Post-Heroic Play in Social Work Education: Structural Constraint and Impossible Care

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for using digital games in social work education to provoke reflection on intersectional discrimination and the limits of individual agency within structurally unjust conditions. Its central claim is that "post-heroic" gameplay, in which individual action cannot resolve systemic injustice, can serve as a pedagogical space for students to confront the tensions inherent in social work's classic triple mandate: normalizing clients, empowering them, and upholding human rights and social justice. The argument rests on a comparative reading of two games, Papers, Please (2013) and A Plague Tale: Requiem (2022), which are treated as complementary rather than interchangeable sources of insight.

The framework draws on three components: an analysis of the reference games in relation to social work, a discussion of intersectional structures within them, and the concept of ethical cognitive friction, the tension between what a game communicates procedurally and what it signifies narratively or symbolically. Papers, Please is read as modelling how discrimination is produced and normalized through bureaucratic procedure, while A Plague Tale: Requiem generates affective identification with persecution and vulnerability from the protagonists' perspective. The paper draws on Lutz and Wenning's three axes of difference (embodied, sociospatial, and economic) to organize its account of intersectional discrimination.

A key theoretical contribution is the notion of the "simulation gap" (Bogost), which the paper uses to caution that witnessing discrimination through play is not equivalent to being structurally positioned within it. The author argues that the two games' combined effect can partly bridge this gap, though this is presented as a reasoned argument rather than an empirically tested outcome. The paper contains no reported survey data, sample, or classroom evaluation; its methodology is conceptual and interpretive, grounded in close readings of gameplay and established ethics-of-games scholarship, particularly the work of Sicart on moral dilemmas and "ludic phronesis."