#  Civil Discourse Hackathon Encourages Gaming for Good 

 





*Inspired by a murder-mystery, Harvard students design ‘Behind the Scene’ to solve polarization.*



 

October 19, 2026

 

 

 [ Genevieve Wallace ](/people/genevieve-wallace) 

     ![hackathon photo by melissa blackall](/sites/g/files/omnuum9911/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2026-10/100526_HR_ELSCE_PRESS_Hackathon_%28MelissaBlackall%29_-7.jpeg?itok=plrCIAIy) 

The winning team presenting their game. Photo by Melissa Blackall.



 



 

How can we help people overcome the tendency to abandon civil discourse practices in a heated conversation, or to abandon the conversation altogether?

A [recent event](https://www.ethics.harvard.edu/event/innovating-civil-discourse-instructional-design-hackathon-0), hosted by the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, invited students and scholars from the Boston area to design games that teach players the tools to better navigate entrenched disagreements. The winning team, four friends who are students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, created *Behind the Scene*, a digital role-playing game exploring the motivations behind a position and what a mutual understanding of those motivations might do for a disagreement.

Over the course of four days, participants brainstormed, workshopped, and tested games with the guidance of [Tomer Perry](https://www.ethics.harvard.edu/people/tomer-perry), Associate Director of Pedagogy, and Pre-Doctoral Fellow [Maxine Gill](https://www.ethics.harvard.edu/people/maxine-gill). Judges Betsy Miller, Adjunct Faculty at Pepperdine Straus Institute of Conflict Resolution & Harvard Law School; Ashley Olafsen, Community Growth Manager at Lovable; and Eliza O’Neil, Senior Curriculum Developer at the Constructive Dialogue Institute, volunteered their time to evaluate each team’s design and provide feedback.

Noel Duong, a member of the winning team, shared their guiding question: “Does understanding what lies beneath everyone's positions change what's possible?” Her teammate Hanna Ho elaborated, “A position hides a lot, including the interests, constraints and private information behind it.”

*Behind the Scene* drew inspiration from a Chinese murder mystery game called Jubensha, a live-action role-playing game designed to reveal more information as the game is played.

The general structure of *Behind the Scene* includes two rounds and a debrief. In round one, each player receives background context on a given scenario, including the cast of characters and the proposal up for discussion. Each player also receives private information about what they care about, where they have room to move, and things nobody else knows. Round one is a loosely structured conversation in which players share their public positions and cast an initial vote.

In round two, players begin by completing two sentences: “I voted (blank) because of (blank),” and “I could have changed my vote if (blank).” At this stage in the game, players can reveal information about their private motivations and preferred compromises. Ho explained: “this is where the game turns. Instead of only knowing what everyone wants, the table starts to see why.”

Teammate Steve Yan described the debrief as the most important part of the game. “In this section, we ask users to reflect on their experience and what differences they noticed between the two rounds of discussions. What did they learn about the hidden constraints that limit people’s ability to agree or disagree in civil discourse?” Yan explained.

All teammates agreed that the game’s structure should be grounded in real-world scenarios and should not require players to reach clear-cut resolutions in order to succeed. “We realized that entrenched stalemates are entrenched most of the time because people can’t agree with one another, or there isn’t a perfect solution, which is completely natural and acceptable, and we want our game to reflect that reality,” Yan offered.

Each teammate played an integral role in game development and design. Owen Wang worked on much of the underlying code to visualize the teams’ decisions. He explained that the process was “a lot of fun” and his use of Claude has improved.

Duong shared that their team “constantly challenged each other's assumptions,” which meant that much of her role was making sense of those ideas and turning them into a coherent direction. “Fittingly,” she added, “we built a game about disagreement through quite a lot of productive disagreement ourselves.”

Ho worked on ideation, testing, preparation, and presentation of the game. She shared that at Harvard she is focused on designing courses that “invite students to engage in more metacognition, self-reflection, and decision-making.”

Yan’s role? “I was mainly the skeptic,” he said. He attributed his skeptical disposition to his background in history and the discipline’s emphasis on questioning underlying assumptions. “I question and challenge anything I feel is unfounded, and because I am also an experienced gamer, I challenge design choices that don’t make sense to me.”

“One thing I'll take away from this experience is a different way of thinking about educational design. We often ask, ‘how do I teach someone this idea?’ But game design forced us to ask a harder question: ‘What experience could I design so that someone discovers the idea for themselves?’ That is a question I expect to carry far beyond this hackathon,” Duong concluded.