Games for Change Asia-Pacific Journal: Volume 2

The Games for Change Asia-Pacific Journal Vol. 2 (2023), published by Carnegie Mellon University's ETC Press, gathers nine papers unified by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, with SDG 4 (Quality Education) as its organizing theme. Its central aim is to examine how games, simulations, and immersive technologies can build health behaviour, social-emotional and leadership skills, professional soft skills, human-autonomy trust, ethical reasoning, and climate awareness. The volume's contributions are largely exploratory and design-oriented, with many studies explicitly positioning their findings as preliminary.

Several health and wellbeing papers examine the conditions under which interactive technology supports behaviour change. An experiment with 217 undergraduates found that an empathic virtual coach produced no clear advantage over a neutral one in behaviour change, working alliance, or usability, with both achieving high usability ratings, and the authors call for longer, more personalised interactions. Survey research during COVID-19 found that the 27% of respondents who used indoor exergames maintained their exercise levels while non-users declined, though between-group differences were not statistically significant, and barriers such as physical discomfort, limited home space, and low long-term engagement limited the approach.

Other contributions address education and human-machine interaction. A tabletop production-management game, iterated four times at SAE Institute, was reported to improve student planning and collaboration, and a predictability-based study of 70 participants found that more predictable autonomous agents reduced human interventions and perceived workload. A cybersecurity ethics role-play game produced a 12.68% rise in ethical reasoning among first-year students (p<0.01), though the authors acknowledge limitations including acquiescence bias and a homogeneous sample, and an accounting ethics game was shown in pilot observation to engage players strongly without yet demonstrating lasting behavioural effects.

The volume closes with a review of climate communication through extended reality, which argues that immersive visualisations can improve public empathy and comprehension but remain constrained by cost, specialised expertise, and user discomfort, and with a reflective essay proposing an experimental, collaboratively rewritable publishing model. Overall, the collection's scope spans health, education, professional ethics, and environmental communication, with most conclusions framed as hypotheses warranting further empirical testing.