Persuasion Invasion: An Educational Game for Teaching Productive Civil Discourse Skills.

As civil discourse in America is becoming less substantive and respectful (Doherty et al., 2019), some educators have turned to educational games as a potential solution. However, due to the complexity the civic education space, games tend to focus on conceptual knowledge (e.g., the structure of government) rather than the practical skills students need to become productive and engaged citizens. Here we present Persuasion Invasion, an educational game that uses Value-Adaptive Instruction to help students learn to engage in productive civil discourse. Throughout the game, players learn about the values that underpin our beliefs and barriers to productive discourse (e.g., tribalism). Importantly, players also practice key civil discourse skills like identifying shared values across political lines and engaging in perspective taking. In this paper, we discuss the unique challenges of designing educational games in the civics domain, how we addressed those challenges, and how students responded to our design. Our results suggest that in-game practice was associated with improved learning outcomes on key discourse skill assessments. These results, coupled with qualitative student feedback, support the development of transformative and meaningful games in the civil discourse space.