Within citizenship education, a new focus is being laid upon what is expected of citizens within a diverse and lightning-fast society: more emphasis is placed on teaching students how to understand and respect other people’s opinions, regardless of how they may contrast with one’s own. However, learning to be tolerant with others’ viewpoints comes with hurdles, as currently it is quite easy to become stuck within one’s own worldview. We developed Diermocratie, an in-classroom game aimed at encouraging a more open conversation, which breaks through these hurdles and addresses key competencies such as empathy and argumentation. By role-playing metaphors that parallel real-world events, students explore their own predispositions, are made aware of the perspectives of others, and are enabled to discuss issues objectively. From a preliminary evaluation, most students could identify the parallelism between the in-game metaphor and real-world situations. They also indicated that the game motivates them to further talk to each other, approaching sensitive topics among them.

We present Pingball, an audio-based mobile game that makes the classic experience of a physical pinball machine accessible to everyone, including those with visual impairments or complete blindness. Pingball keeps the essential game mechanics of traditional pinball, but both the game design and the level design were totally overhauled, to be playable without any visuals. This was accomplished by building every feature from the ground up using only sonification techniques, such as shifting pitches and varying volumes, and spatialization techniques, such as moving audio sources through three-dimensional space. The level design makes use of a broad stereo-field by having a widened playing area featuring gameplay objectives spread over different locations. Evaluation has shown the game was considered quite playable and enjoyable by players both with and without a visual impairment.