River of Justice: The Bunala Struggle

The purpose of this site is to present the designers' account of the motivations, challenges, and solutions around a videogame about Uganda's troubles with a militant group known as the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). River of Justice introduces players to real social dilemmas that they probably won't experience in their everyday lives. Additionally, we are attempting to shed light on the important concepts of  Playable Fictions  and  Dramatic Agency .

Warning: we suggest that those interested in playing the game do so before exploring this account because there are many spoilers here. The five sections of this site present different aspects of the game design, allowing insight into the designer choices for both players and spectators in a manner that reveals details of the game play story.

To place this game in context, the violence committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) on the Acholi people of northern Uganda for more than 20 years has resulted in the death and displacement of millions and left countless others mutilated, raped, or enslaved as child soldiers (see BBC reporting). Reports suggest that torture continues to be practiced amongst security organizations, including the arrest and beating of opposition Members of Parliament. In 2007, the President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, requested support from the International Criminal Court (ICC) ( see game letter  ), which then issued arrest warrants for top LRA leaders. However, a year after the warrants were issued, Museveni offered the LRA amnesty in exchange for an initial ceasefire and eventual comprehensive peace agreement—despite the fact that the warrants were issued at Museveni’s request   (see follow-up game letter)  .

The focus of this work was to create a videogame  that both helps players understand the atrocities of this situation and illuminates such values as peace and justice, such that players might come to appreciate the complex moral issues involved in designing a humane intervention. While situating these subjects in a gaming context remains a challenge , doing so is neither more nor less appropriate than doing so through a book or film because, with any of these media, the designer must balance promoting particular messages with supporting a player-determined storyline. A core question we asked is how best to illuminate particular situations as well as the universal struggles that they manifest. In response to this question, the challenge becomes how to scaffold players in a balanced sense of engagement, neither remaining as mere witnesses, nor interacting with such simplistic rules that the ethical struggle feels trite, or performing within a game system that is itself so complex that the lessons become obscure.

Intricate game design can not only balance such dynamics as these but also foster player reflection about them. Ideally these reflections involve self-reflection in relation to the game space, as well as (more toward our objectives) reflection on the dynamics of the content, that is, the themes and issues of the game. The design of any playable fiction  involves defining a storyline as well as the interactivity that make game play challenging and enjoyable, but for a playable fiction concerning an actual and politically-sensitive event, the design challenges involve choosing which aspects of the narrative to fictionalize in order to afford an experience that is pedagogically illuminative yet narratively coherent. Additionally, for designers to operationalize their own beliefs and biases into a narrative rule set requires a defensible commitment. Visit the Playable Fictions site to learn more. Read chapter on the design or see the GLS PowerPoint.

Our goal is to embed players in the complicated ethical struggles that the rest of the world has undergone in deciding whether to take action on Uganda’s behalf. The dilemma entails irreconcilable values held by opposing groups, and players are situated alternately on different sides of the struggle so that whatever circumstance they precipitate through their action, they must likewise bear witness to. The narrative provides both a context for these different perspectives and a mechanism by which the role-play character adopts the perspectives. In the end, in trying to bring about peace through either justice or amnesty, the player doesn’t win. Players might find a different resolution—forgiveness—but even then, they don’t leave the game without having been wronged and having done wrong. The point of the game is to bring together ethical thinking and players’ personal lives with the ultimate goal of supporting a more engaged and empathetic global citizenship (visit the Invisible Children Website to contribute to the healing).