Decoding Deutschland: Exploring the efficacy of serious games as a medium for cultural training and integration in Germany

1. Introduction

In an increasingly interconnected world, the movement of people across borders, driven by opportunity, necessity, or crisis, has become commonplace. This migration across borders brings with it both opportunities and challenges. The question of how a country supports newcomers in their journey of adapting and integrating into society then becomes essential. In Europe, Germany has emerged as one of the leading destinations for immigrants, with over 23 million residents now possessing a migration background. However, even though the country continues to take in more and more migrants, the country remains a “reluctant” immigration country.

Despite the institutional frameworks in place, including language and integration courses, immigrants often find themselves unsure of what is expected of them due to these traditional methods struggling to convey the nuanced, lived experiences of everyday life in a new country. In light of these challenges, an opportunity for innovation emerges.

In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of work done on the utilization of serious games, which are games designed for purposes other than entertainment such as education, training, or advocacy. These games open opportunities for alternative methods of engagement for players to foster learning, empathy, and skill development. Unlike traditional methods which are more static, serious games can allow users to simulate real-life scenarios in a safe, repeatable environment, making them particularly well-suited for cultural training.

This research identifies a significant gap here: the lack of localized serious games designed specifically for immigrants navigating daily life in Germany. The primary aim of this thesis is to explore the efficacy of serious games as a medium for cultural training and integration in Germany. 

It aims to answer three main questions: 

1. How effective are serious games in disseminating cultural information among new immigrants in Germany? 
2. What are the main challenges faced by recent immigrants to Germany, and how do their backgrounds affect their lived experiences? 
3. How can game design principles can effectively be leveraged to educate and train immigrants in the customs and traditions of the country.

2. Defining Integration

Traditionally, integration is seen as a matter of reducing “cultural distance”. This assumes that cultural differences are objective facts, that they cause problems in integration, and that successful integration requires reducing these cultural differences. These expectations have become markers of successful integration in the eyes of general native populations. This definition of integration not only shapes native-born attitudes towards immigrants, but also immigrant attitudes and strategies for integrating into the target country.

As of 2022, there are 23.8 million people in Germany with a migrant background. 39.7%  of these migrants have been residing in Germany for less than a decade. But the immigrant experience is complicated. Germany is a “reluctant” immigration country, this is due to both cultural factors, as well as economic ones. Integration policy is strict, Non-compliance with integration efforts are met mostly with negative sanctions. High external pressure, immigrants are expected to adopt German culture or always be seen as the “other”. This affects immigrant sense of belonging. To increase belonging , immigrants try learning the language, gaining employment, immersing themselves in the culture, and learning social norms. They learn about this stuff through traditional methods: Integration courses, community, and the Internet. 

However, formal methods lack emotional engagement and practical, lived experience. The question then becomes: What other methods can we employ that actively engage the learner?

3. Why Serious Games?

Games have the ability to resonate deeply with whoever engages with them. They have the ability to not only entertain, but also help people form connections, process feelings, and learn new skills. Serious games differ from regular games in the fact that they “do not have entertainment, enjoyment, or fun as their primary purpose” (Michael and Chen, 2005). Instead, these games aim to educate, train, or advocate. These games are adapted into a wide range of fields, such as Health, Education, and Military due to their perceived benefits over traditonal methods:

1. Improved cognitive abilities and academic achievements. 
2. More positive attitudes towards learning as compared to traditional education
3. Skills imparted in the game can be applied in real life

4. Primary Research

© Zahab Ahmed Qureshi

The goal of this primary research was threefold:

1. Gather authentic perspectives from recent immigrants in Germany
2. Identify challenges faced during integration
3. Translate these insights into meaningful game design requirements

To assist in defining the goal, scope, and testing of the game, I conducted qualitative interviews with both immigrants and German natives. These interviews were open-ended in nature, and lasted between 40-60 minutes each. In total, 7 interviews were conducted. 

An initial expert interview provided direction for subsequent interviews with immigrants to Germany. These semi structured interviews with immigrants focused on their experiences and expectations, cultural challenges, learning resources and support systems, and tech familiarity and experiences with interactive tools for learning. Additional interviews with native Germans allowed me to understand expectations placed on immigrants, along with challenges from a local perspective.

These interviews affirmed how language and bureaucracy were amongst the biggest challenges immigrants faced in their day-to-day lives. Their reliance on community as their main educational resource rather than official sources such as integration courses pointed to the need for alternative integration resources than currently available. Additionally, prior participant use of social media and interactive tools validated the use of interactive methods to disseminate information.

Understanding how immigrants approached acculturation and how their experiences shaped their integration efforts allowed me to better understand who I was designing for, and allowed me to cater to their specific approaches by taking their personal experiences into account.

5. Game Design

Decoding Deutschland is a collection of digital mini-games that encourages players to interact with different facets of German culture through play. Each mini-game tackles areas of German culture that the player might interact with after their arrival in the country. While each mini-game has unique learning outcomes, the overall object of this serious game is to increase cultural understanding, build confidence, and encourage social interaction through safe exploration. Each mini-game is a short, self-contained experience, and tackles issues of integration through puzzles and dialogue. The intended use of Decoding Deutschland is to provide an alternative, supplementary educational resource to steadily introduce players to facets of German daily life.

The four mini-games are as follows:

1. Trash Sorter is a hypercasual game where players can learn about Germany’s recycling system by correctly sorting items to their respective recycling bins. The game follows a score-based model, where the objective is for players to beat their high scores through trash recycling.

2. Road Rules has two main objectives. The first is to impart knowledge to immigrants on how to traverse cities by foot, what traffic rules are present for pedestrians, and unsaid rules of navigating Germany by foot. The second objective is to help orient players in their new cities by providing a basic understanding of services and physical locations that might be present and accessible to them in their vicinity, and the use cases of such spaces.

3. Bureaucracy Battle’s objectives are twofold. Firstly , the mini-game aims to help immigrants understand and learn which documents are typically required for bureaucratic appointments. Secondly, the game helps players understand key German terms, as well as get a basic understanding of how to fill out forms and paperwork.

4. Finding Community aims to make it easier for immigrants to understand how to find community by helping them discover real-life ways to meet people in Germany. It also aims to build player confidence by helping them practice social conversation. The more successful they are in their interactions, the more their „Belonging Meter“ grows.

© Zahab Ahmed Qureshi

6. Testing and Validation

This research post game development aims to test out the serious game design and validate the efficacy and appeal of using serious games as an alternate method of acquiring information. It also strives to substantiate room for future development, as well as directions any future expansion of the game could take. 

Why evaluate the prototype?

1. Assess knowledge gains: Whether the prototype supports cultural knowledge gains
2. Explore user perceptions, especially on game usability and engagement
3. Identify limitations: Target areas of improvement before scaling
4. Gather preliminary data: Data on educational impact, and validate appeal and efficacy

A total of 6 mixed-method interviews were conducted. These interviews were divided into two parts. The first part used pre/post-game testing methods to evaluate knowledge gain, while the second part was focused on open-ended discussion.

The results of pre/post-game testing were promising. In the pre-test, out of a total of 15, participants scored an average of 6.83, with the lowest score being 3 and the highest being 10. Testing post-game showed an increase in test scores across the board, with participants scoring an average of 13.17 out of 15, the lowest score being 10 and the highest being 15. This lends to the hypothesis that the serious game was effective in increasing player knowledge. This was displayed when player confidence also increased, with players feeling more comfortable filling out the tests.

While pre/post-game testing was important to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of this specific mini-game, qualitative discussion post-testing sessions allowed players to give open feedback. To this effect, participants largely vouched for the effectiveness of the game in its learning objectives. Playing the game increased players’ confidence levels in sorting trash in real life, and players expressed learning a fair amount of new information in a short time. According to them, the biggest advantage of using serious games over traditional methods was the lack of consequences when they made mistakes. The game allowed them to make mistakes and learn from them without fear, greatly increasing the speed and effectiveness of information uptake.

Even though most feedback for Decoding Deutschland was positive, that does not mean participants did not voice their share of frustrations. interviews indicated two major avenues for future iteration. For the first direction, players wanted initial tutorials and intermittent feedback when playing the game. The second direction for iteration is integrating Decoding Deutschland within larger immigrant educational ecosystems. Few players saw themselves seeking the game out on their own, indicating the need for external sources to introduce the game to them.

© Zahab Ahmed Qureshi

7. Conclusion

Discussion and Implications

Overall, this research demonstrates that serious games, when designed with contextual sensitivity and grounded in real user needs, can be valuable and effective tools within the larger goal of immigrant integration. Interactive tools can provide a “fun” and “playful” environment for experimentation, with game loops driving player motivation. Serious games might be especially valuable for immigrants as they provide a safe way to make mistakes without fear of consequences or repercussions. This is especially useful when significant barriers such as lack of a mutual language, presence of racism in society, and issues in immigration status are involved. While serious games are not a replacement for structural reforms or policy support, they represent a scalable supplement to more traditional educational approaches, especially when integrated within formal integration programs, schools, and other educational ecosystems.

Ultimately, this thesis provides initial validation of the hypothesis that serious games can be valuable tools in the broader effort to support immigrant integration, and any future research conducted will aim to provide further descriptive and statistical evidence to the application and utilization of such.        

Limitations

Naturally, the study comes with limitations:

1. Small participant sample (n=6) introduces high variability and limits generalizability
2. Selection bias: The participants that were interviewed had to understand English
3. Prototype included only one mini-game. Data collected during the testing phase can only be extrapolated to the working Trash Sorter prototype
4. Short-term evaluation only: Long-term effectiveness of the game in knowledge retention could not be measured within the scope of this thesis

8. Future Work

This research opens several avenues for future work. One main area of focus is language implementation. Limiting the game to just one language severely limits the people it can target. Future iterations of the game can implement localization, allowing players to switch between multiple languages, allowing for clearer understanding of the game and perhaps affecting efficacy.

A tutorial system with real-time feedback mechanisms would need to be implemented, so that the results can be more accurate and tests can be conducted without the need for guidance and hand-holding.

Additionally, larger-scale testing of the game over an extended period of time could offer insights into its long-term impact. While the current research conducted a pilot study with fewer participants, a larger-scale mixed-method study utilizing pre/post/post methods could allow for deeper analysis of the long-term retention of knowledge gained from playing the mini-games. 

Lastly, game distribution channels should be studied. Research indicated a perceived barrier in seeking out the game independently. Since the aim of Decoding Deutschland is to help a broader audience, it would be crucial to understand the various educational and institutional channels that have similar aims.

The Book

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