Gaming for Social Change: Sharmila and the Representation of Otherness

Ferreira and Lietti's study examines whether serious games can shift public perceptions of global inequality rather than reinforce "othering" narratives, using the World Food Programme's 2021 humanitarian training game Sharmila as its case study. Grounded in Hall's theory of representation and Held's ethics of care, the authors situate their inquiry within a literature that documents persistent stereotyping and underrepresentation of gender, LGBTQ+, racial, and disability identities in mainstream games, while noting that serious games addressing global inequality remain comparatively underexplored.

The analysis rests on a qualitative thematic analysis of five playthroughs totaling roughly 12 hours, supported by 39 screenshots, a character inventory, and deductive coding drawn from the theoretical framework. Sampling followed a maximum-variation approach, with coding continuing until no new themes emerged across consecutive settlements in each region. The authors find that Sharmila offers diverse, mostly active characters and departs from stereotypical portrayals, though it still risks a "saviour" dynamic in which players must fix vulnerable communities. The game addresses child marriage, gender-based violence, child labour, disability exclusion, and conflict-driven food insecurity, and it resolves these through consensus-building and community engagement rather than binary choices.

Design features central to the authors' conclusions include first-person community narratives, such as a 13-year-old whose brother goes missing after school exclusion and a 72-year-old displaced by climate shocks, and a real-time engagement score tied to seven operational "engines." This score rewards active listening, empathy, and collaborative problem-solving over pure efficiency, and it avoids punitive failure by framing poor decisions as formative learning. The authors interpret these mechanics through situated learning and procedural rhetoric, concluding that Sharmila effectively models ethical humanitarian reasoning. They also caution that its blended, fictionalized visual culture, drawing on several Global South regions, may sacrifice cultural specificity for pedagogical flexibility. The conclusions are theoretical and qualitative, with no quantitative measurement of player outcomes.