Conference Program

This paper presents the validation of a dialogue-based game mechanic designed to address complex social topics, specifically inclusivity and gender-based violence, through a psychology-informed approach to procedural rhetoric in adolescent game-based learning. Rather than assuming that “good dialogues” and well-intentioned design are sufficient, the proposed mechanic explicitly tests the psychological reality of its procedural message by empirically calibrating how players perceive different dialogue options along a bipolar recognition-of-harm scale (in Italian, from “sminuire” to “aggravare”, or Sm.Ag.).

The case study is Un giorno come un altro (designed and developed by Drimlab), a narrative videogame for lower and upper secondary school students that uses branching dialogues in which each decision node offers two alternatives differing in how they recognise and frame a problematic situation (e.g., dismissive “What’s the big deal?” versus acknowledging “This is really serious”). Each choice is intended to position the player on a bipolar recognition-of-harm scale, ranging from minimising to exacerbating the perceived seriousness of the issue, thereby shaping both in-game outcomes and the player’s sense of agency over how the situation is interpreted. To ground this procedural rhetoric in players’ actual perceptions, every dialogue line is independently rated by psychologists and psychology students on a Likert-type recognition-of-harm dimension (minimising vs exacerbating), after reading the dialogue sequence up to that point. The Sm.Ag. value associated with each option corresponds to the mean perceived position on this bipolar scale, and the game’s scoring system as well as its three possible endings (Sm‑dominated, Ag‑dominated, or balanced trajectories) directly reflect these empirically derived evaluations rather than the designers’ a priori intentions.

The proposed validation procedure is situated at the intersection of work on the psychological reality of procedural rhetoric (Anderson, Karzmark, & Wardrip-Fruin, 2019), philosophical and empirical accounts of agency in games (Nguyen, 2020), and a unifying framework for the psychology of games that conceptualises games as structured psychological systems (Mattiassi, 2026). It also builds on research on games as media for social change and on gender stereotypes and representation in games (Flanagan & Kaufman, 2018). By aligning the micro-structure of branching dialogues with empirically validated recognition-of-harm trajectories, this approach aims to ensure that the game’s procedural rhetoric about inclusivity and gender-based violence is both psychologically plausible and educationally meaningful. The contribution is twofold: it offers a concrete method for validating the rhetoric of dialogue-heavy serious games on complex topics related to civic engagement (Rivers & Bertoli, 2024), and it suggests that addressing such topics in democratic citizenship education requires empirically testing not only content and outcomes (Bertolo & Mariani, 2019; Plass, 2015), but also the procedural patterns through which players exercise and experience agency.