Methods for Racial Microaggression: Experimental Game

Introduction: This week’s blog will be about the methods that will be used in an experimental game I am in the process of designing. The game if to test how people of color (POC) respond to Racial Microaggressions (RMA). I will give an in-depth description of the subjects, the apparatus, and the procedure I plan to use for the experiment.

Subjects: The population of interest for this experiment is late adolescence, early adulthood college/ high school POCs within the United States. Because the method of experimentation here is through computer game the sample will consist of as many high school college students that have access to a computer that care to participate. The methods for contacting these students will include ads on school websites, presentations at cooperating schools, and the incentive will be extra credit for described however the instructors of the students at their home institutes see fit. There will be three groups for this experiment, one controlled and two experimental. The Control group: will include interactions between players and the game engine that have no RMA in them. ). Experimental Group 1: Will have interactions with the engine that have frequent RMAs directed at the self-identified ethnicity of the player. Experimental Group 2: Players will interact with RMAs that are not geared specifically to their self-identified ethnicity. The criteria of importance in selecting subjects for this sample include ethnicity (POCs only), age (18-24), and enrollment status (currently enrolled in high school or an undergraduate program). The students will take a short survey before participation that will find out their ethnicity, age, and level of education. Those that do not meet the requirements will be unable to participate in the study. Ethnicity (non POC), age (outside of age range), non – student. If the participant is of a non-minority eg. European, Caucasian, and other groups not considered POC. The average age should be between 20 and 22. Education and ethnicity will be important parts of the demographic. As of now gender will not be important for the demographic but data will be collected comparing the results of male POC and female POC. Motivation for participation in this experiment includes: Movie tickets, extra credit for courses, and the understanding that they would be learning more about how they are perceived by the rest of the world.

Apparatus: The game engine used for designing this game will be the Unity 3d. The stimuli for this experiment will consist of comments by Non player characters (NPC) that will be 1 of 3 responses; the NPC will respond to the player with a neutral stimuli (non RMA related comment) or 1 of 2 negative stimuli – a RMA related to the specific ethnicity or a random RMA directed at another group other than the players identified group. These stimuli will be presented in dialogue between the player and game characters as the player goes through everyday life within the virtual world. The player’s responses will be measured on a scale of psychological hygiene – from psychologically unhealthy to psychologically healthy. The player will be asked to fill out surveys before and after a session with the game.

Procedures: there will be three conditions: 1- No RMAs, 2 – Racially Salient RMAs, and 3 – Non-Racially salient RMAs. The subjects will be tasked with carrying out everyday tasks for their age range; things like go to school, go to work, hangout with friends, spend time with family, and other daily tasked young adults may partake in within this role playing game (RPG). The subject will be enlightened to the concept of Microaggressions and asked to play a game where they will be addressed by different people who m

Note: This images was obtained from google and edited with information geared toward my project not a custom design of my own

ay or may not be using RMAs while communicating with them. They are then asked to act as close to their normal persona as possible and answer the questions how they would if they were asked the questions in real life, or how they would like to respond to the questions and to clearly determine which attitude they were playing with – real answers or desired answers – when asked in the survey after their experience. This information will be presented to the player in the game description and during the early game tutorials. Each response in the game will be recorded for later input into a data analysis program like SPSS for further analysis.

Thank you for your support! Stay tuned in to watch the development of this project.