Development of a Serious Game for Practicing Pronouns

"Development of a Serious Game for Practicing Pronouns" presents the design and development of "Pronouns in Practice," a 2D visual novel serious game built in Unity to help learners practise inclusive pronoun use. The motivation is the apprehension many people feel about causing offence when meeting LGBTQIA+ individuals, and the work positions the game as a low-stakes environment for rehearsing respectful language before real encounters. The authors observe that serious games addressing equality, diversity, and inclusion remain under-researched, and that none of the games they identified focus primarily on pronoun use, though adjacent projects offer useful design precedents such as branching narratives and perspective-switching.

The game is structured as a branching narrative in which players navigate workplace scenarios, such as a manager who witnesses or commits misgendering of transgender colleagues. Choices are followed by feedback screens intended to prompt reflection. Development proceeds in two phases: a base game with pre-built scenarios, and a planned spreadsheet-based scenario editor that would let educators customise dialogue, non-player characters, and visuals in line with Gee's Insider Principle. Two initial scenarios, a presentation misgendering and a team meeting mix-up, were drafted with input from an EDI Coordinator, and the design follows a seven-stage framework.

The work is at the development stage, and it reports no empirical findings. Evaluation is planned as a randomised controlled trial with pre- and post-tests, complemented by instructor focus groups, so claims about the game's effectiveness remain untested. The reference base situates the project within recent research on serious games for EDI education, including an inclusive game for international students and a study addressing microaggressions, indicating the authors' intent to contribute to a broader body of diversity and inclusion training scholarship.