Goodwill Grind: A Career Simulation Game for Civic and Professional Education

Goodwill Grind is a Unity-based career simulation game designed for players aged 12 to 25, which models the daily routine of working life as a repeating loop of commuting, workplace tasks, and evening choices. Its central thesis is that civic and ethical decisions are best taught through the mechanics of play rather than through explicit instruction. Drawing on Kolb's experiential learning cycle, Bogost's procedural rhetoric, and Gee's principles of learning, the authors argue that embedding trade-offs among four interdependent resources (money, energy, time and punctuality, and Grind Points) allows players to experience the pressures of professional life across compressed time.

The design uses an egg-cracking metaphor to visualise failure and spans five career levels, though only Level 1 has been built. Its prototype, targeting modest hardware of 8GB RAM and an i5 processor, was informally playtested with ten participants. Testers reported feeling resource pressure without being told the game's purpose, a promising early signal, but they also identified problems with navigation, the absence of a female avatar option, unclear zebra-crossing mechanics, and monotonous binary choices.

The findings should be read as preliminary. The work constitutes a first design-based research cycle, and the authors explicitly state that no formal evaluation of learning outcomes has yet been conducted; the paper proposes an evaluation plan but reports no outcome data. Its framing draws on game studies, learning science, and career research, with supporting context from the UNICEF and iDreamCareer Bharat Career Aspirations Report 2024 and from studies of adolescent career aspirations in Delhi NCR, India, which motivate the career education rationale.