Beyond Entertainment: Analyzing Multiperspectivity in Digital Strategy Games for Educational Purposes

Commercial strategy games are a medium for addressing and disseminating socially controversial issues and influencing social discourse. In order to assess their didactic usefulness and suitability as educational media, this article examines the extent to which they integrate multiperspectivity into their game design. In principle, the ability to adopt perspectives is essential for understanding other human beings, their views, motives, and interests, and is therefore also an important educational objective at school. If strategy games integrate multiperspectivity, they could eventually also be used as a didactic tool to develop perspective-taking skills and to deal with controversial social issues, such as climate change or urban planning, in the classroom. In order to address this research gap and assess the potential of digital strategy games for teaching multiple perspectives in the classroom, it is first necessary to examine the extent to which and the forms in which strategy games integrate multiple perspectives. For this purpose, seventeen successful titles are examined through an empirical game analysis. It is shown that in all of them, different stakeholders and their perspectives are integrated into the games. However, the number of perspectives, the scope of the perspectives presented, and their controversial nature, as well as the language design vary considerably.