Designing game-based moral courage

We describe an approach to designing games that convey the principles and actions related to moral courage. We show that these games can be categorized as persuasive social impact games because they aim to trigger a specific behavioral change, namely acting morally courageous to become an active bystander ready to intervene when necessary. We base our design strategies on findings from the literature that identify relatedness and autonomy as important aspects of moral courage. Together with a list of factors that enable morally courageous behavior, we develop a narrative used in three distinct game designs for a hybrid card game, a virtual reality experience, and an urban game. We give a list of essential considerations that should be considered for the narrative as well as aspects of the VR experience. We also describe the games, report findings from user tests and discuss the paradox of agency that can occur with such games. Our results indicate that these games were effective as people could expand their repertoire of actions and initiate a process of reflection.