1. Project title
2. Intro story:
   1. When I tried to buy our marital home, I negotiated through a real estate agent for a property we both loved. I made my final offer - and was confident that I would get it as the agent told me I was the highest bidder. He called me later, and said that the landlord "preferred not to sell it to me" and suggested that the next highest bidder, who he mentioned was Chinese, got the property instead. I was furious. I wish other people could feel what I felt that day... but there was nothing I could do. This was just another small incident that was part of my personal experience with discrimination.
3. Quote from survey.
   1. I am not alone. Just in the area of property rental, 42% of our surveyed users reported being discriminated against on the basis of race. In other domains, discrimination had a darker face. One of our survey respondents left this anecdote.
   2. Quote options for the slide (pick 1):
      1. "In secondary school, one of the boys in my class always gave me hard time. The teacher took notice and spoke to him to find out why he disliked me. He said he did not like because I am an Indian. When asked why he doesn’t like Indians, he said his parents didn’t like Indians either and told him to keep his distance from them. This gave me a rude shock as to how racism is perpetuated by older generations to children for no reason." - Survey respondent
      2. At a job interview about 5-6 years ago, I was asked about my religious beliefs. When I mentioned that I was a Hindu, one of the interviewers asked, if I was going to need time off a lot to attend to "all the various Hindu ceremonies & special occasions". When I asked what was meant by that question, she shared that there was "this other Hindu" who had been working with the organisation who had asked for time-off "many times". Again, when I enquired further, it was explained that this employee had taken personal leave on the dates of the anniversaries of the deaths of her parents every year; "in fact, one year, she wanted to get a half-day off on Deepavali eve!". She continued, "I know you have 1000 & 1 gods, so will have 1000 & 1 holy days - you can't take leave on every such day, ok". Needless to say, I turned down their offer.
      3. I work in a male dominated industry. Men often look down on my capabilities and have the tendency to talk over me or mansplain too much.
4. Data
   1. Other survey respondents said that they were discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, or religion at school, at work, in job applications, while socialising, etc.
   2. IPS Survey data confirms that this is still commonplace in Singapore.
5. Problem: Discrimination due to racial, gender, and religious stereotypes and prejudice are difficult to dismantle. Empathy for people of different backgrounds requires you to understand and care about their lived experiences.
6. Question: How can we help young people develop empathy for people who are not like them?
7. Our primary target group are youths, especially those aged 16-18. We have studied Singaporean's mobile usage and we know that mobile gaming is something that is very popular, across all socioeconomic classes, and both genders. Over 1.1m Singaporeans played mobile games last year.So we wanted to turn incredible statistic that into something we could use.
8. What if we could make learning empathy a game worth playing? What if, instead of just a game, we created an immersive experience that they wanted to play?
9. What if we used real stories - from people like me, and others we have interviewed to get their experiences being discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, or religion - to let players experience real emotions from "fictional" characters, and used an interface that helped put them in the shoes of the victim?
10. We created multiple characters, and picked 10 key milestone chapters in life where stories of discrimination are often found, and built an interactive immersive fiction game - like a "choose your own adventure" book - where players choose a character, and go through life as them. Each choice they make as success points, hardship points, and helps the character progress through life.
11. And that's the whole crux of our game: What if you were born as somebody else? How would you feel? What choices would you make? How would those choices work out for you as that character? Would going through all of those difficult experiences help open your eyes? What if you received that message from the property agent telling you - as a fictional indian male character buying your marital apartment in chapter 8 - that your bid didn't go through but the next bidder who was chinese was accepted? What would your text response be? What would your next chapter look like?
12. And at the end of the game, they can see how their chosen character did against other people who played their character, or see how other characters did. They can share their reflections on the experience - on the journey - and start another game and be somebody else this time. We want to create a game that is so engaging that people (esp youth) will play it for fun, without thinking about the educational value of the game. We want them to discuss their choices, discuss the game, and implicitly understand dilemmas that other people face.
13. We play tested the prototype with potential users and this is what they had to say.
    1. Insert quotes from testers
14. Our project tackles 3 key themes in this hackathon: 1, 2, 3
15. UVP 1. We don't want to teach empathy, we want users to experience it via immersive exposure. 2. Having in person discussions on discrimination is difficult. Supervised dialogues must be held in small groups, and even then, it is hard for young minorities in the group to open up in such a setting. Using a single-player mobile game removes those difficulties, and is more scalable. 3. We also will collect tremendous amounts of data that will help us understand societal dynamics: what characters did most males choose first: other males of a different race, or females of the same race? What choices did male indian hindu players when they played as female characters? What can we learn from that data?
16. Roadmap & Implementation Plan
    1. Implementation timeline:
       1. Aim to build up 3 characters with a 10-chapter story by Feb 2021.
    2. validation: play test, in depth interviews
    3. user acquisition: teachers → classrooms, ground up groups, social media campaign #besomebody
    4. channels: classrooms & MOE
17. Impact & Outcome
    1. Sustainability: growth plan for new characters and chapters over time, for paying users. also can have option for organisations to pay for access to facilitated dialogues that draw on our data analysis and insights from their participants.
    2. Impact: to deliberately and constructively facilitate conversations about discrimination to "grow" empathy
    3. Metrics: every sec 4 student in 2021, as part of CCE.
18. Team
19. End quote from survey (pick 1):
    1. That ignorance is no excuse for discrimination, that because I respond to such discrimination it does not make me "overly sensitive"; that babies are not born racists but they easily learn to become racists from the adults in their lives
    2. I wish people would learn how to empathise, how to put themselves in other people's shows before showing their prejudices.
20. Insert qr code for playable prototype