Promoting Player Empathy For People Living With Poverty

Transformational games, i.e. games that aim to transform their players for the better, are becoming increasingly popular ways to help people engage with difficult topics. In our mobile game, BROKE: The Game (based on an original board game), we strive to transform the way our players view people who live with the condition of poverty and have more empathy for them. In this paper we discuss how we adapted a board game into a mobile game and how we designed empathy promoting mechanics into the experience to help our players better understand what living in poverty is like.