Daydream

URL to the playable demo: https://www.66rpg.com/game/1533041 (copy the link to the browser if you cannot open it)

*Note: Sorry that there is no English version for the website, please follow the instructions to start the game (the game is in English).  

1. Please click on the grey space around the advertisement image to load the game. 

2. Please click the first button of the six to start the game. (Sorry again for the untranslated menu bar in Chinese due to copyright issue)

3. If you have started the game and then refreshed the web page, there will be a small window popping up: the left button is “restart” and the right “continue”.

Game Introduction

1. Needs Analysis

Gender discrimination has been a long-existing issue in society. From the less intelligent games girls play during toddlerhood (Bian, Leslie, & Cimpian, 2017) to the little representation in academia (20% of undergraduate and graduate students and 14% of faculty members in physics; Barthelemy, Mccormick, & Henderson, 2016), women still suffer from persistent negative impacts caused by gender biases and stereotypes even though gender equality has made remarkable progress over the years, and dozens of laws were enforced to protect women’s rights.

Besides intellectual discriminations against women, the social, prescriptive stereotypes of how a woman should behave is an important factor threatening women’s individual identities. From body images to family responsibilities, women are expected to keep fit, work hard, while taking good care of the family, doing the chores and looking after the children. Compared to men, women are less likely to get their loans approved (Montoya et al., 2019) and to receive support doing the same work (Parker & Funk, 2017). This list can go on and on.

According to previous studies, gender awareness could be raised through certain comparative activities in class, which could even change students’ biases against genders (Gray & Leith, 2004). But these activities are confined in classroom settings, age-specific, not enduring, and follow the pattern of top-down instruction, which undermines the effectiveness of gender education. However, there are few tools that support self-exploration and construction for the gender issue, which makes it hard for people to associate real-life stereotypes of women with their personal experiences.

2. Audience and Context

With all the issues in mind, we identify the need to break the gender stereotype imposed on women by the patriotic society. Therefore, we currently focus on male between 18-30 as our ideal audience, but this does not mean that we attribute the prevalent gender stereotypes solely to male beliefs and behaviors. Instead, we expect males to deepen their understanding about the situations faced by women, so the game we designed will play a communicative role between the different genders. We select this age group because they are adults who have relatively mature notions of gender issues in social contexts, and were born and raised in the Web 2.0 era, who have a considerable consumption of video games. Due to the limit of traditional classroom education, the game is expected to function in informal learning settings. Players could experience the game whenever and wherever they want on their personal devices.

3. Design Description

The game we designed is an interactive narrative game with constructivist gameplay, in which players will read through conversations and make dilemmatic choices to respond by clicking on the mouse button. In the game, players will play as a husband, newly married to a lovely and capable wife, and lead a life together with her. Constructivist paradigm shows that an individual constructs his/her own understanding and knowledge of the world through experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences (Bada & Olusegun, 2015). Therefore, a series of real-life scenarios and incidents were designed to prompt players to connect their past experiences (or emotional experiences) with the scenarios and characters in the game. The  goal is to maintain the “mood value” of the wife by choosing “appropriate” (“appropriate” in players’ understanding to make a tradeoff between her will and social reality) answers so that the days will go on and more scenarios will show up, otherwise the game ends when the value decreases to zero.

D’Aprile and colleagues (2015) proposed a socio-constructivist learning framework to guide designing serious games that could effectively support meaningful learning processes. He incorporated Keller’s three factors of enhancing learner motivation: attention, which concerns how game design can continuously engage a player; relevance, which is related to how much the player cares about the game topic; and confidence, which concerns the player’s attitude and expectation to achieve success (D’Aprile et al., 2015).

The game enriches the interaction presentations in varied ways for players’ continuous attention. In addition to text conversations and choices, we also designed image choices that provide information, and other UI elements such as the mobile chat box and news comments in case players get bored of reading through the texts. 

To enhance relevance, besides real-life scenarios of the game (e.g. the wife asking players’ advice on what to wear for a late-night party, the couple discussing whether the wife should accept the promotion at work, etc.), we also tried to nurture “user-avatar similarity” to enhance empathy. According to Raney (2011), players will generate “user-avatar similarity” if they have a positive moral evaluation of the avatar’s behaviors in the game. Therefore, the husband character is depicted to be someone who loves and cares about the wife, and would like to get through the problems she encountered together with her. In this way, even if some choices connote underlying stereotypes, they still express the good intentions of the husband. 

Nevertheless, for the confidence factor, we manipulate players’ sense of confidence in a fluctuated manner. They will be rewarded and obtain a sense of achievement at unexpected points, but their assumptions about how to please the wife will also be broken at intervals, since the game does not want players to be hypercorrect about the gender issue. When players face choices such as “I can open up a business for you” and “You’ll open up your own business one day”, they may assume that independent women only feel respected when the latter sentence is said to them. Therefore, the wife may not show desired reactions to the players. This is to remind players not to generalize women with stereotypical tags. It is unfair to ask an “independent” woman to be always strong, or regard a housewife as unaspiring.

To provide players with an immersive and reflective emotional experience, we tried to make up a wife with lovable and real personalities who may say “How can I get angry” at one second and get angry at the next. The ways in which she speaks and her facial expressions were designed to be lifelike and intimately associated with the players for deeper immersion. Moreover, we encourage players to reflect on the gender issue as something that requires the effort from society rather than simply focus on family relations. Therefore, a surreal finale will show up at the end of the game if the mood value falls to zero. The wife will tell the husband that she is just a dream of his (echoing the title “Daydream”) and express her gratefulness for his effort to make her happy and protect her, and also put forward that she wishes all the difficulties she is facing could be conquered by his love. Then she will disappear when he wakes up, but his breakfast will be prepared and put on the dining table as a comforting finale. This is to leave some food for thought that the deep influence brought by the stereotypes of women is not easy to eliminate as a social issue. even if the players think of everything from the wife’s perspective, let alone simply encourage her to follow her heart regardless of social reality.

Besides, we also used different music tones to express different atmospheres in each scene. The artistic style is kept consistent, with the match of color tones in mind, but there are still problems due to the limitation of the resource library. For example, the wife in different costumes may appear different as a new figure.

4. Challenge and Success 

For the design of this interactive narrative game, the conversations and choices are core to the game mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. So the biggest challenge during the design is to make the information delivered acceptable and meaningful. If choices with obvious biases are shown directly, players may feel averse and misunderstand the game for expressing extreme or exaggerated feminist cases. Also, we hope not to make one of the choices appear “more reasonable” than others. Instead, we tried to use different choices to cater to the beliefs of different players. 

To address these needs, we, on the one hand, designed a husband who always expressed his concern and love with good intentions (when choices are given). And on the other hand, as stated in previous sections, we paid efforts to break certain stereotypical assumptions if some choices appear “obviously correct” to some players. After a round of playtesting with two of our male friends, they reported that the choices were effective and down-to-earth since they always heard of them in real life.

Another challenge we encountered was brought by the limitation of this 15-minute playable demo. The demo is too packed to fully address such a huge issue, especially when gender stereotypes take place in different aspects of life. Therefore, all the tensions to be delivered are connected tightly in the sample scenarios, which may give players a tiring experience without fluctuations. So hopefully we could interweave dramatic life stories into the constant discussion of values and beliefs as we make the game longer and completed in future iterations.