IF760 — Tópicos Avançados em Mídias (Advanced Topics in Media) (75 hours) · Undergraduate, CIn/UFPE · 2025.1 (May to August 2025)
Digital games as research tools for social dilemmas (cooperation, commons, game theory), with experimental design for the projects; affiliated with the PsyFun group.
01 · Teaching
Undergraduate course at CIn/UFPE on designing and implementing games to study behavior facing ethical and social dilemmas, within the research line of PsyFun. It was taught by Giordano Cabral with Guilherme Cabral, with whom he has collaborated on the topic since 2013. The article Lessons learned about the development of digital entertainment tools for experiments on resources distribution (Computers in Human Behavior, 2017), which addresses the same design problem, was part of the course material.
02 · Teaching
Offered once, in 2025.1, from May to August, as Tópicos Avançados em Mídias (Advanced Topics in Media) (75 hours).
03 · Teaching
Students study social dilemmas and game theory, describe real dilemmas through a questionnaire, design their own ideation dynamics, write the Game Design Document, learn experimental design and ethical limits, lay out variables and hypotheses before running anything, and then build the game and collect data in class — the class plays each other's games, two groups per day. The final deliverable is the game, the experiment results, the publicly open link, and the 360 evaluation. A document by Giordano Cabral, "Macrojogo e Minijogo" (Macro-game and Mini-game), proposed implementing the games as mini-games inside existing platforms, to leverage their player base; one team adopted this format (Star Race, below).
Iasmin Gomes, Italo Lima, Lucas Vidal, Marcos Gabriel, Matheus Pinheiro, Victor Matheus
A web-based narrative decision-making game in which a journalist in a fictional country under a dictatorship makes editorial choices that affect three meters — relations with the government, relations with the population, and paranoia — and must reach the end without letting any of them drop to zero.
A multiplayer Android game inspired by Reigns, set in a dystopian Recife in 2040 where crab-men rebel: the group votes on event cards that affect four collective stats, while each player pursues personal objectives — the tragedy of the commons in game form.
Eliab Bernardino de Paula Junior
A narrative game with hidden moral decisions: the player follows Kuma, a young man capable of absorbing other people's pain, and the choices reveal dimensions of the player's empathy, inspired by psychological scales.
Beatriz de Araujo Andrade, Erlan Lira Soares Junior, Guilherme Maciel de Melo, Pedro Arthur Santana Patriota, Pedro Augusto de Almada Lobo Fonseca
A multiplayer web game (2 to 8 players) about herd behavior and misinformation: "time navigators" vote, amid true and false rumors, on whether to intervene in past events to prevent a devastated future.
Eduardo Amorim, Felipe Moraes, Gabriela Pinheiro, Vinícius Resende
A web-based, turn-based cooperative strategy game for studying cooperation and risk aversion under inequality: players with different credits and abilities decide whether to participate in smuggling missions with varying risks and rewards.
Beatriz Barros, Bernardo Melo, Letícia Pedrosa, Rafael Teles
A coalition government in a fictional country in crisis: each group decision affects four indicators (stability, security, economy, freedom), and the experiment observes how communication among decision-makers changes consensus and alignment; a web prototype built with Django.
Bernardo Melo, Bonna Gil Borsoi, Lucas Vinícius da Silva, Maria Carolina Santos Berrafato, Victor Luiz de Paula Lima, Severino Carlos da Silva Junior
A murder investigation in which the player gathers evidence, hears different accounts, and identifies the culprit — to observe how emotional factors influence the decision.
Ellian dos Santos Rodrigues, Pedro Henrique Vieira de Moura, Jonathas Vinicius Rocha Alves da Silva, Miguel Gomes de Oliveira, Arthur Bezerra Calado, Tarcisio Rickson Campos Chagas
A model of the public goods dilemma within Transformice (Lua): over six rounds, each player chooses between contributing to a collective pot or accumulating private gains, amid environmental and social events, with a ranking that shows contribution, efficiency, and consistency.
Guilherme Maranhão Simões de Moraes Ramos, João Luís Gomes Agra, Layse Roberta da Silva Araújo, Luiza Diniz Mendes Monteiro Luna, Maria Letícia Maranhão Nascimento, Roseanne Oliveira Cavalcante Gama
A judgment game in which the player makes decisions about cases and suspects — to measure how quickly an initial judgment forms, how much it changes in response to new information, and how gender bias and stereotypes enter into the decision.
04 · Teaching
https://ainda-estamos-aqui.vercel.app/. Team 2: Iasmin Gomes, Italo Lima, Lucas Vidal, Marcos Gabriel, Matheus Pinheiro, Victor Matheus.
Teaching
Frequently asked questions
Digital games as research tools for social dilemmas (cooperation, commons, game theory), with experimental design for the projects; affiliated with the PsyFun group.
1 class, in 2025.1.
In PsyFun.