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

This paper presents the design and development of a serious game intended to raise awareness of human trafficking by placing players in the position of a victim rather than a hero. Its central argument is that stealth mechanics, which restrict combat and emphasize evasion and concealment, can translate abstract knowledge about trafficking into an embodied, internalized understanding of victims' vulnerability. The authors ground the design in three frameworks: situated cognition, Kolb's experiential learning cycle, and empathy-driven design informed by the concept of procedural rhetoric.

The game was built in the Unity Engine and combines a hybrid AI architecture, with Behaviour Trees governing macro-level patrol and search behaviour and Finite State Machines handling micro-level animation and state transitions. Guards operate under a localized field-of-view mechanism, and detection triggers an immediate capture and reset. The project also describes technical treatments for immersion, including avatar reuse, inverse kinematics, particle-based fog and smoke, pre-baked lightmaps, and a custom outlining effect for contextual feedback. A stylized 3D aesthetic was chosen to suit a small-scale educational project running on modest hardware.

The contribution is primarily theoretical and technical. The authors acknowledge that the work has not yet been empirically evaluated; no user testing, learning outcome data, or sample results are reported. They identify large-scale user studies correlating in-game evasion failure with knowledge retention and safety awareness as future work, and note that a simulation cannot fully capture the long-term psychological trauma experienced by victims. The paper's claims about educational effectiveness therefore remain hypotheses pending validation.