consequences of daily decisions become visible within a single play session, allowing players to observe patterns that would take weeks or months to surface in actual life. The paper draws on Kolb’s experiential learning cycle to explain how the repeated daily loop produces learning, Bogost’s procedural rhetoric to analyse how game mechanics encode an argument about professional life and civic responsibility, and Gee’s learning principles to ground specific design choices around identity, failure, and situated meaning. Level 1 has been prototyped and evaluated through a first cycle of design-based research with ten testers. The paper describes the educational rationale, game design, implementation in Unity, and a proposed evaluation plan. It also reflects on what the design team learned through the process of building the game, connecting the project to constructionist approaches in game-based learning. Goodwill Grind contributes a practical model for embedding civic awareness, work-life balance, and professional readiness within an accessible career simulation. While the game is set in an Indian urban context, the pressures it simulates, balancing productivity with rest, navigating ethical choices under time constraints, and managing the monotony of routine, are common to early professional life across cultures.