Rights Quest: A Game for Child Rights Awareness

"Rights Quest" presents the development and early pilot of "A Way Home!," a first-person serious game built in Unity to raise public awareness of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), a treaty the United States has not ratified. The authors argue that digital game-based learning offers a motivating and effective route to educating adults and potentially shifting cultural attitudes toward children's rights. Their case rests on several contextual figures, including that 68% of 12–17-year-olds and roughly 75% of children under six live across two households, that the U.S. ranks poorly on child well-being measures, and that 190.6 million Americans play games weekly according to the Entertainment Software Association.

The empirical component is a small pilot with 17 undergraduate volunteers who watched a demonstration video and completed a survey. Most respondents found the game motivating (12 of 17), could recall at least one child right (11 of 17), and correctly identified the U.S. as the only nation not party to the treaty (13 of 17). The authors are candid that the non-randomized sample and a budget of roughly $10,000 limit generalizability. Formative feedback shaped several design revisions, including a wrist-mounted heart-based point system, more realistic graphics, and a shift to VR headsets.

The work is explicitly framed as an early-stage prototype. Its grounding draws on literature in educational games, serious games for social change, and children's rights law, though the reference base contributes no original findings of its own. The project does not yet demonstrate changes in attitudes or civic action, and the authors acknowledge that testing these outcomes remains future work. Its scope is therefore best understood as a proof of concept for using interactive media to advance awareness of child rights in the United States.