Three Essential Games for College: Meeting Challenges of Equity, Mental Health, and Diversity through Play

David Seelow, PhD, Siena College & Revolutionary Learning

dseelow@siena.edu or davidseelow@gmail.com

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Claim

• Games offer engaging, fun activities that offer insight, assessment information and potential intervention opportunities for helping college students cope with depression/anxiety, face implicit biases, and negotiate inequality on campus.

• Role playing the college-based characters Samantha Browne (undergraduate, white residential student), Kara (African-American undergraduate commuter) and Jamal Davis (African American graduate student) will assist students in building empathy and developing competencies for everyday college struggles that are often invisible and/or ignored by official channels.

The Games

• SweetXheart- Catt Small

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• Fair Play- University of Wisconsin and The Fair Play Project

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• The Average Everyday adventures of Samantha Browne- Lemonsucker games

SweetXheart

• You play 19-year-old Kara, an African American student living with her mother and kitten in the Bronx and commuting to an art and design school in Manhattan.

***Mission: Explain how the intersection of race and gender impacts your sense of self as a minority student commuting to college in an urban environment.

Embodied Experience, Empathy and the Dangerous Dilemmas of Everyday Life

Fair Play

• You are Jamal Davis an African American student beginning his postgraduate studies in pursuit of a PhD and, hopefully, future professorship.

*** Mission: As you play Jamal record example of implicit bias you encounter. How does your experience make you feel? What decisions did you make and were these effective decisions within the game? What about outside the game?

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"Fair Play": A Videogame Designed to Address Implicit Race Bias Through Active Perspective Taking

PLAYING SAMANTHA BROWNE� A CASE EXAMPLE

As a young undergraduate living in the dorms of a small rural university you are very hungry tonight, but your package of oatmeal needs some hot water. Walking down the hallway to the kitchenette is no big deal unless you have social anxiety, then, the simple task becomes a quest.

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***Mission

1. Describe the game from your perspective and how well you did.
2. Could  you relate in any way to Samantha Browne’s experience of anxiety  at college? Please explain.
3. How can colleges and universities better help students alleviate some of their anxiety?

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Mental Health of College Students

• 2018- 63% of college students reported facing overwhelming anxiety (American College Health Association), but only 23% received treatment.
• Since the height of the COVID 19 pandemic with its attendant lock down, turn to online learning, mask mandates, social distancing and so forth, the level of anxiety has increase among college students, but numerous other factors contribute to students’ rising anxiety.

Mental Health of College Students

• For me, the daily experience of anxiety is of most concern because of its immediate impact on student success and well being and because of the potential for ameliorating some of that anxiety.
• In spring 2023 a Gallup survey reported 66% of students had experienced stress the previous day (stress is linked to anxiety).

A just published article in the Journal of Affective Disorders, concludes: “In addition, periods after the Covid-19 pandemic, and its later stages, have also seen more prevalent anxiety among college and university students in general. Our findings support the need for more comprehensive strategies, implementations, and interventions to combat this rising trend.

Although potential protective factors—such as but not limited to the role played by optimism, resilience, and emotional regulation—have been brought up above, the role of educational institutions and its staff, such as school counselors and psychologists, are primary in ensuring that psychological help and treatments are made accessible and available to the students who require them.”

Samantha Browne is Our Student

• On campus this anxiety often goes unnoticed and untreated, but the negative consequences on students persist. I discovered the ubiquity of students' stress when asking students to play the game “The Amazing Everyday adventures of Samantha Browne,” in a class on Games and Modern Culture. Given 90% plus students experience a close identification with Samantha Browne’s anxiety in the dorm I have decided to assign the game when I teach a Freshman Composition or related course.

Samantha Browne is Our Student

Not only does this show me what students in many class are facing, the assignment asks students to provide concrete ways they feel college administrators can help them cope. Giving students a voice through the game could, should administrators listen,. Have a positive impact on student success, satisfaction and wellbeing, all factors that also benefit the college.

Conclusion

Roleplaying college students Kara, Jamal and Samantha can help build empathy for students and provide college and university faculty, support staff and administrators with valuable information that can directly benefit the student experiences. These games are idea for student orientation, first year experience courses, and freshman composition or similar courses.

Conclusion

Both students and higher education staff benefit in significant ways from these games which contribute much more to dealing with issues of student mental health, biases and discrimination on campus than the formulaic mandated trainings that are part of much high education today.