Goals
- Exploring freedom, oppression, responsibility, and power through gameplay.
- Developing critical reflection on identity, values, and democratic engagement.
- Making connections between in-game experiences and real-life attitudes and behaviours.
- Engaging with video games as tools for democratic learning
Video games as a learning space
From and EDC/HRE perspective, game-based learning and especially video games represent a meaningful medium to explore the tension between freedom and oppression as a lived and constructed experience. Research highlights how games simultaneously limit and enable action, mirroring real-world dynamics of constraint and agency. They create spaces where players struggle with responsibility, question rules, and reflect on their own ethical positioning—thus engaging with core civic values. Rather than offering absolute freedom, games confront players with calculated limitations that provoke reflection on what freedom means, for oneself and for others. This opens a path for exploring identity as something rooted in values and shaped through action and consequence. Games foster a feedback loop between experience and analysis, encouraging learners to step outside the “flow” and question dominant ideologies. They challenge players to recognize that the worlds they inhabit—both virtual and real—are shaped by structures that can be interrogated, resisted, or transformed. In this sense, game-based learning offers not only empathy or engagement, but the possibility of political and ethical awareness grounded in experience.
Using Video Games for Democratic Citizenship & Human Rights Education is a flexible educational method that uses commercial or educational video games to foster reflection on freedom, oppression, identity, and democratic values.
Steps
The duration depends on the number of sessions and can therefore be adjusted.
Introduction
Through a cycle of playing, guided discussion, and re-playing with awareness, participants connect in-game experiences to real-life challenges and values, developing critical thinking and empathy. This approach supports the use of video games as tools for human rights and citizenship education, empowering young people to see play as a space for learning and transformation—not just entertainment.
Preparation
Choose a suitable game, in example:
- Commercial: Apex Legends (PEGI 16), Fortnite (PEGI 12)
- Narrative Adventure: Life is Strange (PEGI 16), Detroit: Become Human (PEGI 18)
- Simulation/Strategy: Democracy (PEGI 12), Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You (PEGI 16)
- Educational: Mission US: Flight to Freedom (10+), Darfur is Dying, Bury Me My Love (PEGI 7)
Session 1: Experiencing the game
Create a shared immersive game experience as a basis for reflection. Let the participants play in small groups or individually, either cooperatively or competitively.
Guided Reflection 1: Unpacking the Experience
Transform the game experience into critical awareness and shared meaning by
- Group discussion using critical incidents (moments of tension, moral conflict, or ambiguity).
- Mapping values: link in-game actions to values like fairness, empathy, loyalty, or justice.
- Identity mapping: “Who was I in the game? How does that reflect who I am in real life?”
Some more questions:
- What drives your decisions in the game?
- What surprised you about yourself?
- How do you relate to others in the game?
- When do you feel powerful or powerless?
- What parts of the game made you uncomfortable or reflective?
- Do you follow the rules? Challenge them? Why?
- Did you notice moments of freedom or constraint? Why?
- Did you encounter moral or ethical dilemmas?
Session 2: Playing with awareness
Offer a second game session where participants apply insights gained from the reflection part before.
- Return to the same game or continue in the same world/session.
- Ask participants to intentionally experiment:
- Try different roles, decisions, or behaviours.
- Observe group dynamics more consciously.
- Seek to “act out” values or ethical stances.
Observation focus during gameplay:
- Do you make different choices this time? Why?
- Are you more aware of power dynamics or emotional reactions?
- How does your identity in the game evolve?
Guided Reflection 2: Connecting to Real Life
Link the digital experience to broader issues in society, identity, and democratic living by
- The Game as a Mirror: Compare in-game tensions with real-world issues (freedom vs. control, inclusion vs. exclusion, power vs. responsibility).
- The Avatar’s Voice: Write a letter from the game character to the player.
- Value Constellations: Identify tensions between competing values in gameplay.
Some more questions:
- How does the game reflect situations of freedom or oppression in real life?
- What does your playstyle say about your beliefs or values? And how important is it for you to experiment with behaviours in the game that go against your values or seem unethical, in order to better understand what ethics and rules mean — when they should be respected and when they might be challenged or broken?
- Can the game help us understand discrimination, responsibility, or justice?
Transfer
Transforming Insight into Expression Encourage personal and collective meaning-making and creative output.
- Personal reflection journals
- Group podcasts or discussions
- Artistic response (e.g., posters, storyboards, poems)
- Small group presentations: “What the game taught me about…”
- Co-creation of a Code of Ethics for Digital Citizens
Handbook: More than Go with the Flow
- A handbook on Digital Citizenship Education, created in the frame of the project DIYW-ROAD/Competendo. Digital Youth Work - rights-sensitive, open, accessible, democratic.
- Unless otherwise stated, authors and editors of the methods published in the project are Elisa Rapetti, Markus José Plasencia Kanzler, and Nils-Eyk Zimmermann
