March 28, 2017, by Stuart Moran

Horizon scanning for digital engagement technologies in Politics and Law

The digital research team are working with Politics, Law and Computer Science on a provocative digital engagement in research on corruption.

During the latest meeting we were discussing the possibilities of using a serious virtual reality game to explore trust issues in the workspace. Some creative ideas we had involved having the user virtually work in human resources sorting through CV’s, with monetary bribes subtly attached to certain CVs – does the player take the money or not?

Another idea was to have a second user in the game that served as a supervisor with different objectives, perhaps to make judgements on whether the other player was taking bribes. This could all be really shaken up with real-world monetary rewards directly correlated with in game behaviours – a technique frequented in economics research.

We also considered the potential uses of biofeedback in a game, measuring traits such as heart rate, galvanic skin response and breathing and presenting this information to the players.

All of this is intended to understand and provide commentary on the nature of corruption in the work place. Beyond this, there are many interesting research questions around the role of technology in this space, and its use as a probe for exploring social science queries.

Much of our discussion was inspired by existing serious games, including:

• Job Simulator VR: http://jobsimulatorgame.com/
• Papers Please: http://papersplea.se/

Keep an eye out for a future segment of the Digital Engagement series which talks about serious games.

 

Next blog in series: The role of paper prototyping in digital engagement  

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Stuart Moran, Digital Research Specialist for Social Sciences

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