Conference Program

Research on serious games for civic and citizenship education has often focused on their potential to convey civic content, simulate political processes, or increase engagement with public issues. Their educational contribution, however, remains contested, partly because games are frequently treated as self-contained interventions and evaluated through short-term, in-game measures (Dishon & Kafai, 2022). This paper argues that what makes serious games educationally significant for democracy might not lie in the civic content they carry but in the quality of the encounters they stage: spaces in which learners not only encounter other viewpoints but are also challenged to move beyond them (Blokland et al., 2024; Gutierrez et al., 2014), and experiment with ways of reasoning and acting within complex civic systems rather than merely learning about them (de la Torre et al., 2021). From this perspective, serious games are read as designed environments for navigating democratic complexity, understood as the interdependence, non‑linearity, and uncertainty that characterize civil life, rather than as discrete tools for delivering predefined civic messages.

Central to this argument is a relational and emotionally grounded view of perspective-taking. Taking another's standpoint is not simply a cognitive exercise performed at a distance; it is shaped by the affective experience of role-play, by peer interaction, and by the discomfort of inhabiting a position one would not otherwise choose or be able to occupy (Gutierrez et al., 2014; Blokland et al., 2024). Emotion is therefore not incidental but constitutive: it pushes learners into a zone of proximal development for democratic reasoning, making alternative positions something they must reckon with, not simply register, and opens space to test possible ways of seeing and acting within complex civic situations. This is also why serious games are especially well-suited to democratic education: they can stage ambiguity and conflicting values without prematurely resolving them, holding open the dissonance that civic life requires learners to navigate (Blokland et al., 2024).

This potential, however, is conditional. What happens during play matters, but so does what surrounds it. Without structured debriefing sessions, contextual embedding, and facilitated dialogue, gameplay may remain affectively intense but educationally limited (Blokland et al., 2024; Dishon & Kafai, 2022). From this perspective, this paper considers AI‑supported systems not as substitutes for facilitation, but as tools for scaffolding reflection after play. It explores whether AI‑mediated debriefing might help learners articulate, connect, and reflect on the multiple perspectives encountered in the game, while preserving space for open‑ended dialogue and critical interrogation of the norms and assumptions at stake (Wegemer et al., 2025).

Rather than asking whether serious games "work" for democratic citizenship education in general, the paper asks under what conditions they may help learners navigate democratic complexity in ways that are emotionally engaged, reflectively informed, and open to genuine civic dialogue. It thus offers a cautious and educationally grounded interpretation of serious games as designed and facilitated environments whose democratic value depends on the quality of the emotional and reflective experiences they make possible, and that may be further supported and augmented by AI-mediated dialogue.