Emergence of class awareness: text analysis of reports from simulated society game participants

In recent years, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened, and polarization of public opinion has been observed worldwide. Is there a possibility that such disparity will lead to the fixation of awareness for economic status? If so, how would the difference be identified through text analysis? This study used text analysis of post-game reports of participants in a Simulated International Society Game, a participatory social simulation taking all day long, to explore the differences in consciousness between groups assigned to the wealthy and those assigned to the poor. The participants were 158 first-year students at Hokkaido University. Participants who had never met each other before were randomly assigned to regions of varying affluence to conduct transactions and to create a virtual society. The game was repeated six times for a 1-h session, assumed to be 1 year. After the game, participants submitted a report describing the events during each session. The latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model was used to analyze these reports. This study investigated how participants assigned to wealthy and poor regions interpreted their experiences in sessions 1–6. The analysis results indicated that participants from the wealthy and poor areas were more likely to refer to different topics. The results suggest that this 1-day experience could make a difference in the consciousness of participants in the wealthy or poor class. The validity of analyzing topic ratios as individual variables was also discussed.