Developing a Virtual-Reality Game that ...

The dissertation project proposed here is part of a larger collaborative research program of our two departments that looks into the potential of video games beyond teaching skills and increasing motivation. Our overarching goal is to explore how video games can foster wisdom-related capacities for living a good life, such as empathy, openness, or reflectivity (Glück and Weststrate 2022). A first study of the AAU Wisdom Lab founded by Judith Glück has found that players report gaining a broad range of insights and change from playing commercial video games, including increases in empathy, openness, and emotion regulation (Harbig 2023).

The overall goal of the dissertation project proposed here is to investigate whether an immersive virtual reality game can influence a person's attitudes towards a social outgroup. By putting players into the position of people who are the target of hostility and live on the fringes of society, we want to foster empathy, perspective-taking, and positive attitudes towards that group. Smaller goals are (1) the identification of “typical” scenarios from the experience of refugees, (2) creation of a software artifact that allows players to enter the virtual world of

refugees, and (3) a first experimental investigation of effects of immersive game experiences on wisdom-related capacities.