Challenges in Designing a Game for the Prevention of Intimate Partner Violence

The paper presents ongoing work on a serious game designed to support primary prevention of intimate partner violence (IPV) by educating adult players about long-term abusive relationships and the bystander role. Its central contribution is an analysis of the design dilemmas that arise when addressing a taboo, complex social issue in an interactive format, particularly the tension between creating empathy for victims without implying that leaving an abusive relationship is simple, and between encouraging bystander action without blaming bystanders for violence that is solely the perpetrator's responsibility.

The authors describe their solutions in detail. These include a backward narrative that opens with a victim's death, a systems-mapping approach to capture structural dependencies in village social networks, a memory-revisiting mechanic in which players reconsider past choices and attempt to build a network of supporters, and a chance-based "fortune wheel" that makes outcomes partly uncertain, reflecting real-life unpredictability. Feedback mechanisms are used to explain why outcomes occur and to reinforce that small acts of help matter even when they fail.

The evaluation is formative and limited in scope. Four test runs involved 3, 7, 14, and 47 participants, with the first three being qualitative and the last quantitative. Reported findings are preliminary: participants viewed the game positively for lowering barriers to discussing IPV and promoting an attentive attitude, and some misread the chance outcomes as right or wrong decisions, indicating a need for clearer debriefing. The work's stated limitation is that it is still in development, with the next steps focused on expanding the scene pool and developing templates to support iterative content creation.