"i Don't See Color": Characterizing Players' Racial Attitudes and Experiences via an Anti-Bias Simulation Videogame

Abstract

Videogames and learning/training applications that address racial discrimination have risen in popularity recently, coinciding with the rapid development of the field of serious (or impact) games [1, 2]. While there has been much focus on understanding the efficacy of these systems as interventions to reduce racial bias, there has been less attention paid to how individuals' prior physical-world racial attitudes influence their experiences of such games about racial issues. Toward addressing this gap, the study presented here examines the relationships between PreK-12 educators' colorblind racial attitudes and their game experience and narrative interpretations in narrative videogame modeling racial and ethnic socialization called Passage Home. Passage Home embeds a novel computational model and simulation informed by the Racial Encounter Coping Appraisal and Socialization Theory (RECAST) [3] to simulate a discriminatory racial encounter in a classroom setting. The system serves as a tool for assessing players' racial and ethnic socialization (RES) experiences to support interventions for learning about racial bias. This paper presents the results of a user study deploying Passage Home with PreK-12 educators. Analysis revealed that players' colorblind racial attitudes and ethnic identity were related to their in-game racial appraisal and feelings of competence, negative affect, and empathy in the game. Given the prevalence of colorblind racial ideology across racial and ethnic groups in the United States [4, 5], we propose an initial typology of players' colorblind racial attitudes emerging from this analysis to aid in the future development of serious game interventions addressing racial discrimination.