The Good Place

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Role

Learning Designer

Project Type

Game Design

Audience

High School Students

Organization

New York University

Client

Dr. Jan Plass

Problem

According to the United Nations Children's Fund negotiation is a part of the 12 transferable skills needed to adapt to various life contexts.However, students graduating from high school, universities, and MBA programs are under-prepared for this critical interpersonal competency (Bedwell et al., 2014).

Insight

Research suggests the best way of learning negotiation is through a mix of classroom lectures and experiential learning, where students receive hands-on experience by applying this knowledge in simulated negotiations with other students or negotiation experts (Monahan et al., 2018).

Strategy

Make negotiations fun by using a pop-culture narrative on negotiation

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Solution

The Good Place negotiation game designed to give young learners (13-18 year olds) a basic understanding of the process of negotiations. The game is aimed at sparking their interest in further developing their negotiation skills.
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The learners/players will be introduced to the three phases of negotiation: Preparation, Execution, and Reflection.
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The game has been designed to develop socio-emotional learning competencies amongst the learners.
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In addition, the learners/players will be offered the opportunity to negotiate with real-time players (RTPs) and computer role-playing agents based on the case studies we provide, along with the constant support of a pedagogical agent.

My Role

Strategist
‍As the strategist in the group, I came up with the idea of a role-playing game for negotiation. During a negotiation boot camp, some of the expected behaviours participants exhibited was moving towards a zero-sum game, thereby engaging in unfair means. Secondly, many participants did not contribute due to introversion or lack of engagement. Negotiation is an essential aspect of strategy games and an important transferable skill. Thus, a negotiation game built on a pop-cultural narrative would only encourage learners to test their understanding and develop their interpersonal communication skills while negotiating.
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Curriculum Developer
‍As a curriculum developer, I aligned popular case studies, like The Orange Ungli Case, to fit the game's narrative. The curriculum immerses into gameplay, with each case study offering the player critical clues to succeed to the next game level. The curriculum suits players between the age of 13-18, with differing skills and competency levels. Moreover, the curriculum integrated into the game also considered that these conditions would affect the level of support the pedagogical agent would offer the learners to nudge them in building their understanding.
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Visual Developer
‍ created the visual elements of the game, both the storyboards and the wireframe. The design was in alignment with the mood board of the T.V. series. Moreover, bright colours and round shapes were used to induce positive emotions amongst learners.

Key Learnings

A solid narrative design referenced to popular culture allows building stronger characters to role-play, which learners relate to. This, in turn, positively impacts emotional and affective learning because of their investment in the learning game.
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Legitimate peripheral participation in the game allows learners to learn from each other. It furthers the learning process in a social-constructivist environment where the participants negotiate the idea of what constitutes a good negotiation. Furthermore, the learners also create a community of practice in which they come to a shared understanding of acceptable rules of negotiation and fair approach.
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Creating a game around negotiation allows learners to experience graceful failure in the presence of pedagogical agents. Thus, the learners are not afraid of experiencing shame as the game creates an environment for metacognition and immediate opportunities to iterate on mistakes.