Despandemia: Serious Game in Alternate Reality for Reading and
Rewriting Our Intercultural World during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Marcelo A. de Barros
1
, Valéria Andrade
2
, Antão Moura
1
, Laurent Borgmann
3
and Osmundo Claudino
4
1
Systems and Computing Department, Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG), Brazil
2
Semiarid Development Center, Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG), Brazil
3
University of Applied Sciences, Koblenz, Germany
4
Biology Sciences Department, State Univeristy of Paraiba, Brazil
Keywords: Emergency Remote Teaching, Serious Games, Alternate Reality Games, Interactive Books, Pandemic,
Violence against Women, Teacher Empowerment, Social Challenges, Intercultural Awareness, Utopian
Thinking.
Abstract: The Covid-19 world pandemic and the ensuing closure of schools has resulted in unprecedented emergency
remote teaching. In teaching-learning settings in Northeastern Brazil, teachers often face challenges when
they try to use innovative pedagogical approaches and introduce innovative technologies to transform students
into agents of change in our culturally diverse world through the application of learning. Such challenges
were augmented further with the pandemic as the forced systemic use of these technologies was no longer a
pedagogical choice but was quickly turned into the general rule for all educators – even those who were not
familiar with these technologies. In addition, pandemic traumas such as domestic confinement, social isolation,
fear, uncertainty, and anxiety about the future, weakened the emotional health of everyone involved in
education by reducing or sometimes even paralyzing the creative processes essential to learning. The result
of this new condition was a tangible increase in dropout rates, poor school performance and low self-esteem
for teachers and students alike. Home confinement also increased domestic violence, including child abuse
and particularly, violence against women. This paper presents a serious game, called Despandemia, for
building libraries of interactive gamified books and ubiquitous reading communities. The game is accessible
by cell phone and based on the humanistic performative attitude of a teacher-reader in collaborative projects
of online socio-cultural entrepreneurship. Despandemia was used and evaluated by 119 students of an
“Introduction to Computer Science” course, in which participants considered violence against women as a
predominant theme of the pandemic. Results indicate that the game has a positive influence on 1) decreasing
course dropout; 2) improving learning performance; and 3) creating connected communities of readers to
prevent violence against women.
1 INTRODUCTION
The world’s Covid-19 pandemic caused schools to
close and members of households to spend an
unprecedented amount of time together at home. The
pandemic and limited schooling also led to a
multitude of remote teaching-learning issues,
particularly in less-privileged countries (Asanov et
al., 2021). Emergency Remote Teaching, ERT, is
likely to worsen existing reading weaknesses in
scenarios of ubiquitous communications (Santaella,
2014). Low levels of reading and writing capabilities
are indeed an important problem and affect many
young people in several countries (PISA, 2019).
In the Covid-19 pandemic scenario, Emergency
Remote Teaching appears to accelerate innovations in
school practices but does not necessarily bring about
an improvement in reading skills. In fact, weaknesses
in reading skills appear to precede and transcend the
pandemic.
According to Santaella (Santaella, 2014), even
with the apparent excess of reading opportunities
brought about in recent years by pervasive and mobile
computing and ubiquitous communication, the
A. de Barros, M., Andrade, V., Moura, A., Borgmann, L. and Claudino, O.
Despandemia: Serious Game in Alternate Reality for Reading and Rewriting Our Intercultural World dur ing the Covid-19 Pandemic.
DOI: 10.5220/0010480804250436
In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2021) - Volume 1, pages 425-436
ISBN: 978-989-758-502-9
Copyright
c
 2021 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
425

readers’ low level of attention does not allow them to
form their individual imaginary libraries that
represents the history of his personal reading
experience as presented by Manguel in (Manguel,
1998). These imaginary libraries are formed by the
phrases, ideas, concepts and extracts of the essentials
of readings that were created by the authors with such
attention that they remained in readers’ long-term
memories. These libraries built by the reader during
his life are available as sources whenever readers
need to build a potential utopia for themselves or for
others, or simply to remain resilient in a school's
teaching-learning process with all its weaknesses.
At the same time, the pandemic also caused an
increase in Intimate Partner Violence, IPV (Evans,
Lindauer and Farrell, 2020). Intimate Partner
Violence in practice is mainly oriented against
women. According to the United Nations (United
Nations, 2015), 50,000 women are murdered each
year by their own partners. UN statistics show that
one in five women and girls, have experienced
physical and/or sexual and/or domestic violence by an
intimate partner within the last 12 months. Yet, 49 of
the member states have no laws that specifically
protect women (or men) from such violence. This is
an indicator of a great challenge for our societies, and
it is recognised by the UN Sustainable Development
Goals (No. 5 – “gender equality”), whose attainment
unquestionably requires preparation of our youth, for
example through developing reading and writing
skills, in order to be able to contribute to the future of
humanity in their own words and actions. The aim is
to empower youth in a reading-acting revolution to
understand and reduce violence in society. In Brazil,
violence against women is taking on alarming
proportions: Brazil ranks 5th place in the world
ranking of feminicide; in the first 20 days of 2019
alone, there were 107 cases of feminicide in the
country (Garcia, 2019). These numbers speak
eloquently of the insufficiency and inefficacy of
governmental strategies and actions to break the cycle
of this systemic, gender-related violence, as well as
of the need to apply existing knowledge to face
sociocultural challenges of this dimension.
Pandemic traumas caused by Corona home
confinement, social isolation, fear, uncertainty about
the future and anxiety, have weakened the emotional
health of many involved in education by reducing or
even paralyzing the creative processes which are so
essential to learning. At the same time, the situation
of home confinement also increased the number of
Intimate Partner Violence cases, particularly against
women.
This paper proposes a computer supported
educational approach to promote productive reading
habits amongst its users and to address two pandemic-
related challenges:
i) to create an enchantment of educators and
students with reading, with an emphasis on
literature; and,
ii) to make them multipliers of the idea of the
reading experience as a process aimed at
transforming people and creating utopian but
thinkable violence-free worlds.
Related to challenge i) and according to
Santaella (Santaella, 2014), readers have adapted
themselves, assuming one or more new profiles that
vary from the traditional contemplative or immersive
reader, transforming the reader into the ubiquitous
reader, who inhabits pervasive computing
environments and mobile computing. In this
environment of ubiquity, the ubiquitous reader
inherits from the varying profile reader the ability to
read and move between different forms, volumes,
masses, interactions of forces, movements, directions,
lines, signs, colors, lights with which texts are
presented.
The ubiquitous reader also inherits from the
immersive reader the ability to be physically present,
while moving through physical environments (home,
work, streets, parks, avenues, roads) reading the signs
that these environments continuously present. That is
why the attention of the ubiquitous reader is
irreparably “continuously partial”. This attention
responds to different focuses at the same time without
lingering reflexively on any of them. The attention is
continuously partial but insufficient to generate an
emotional involvement with the text to the point of
feeding the construction of ideals and utopias.
Challenge ii) consists in transforming the teacher
into a source of inspiration and training to build
practical meaning for the reading experience, and
providing support to the student and future reader, by
empowering them through awareness-raising to
become autonomous. As a conscious reader of
oneself and of the other as represented in the text,
students try out their new role as re-inventor of the
world which may have been shaken by a pandemic
such as that of Covid-19 or by any other dystopian
phenomenon.
This paper presents a gamified approach for
educators to be transformed into inspiring readers
themselves and to be able to build a virtual incubator
structure for social entrepreneurial readers, in the
form of a growing library of interactive gamified
books and a ubiquitous reading community interested
in addressing Covid-19” challenges.
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We coined the neologism “Despandemia” for our
gamified approach, by joining the prefix Des (from
Latin and Portuguese - reversal of sense of
succeeding word) to Pandemia (Greek and
Portuguese - pandemic). The name implies the game
seeks to ‘undo the pandemic’ and in particular its
negative effects.
The approach uses the ReadAct platform for
serious games meant for addressing social challenges
(Barros et al., 2018). It has been experimentally
applied by 119 teachers in Northeastern Brazil to
challenges i) and ii). Results were evaluated by over
3,000 readers of produced material and they indicate
the approach is potentially effective in addressing
both challenges. The paper contributes to computer-
supported education R&D efforts by offering new
insights into applications for current social challenges
in uncertain times like a pandemic.
The paper is organized in six sections, with this
introduction as Section 1. Section 2 briefly discusses
related work. Section 3 highlights methodological
aspects. Section 4 introduces Despandemia and offers
major details of its gameplay and other major
characteristics. Section 5 reports a trial run of the
game to validate its usefulness in supporting solutions
for pandemic-related deterioration of schooling and
IPV against women, i.e. the above challenges i) and
ii), respectively. Section 6 concludes with
suggestions for future work.
2 RELATED WORK
The application of serious games (SGs) to train
people to address challenges has been the focus of
many works. The systematic literature review in
(Calderon and Ruiz, 2015) surveys several
application domains before concentrating on software
project management. Applications for other technical
fields include but are not limited to, engineering (de
Geus et al., 2020) and computer science (Vidakis et
al., 2019). Applications to humanities and social
domains may be found in the works on socially
interactive constructivism based on each player’s
needs when acquiring knowledge on Greek ancient
theatre (Papadakis1 et al., 2020); reading fluency
(Durski et al., 2020); and, on identifying emotional
factors associated with lifelong m-learning (Dirin et
al., 2020).
Despandemia is a SG to train players in writing
and reading skills – in this, it is closely related to
(Durski et al, 2020), and, as (Papadakis et al., 2020),
aims at knowledge acquisition, skill-building and
awareness raising in the literary and theatrical
domains. However, in contrast to these two works,
this paper’s objective is to apply skills, awareness
and knowledge to support activities towards solving
social problems. Also, while (Dirin et al., 2020)
identifies emotional factors linked to m-learning,
Despandemia uses m-learning to trigger emotions
that will lead its players to act collaboratively with
other readers of literary artefacts produced by the
players of the game, in order to create an awareness
and solutions for social problems – pandemic-related
deterioration of schooling and IPV against women, as
it is the case here.
There are few reports so far on efforts to apply
SGs to solve pandemic-induced social problems. One
reason is that the Covid-19 pandemic is very recent;
and two, the problems need to be identified first. One
early work (Gutierréz, 2014) identified the contents
of certain videogames as a cause for gender-based
violence – i.e., violence perpetrated against women.
The author goes on to ask whether such content is
actually legal. His question raises an important
point: any effort to contain incitement to violence,
like the use of SGs, would be made more efficient if
backed up by proper government policies and laws.
In Brazil, governmental and non-governmental
organizations initiated a National Pact and Policy to
Combat Violence against Women. It promotes
policies in pursuit of gender equality, as established
in specific goals. Among them, there are policies for
economic autonomy of women and for encouraging
political participation, insertion in power positions
and new educational approaches for tackling the
multifaceted and structural character of gender
violence linked to the patriarchal culture (Bugni,
2016). However, data by the Observatory on Dating
Violence in 2018 show that related pedagogic efforts
in schools do not show enough synergy with
government strategies and lack in reach and impact
for cultural change in gender consciousness (Neves,
2018). Despandemia may be one tool for introducing
the desired change in schools.
The article (Barros, 2001) introduced the concept
of Innovation Social Sense Making (ISSM) as a
means to prepare ordinary persons to be the readers
of themselves and of others, (re)inventing
technological solutions for the other’s needs –
becoming a “reader-inventor”. ISSM was later
merged with the concept of Transformative
Performance Reading (Andrade, 2019) that prepares
ordinary persons to be readers of themselves and of
others and who re-invent life stories, and thus,
become readers-authors. The merged concepts lead to
the concept of readers social entrepreneurs,
implemented in the ReadAct platform (Barros et al.,
Despandemia: Serious Game in Alternate Reality for Reading and Rewriting Our Intercultural World during the Covid-19 Pandemic
427

Figure 1:
2018). The ReadAct platform allows one to build
alternate-reality serious games as one part of a
solution for a given social problem. Despandemia is
built on the ReadAct platform, and the focus is on
ameliorating Covid-19 pandemic’s negative impact
on schooling and on IPV against women.
3 METHODOLOGY
Efforts to specify, build, apply, use and evaluate the
Despandemia serious game were carried out according
to a 4-step methodology as conceptually illustrated in
Figure 1. Each step is briefly described here for the
purpose of providing a high-level, conceptual
understanding of Despandemia’s dynamics, which
include the game implementation itself.
In step 1, the Covid-19 pandemic served as a
background to identify possible social effects of
domestic isolation and distance-learning. Information
was harvested from literature, from the news media,
from government sites, discussions with high school
teachers, students, and their parents and discussions
with students and professors engaged in Emergency
Remote Teaching (ERT) at universities in the city of
Campina Grande in Paraiba state, Brazil and in
Europe. Potential negative effects – i.e., “challenges”,
such as IPV – were then organized for discussion and
selection in step 2.
Step 2 used a group of 119 2
nd
and 3
rd
semester
Engineering students of an “Introduction to
Computers” course, offered in ERT mode in
September-December 2020 at UFCG, to function as
active Despandemia players who were trained as
teachers to motivate and guide others in solving social
problems. They analysed the organized challenges
from step 1 and they were free to propose challenges
of their own choosing. By simple majority they
elected “violence against women” as challenge ii) to
be addressed in later stages of the game. Game
components for later stages borrow from ReadAct’s
generic facilities – e.g., theatre and transmedia
artefacts (Barros et al., 2018), but other game
requirements – e.g., gameplay, need to reflect
characteristics of the elected challenge(s). Step 2’s
output is a set of requirements to be implemented as
part of and for Despandemia’s later stages.
Step 3 involves the implementation of Step 2’s
requirements set by the same 119 players. Since these
players are enrolled in a computer science course, one
of the game’s missions involves software
development – i.e., the game introduces the players to
produce parts of the game itself. Implementation was
carried out in three evolving versions in the free
programming language Scratch (Moreno-Léon,
2016). Other Despandemia’s missions involve
players’ creation of their own stories in the context of
the chosen challenges.
Step 4 is dedicated to evaluation and validation of
results. For that, three specific indicators were
defined according to challenges i) and ii). Players
were evaluated before and after playing the game
concerning their perceptions and potential influences
in addressing both challenges. Transmedia artefacts,
i.e., interactive books in Scratch, produced to address
the chosen challenges, were then read and
commented by other readers, e.g., ordinary citizens
and acquaintances of the players, in order to identify
potential contributions to solving the challenges. Note
that execution of steps 3 and 4 may not be sequential
as Figure 1 seems to indicate. Steps 3 and 4 are
interlaced and may show some overlap in time.
More details of steps 2, 3 and 4 are described in
Sections 4 and 5.
4 DESPANDEMIA
Despandemia blends aspects of storytelling, tutorial-
based education and theatrical reading and writing of
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intercultural multimedia contents about a given social
problem (Barros and Andrade, 2018). The game aims
to empower teachers and students of a school to take
individual or collective action towards a solution for
a Covid-19 related social problem. The game
encourages co-authoring interactive books and games
for reading-acting ubiquitous communities. The game
is based on principles of utopia to build new “utopian
worlds” (More, 1985) – i.e., worlds without a
pandemic’s negative effects in our case, while players
live a hero’s journey (Campbell, 1949) that impacts
their culture and dystopic situation in a gamified
experience (Huizinga, 1955).
4.1 Gameplay
In Despandemia’s gameplay, players create books to
sensitize and influence other people (readers) to show
solidarity and leave a positive legacy. The readers’
legacy may be in the form of a comment on the
interactive book they read or even in the form of
writing their own book and this authorship reflects a
change in their reaction to an aspect of the pandemic.
The learning level design is included in a hero journey
where players discover and develop hard and soft
skills from a) their basic reading and writing
experiences, motivated by their desire to improve the
pandemic world; and b) the identity they create with
the book they read and the book they write.
Figure 2: Despandemia’s gameplay and its 4 missions
(dreaming, immersing, creating, changing).
Figure 2 illustrates the 4 missions that make up the
experience of playing Despandemia, building access,
status, powers and artefacts (interactive books) to
transform people into readers of themselves and of
others.
For the first mission, “dreaming”, the teacher
creates and presents to the classroom a utopian world,
described in texts (prepared or collected in step 1 of
the methodology) in a repository with both dystopic
and utopic views of the pandemic. The presentation is
done in a performative way to encourage participants
to dream of a theme that could overcome pandemic
challenges i) and ii). The students may use contents
of the course they are taking (in our case, contents
include mathematical modelling, algorithms,
programming, collaborative systems, tutoring
education) to create interactive books about these
challenges. The texts in the repository should be
studied with a high degree of attention to the point
that it turns the teacher into a dreamer. The teachers’
performance should be a natural result of their own
imaginary library. The collective teachers’ and
students’ dream experience aims to lead participants
to dream together and then describe this dream in a
recorded online meeting which is to be shared in an
asynchronous way with participants who cannot
participate. The presentation should inspire students
to dream up their own libraries, which they will build
as they play the game. The collective dream begins to
materialize when the students do their own
performances in the meeting.
In mission “immersing” players chose and read at
least a couple of relevant texts (one literary and one
journalistic) and immerse themselves intimately in
the world built by the authors. This rule of the game
aims to help the players, who are teachers in training,
to build their work (interactive gamified book, video-
letter or homelab) or “vaccine” as these artefacts are
referred to in the game, in a way that it turns into an
alternate reality experience. The reading of these two
coupled textual genres naturally leads to a bridge
between the utopian or dystopian worlds presented by
the read authors on the one hand and the world that
the player can change to become utopian, the present
world in which the player lives, presented by the
current journalistic truth on the other. Players will
identify dystopias and utopias in the texts and choose
the ones they want to reduce or amplify in their own
construction of a new utopian world. Players infuse
their dreams of the utopian world with the dreams of
the author, with the dreams of the characters in the
literary texts, and with the information gained
journalistic texts.
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In mission “immersing” the teacher ensures that
the learning process can be guided. The teacher
1) facilitates a vote to select a single pandemic
–related problem to be the topic of all the
imaginary individual libraries that will be
created or updated. This vote allows for more
effectiveness of the crowdsourcing effect in
the performance of the class on the problem
in the community. It also facilitates the
tutoring and evaluation work of the teacher in
the community. In the case considered, the
elected topic was “gender violence”;
2) prepares an open document with quality
requirements for the books to be written in
order to guarantee an appropriate level of
application of course contents. In the present
case, the essential contents were
mathematical modelling, programming, and
collaborative systems. The requirements
document defined a simple game form, based
on a 3-scene role-playing game, structured as
an interactive book. The story told in this
interactive book is meant to inspire the
prevention of violence against women and
should have scoring and personalization
features for the readers. The document
defines a simple solution model and is open
to additional requirements by the participants
by adding new challenges according to their
different reading and computing skills.
In mission “creating”, the teacher defines a book
building process based on the requirements document
and on a series of creativity workshops in which the
participants make intensive use of the camera and
performance presentations of their stories during
online meeting sessions. Their stories are reinvented
and implemented in the form of an interactive
multimedia application of the gamified digital book
type. Each workshop is a dramatic performance
where students enact roles and scenes implemented in
their books. In this process, students receive
feedback and suggestions from their teacher and their
fellow-students. The teacher will propose a
development platform that is adequate to meet the
documented minimum requirements and that is
accessible to students who cannot access the school’s
facilities. Due to the great heterogeneity of
programming skills of the participants, books were
developed on the Scratch platform (Scratch, 2019).
In mission “changing”, participants create a social
enterprise and use their books to win commenting
readers through their social networks and through
their personal relations. The objective of the
Despandemia game with this mission is to create and
market a large interactive library built from individual
imaginary libraries and positively affect the chosen
social challenge. The tangible impacts are represented
by the participants' self-assessment and documented
by the comments generated by other readers. The
process of winning readers combined with the
collective reading process and the accumulation of a
repository of comments generated by readers
characterize the creation of a ubiquitous reading
community.
5 A VALIDATION EXPERIMENT
A trial run to validate the Despandemia game was
carried out with a community of 119 engineering
students of the course "Introduction to Computer
Science" offered in ERT mode by UFCG in Campina
Grande, state of Paraíba, Brazil, during September-
December 2020. These 119 students played
Despandemia in its entirety (4 missions) during that
period. Additionally, as many as 2,966 ordinary
citizens and acquaintances of the players took part in
the "changing" mission (4
th
and last mission) – where
the ordinary citizens collaborated as "readers-actors"
and offered anonymous comments on the books
produced by the 119 players. The fact that the players
managed to motivate so many contributors surprised
the project managers.
The 2,966 readers-actors plus the 119 players
together constitute a reading community with an
initial library of interactive books with which
participants attempt to change one or more aspects of
the pandemic. The players then reported on
comments by the reader-actors of each interactive
book which had been produced. In order to increase
the reach of the game and the access of authors and
readers to the experience and the expected effects of
the game (impact on challenges), players were free to
use their various social networks as communication
channels and to win over and motivate their readers
to take an active part in commenting. In addition to
verifying the influence of the approach on the
pandemic challenges, the objective was also to win
and prepare volunteer tutors. These tutors will
facilitate a repeat of the Despandemia game in
schools in 2021, this time in partnership with teachers
and staff of these schools. Surprisingly, all 119
players volunteered to take the game to the next level.
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5.1 Library and Ubiquitous Reading
Community
The first impact of the experience of playing the
Despandemia game is represented by a) the growing
library of interactive, gamified books; and, b) its
growing ubiquitous reading community (Figure 3),
over 3,100 members strong if you count the full-game
players.
Figure 3 shows part of an example of one (out of
119) of the library's interactive, gamified books,
produced by the participants on the Scratch platform:
the booklet entitled “The Witch Her”. It is a gamified
story in the structure of a role player game (RPG) in
which the readers play the main role and live in a
home where they observe facts in the daily life of a
couple. During the reading, the reader is challenged
by a character who is an agent of the Ministry of
Public Prosecution to help identify different forms of
violence against women in three different scenes. The
scenes in this book are animated, have a musical
soundtrack and the characters' lines are expressed in
audio and text. The readers act on the story through
the insertion of texts through specific interactive
objects available in each scene and through the
choices in proposed quizzes. The readers will modify
the non-linear narrative of the story depending on the
type of text they put in and their quiz responses.
Adequate responses that represent a good
perception of the problem of gender violence or a
constructive attitude towards reducing the risks of
violence are computed as powers and experiences.
Inappropriate responses that represent poor
understanding of women's protection system in Brazil
but also readers’ indifferent attitude to the problem
are countered by an immediate presentation of what
should be done in view of the situation presented in
the scene. In this last case, the reader will be
confronted with to the same scene again and has a
fresh chance to interact appropriately with the
characters.
Figure 3: Example of interactive gamified books created by players when building new utopian worlds.
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431

5.2 Some Testimonials
The resulting ubiquitous reading community of the
library posted comments by 2,966 readers-actors who
acted in the interactive stories of the library. Figure 4
shows an example of a commentary by a reader-actor
who congratulates the authors of the game on their
didactic approach for making readers critically aware
of everyday challenges.
Figure 4: Example of a comment from a Despandemia read-
actor (“I enjoyed the game because it deals with day-to-day
situations which we often consider to be normal, but which
are really not. The game brings awareness to the participant
in a didactic and creative way. Congrats to the authors.”).
Other testimonials were extracted from the
WhatsApp group of the course, which the 119 full
players participated in. About 30 testimonials by the
full players (translation below) have the level of
expressiveness and orientation as those below. In
addition, there are many other testimonials that were
captured in the 11 recorded online meetings of the
course / game.
“… with the course / Despandemia, I became a
better person and I hope to be of inspiration for
someone else. Thanks for everything.”
“I didn't believe in what I was able to do.
Transforming.”
“…along with the pandemic came the diagnosis of
cancer. I had the surgery and when I was doubly ill,
Despandemia meetings each week were better than
medicine, better than chemo for me. And, originally,
I didn't even want to enroll in this course. Thanks.”
“Music, poetry, books and news to learn
computer science? I never thought of that. Thank you
for the opportunity to share my humble accordion.”
“The best part was to learn by building a game.
And still use it to help others. Awesome. I will never
forget.”
Note that comments by readers-actors and
testimonials by the full players comprise some form
of Despandemia’s soft Key Performance Indicators,
i.e., derived from opinions or qualitative key
performance indicators (DsoftKPIs) as opposed to
hard (quantitative) KPIs (DhardKPIs).
5.3 Soft KPIs
Soft Key Performance Indicators (DsoftKPIs) were
used to judge the influence, which the game
Despandemia may have on the investigated
challenges. These indicators were evaluated using
structured interviews with the main players (teacher-
trainers) before and after they played the
Despandemia game. Each DsoftKPI took the form of
a question the interviewee could answer with “No”,
“Not sure” or “Yes”.
The following six DsoftKPIs were analyzed:
1) DsoftKPI
1
– Can you raise the interest of
someone for reading using computer resources?
2) DsoftKPI
2
– Can you author an influential
intercultural artistic work to lessen the negative
impacts of the pandemic such as IPV against
women using computer resources?
Figure 5: DsoftKPIs Before and After Despandemia.
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432

3) DsoftKPI
3
– Can you create, feed and manage a
community for online reading to train new
readers to tackle a major challenge brought about
by the pandemic?
The charts in Figure 5 illustrate results for the
three DsoftKPIs, or rather, changes in the responses
of the 119 main Despandemia game players. The
numerical data correspond to the percentage of the
total of 119 respondents.
Overall, the charts indicate an unexpectedly high
positive change in attitude and a sense of
empowerment for confronting IPV among the 119
players of the full game. `
5.4 Hard KPIs
The 119 players of Despandemia’s full game in this
trial run were all students of the “Introduction to
Computer Science” (ICS) course and they played the
game within the joint contexts of that course’s
syllabus and Covid-19 pandemic’s negative effects
on violence against women. The assumption was that,
by playing Despandemia, students would improve
their performance related to the contents of the ICS
course and at the same time, they would have their
awareness raised about gender-violence. It was
expected that students would be able to create an IT
tool including an online community to support actions
to confront gender-violence during pandemics.
Despandemia’s hard KPIs were anticipated in the
Abstract:
1) DhardKPI
1
– “Introduction to Computer
Science” course dropout rate. The course (mean)
dropout rate was defined as the mean of the ratios
of (number of students who did not complete the
course) / (total number of initially registered
students) for all the considered courses (or
different classes of a same course).
2) DhardKPI
2
– Students’ performance on the
“Introduction to Computer Science” course.
Performance in this case is summarized by the
average (µ) and standard deviation (δ) of the
students’ grades (0% to 100%) in the course.
3) DhardKPI
3
– Establishment of a connected,
organized community to foster awareness about
violence against women.
In order to evaluate DhardKPI
1
and DhardKPI
2
, 5
other ICS classes offered by UFCG for a total of 217
other stuents during the same time period
(September-December 2020) were considered.
Comparison of Despandemia and these other classes
is offered in Table 1.
Table 1: Quantitative performance of Despandemia.
Control Despandemia
Dropout rate(%) Dropout rate (%)
DhardKPI
1
21,8 0,8
µ (%) δ (%) µ (%) δ (%)
DhardKPI
2
77.4 19.7 91.8 8.2
DhardKPI
1
, being lower for Despandemia (only
one out of 119 students dropped out of the class),
suggests the game may lower dropout rates for the
course. As for DhardKPI
2
, Despandemia class shows
a higher grade average and a lower standard deviation
suggesting that the gamified approach may improve
learning and make the students’ learning process
more engaging and rewarding for students.
The discussions in subsections 5.1 to 5.3 indicate
DhardKPI
3
has been attained. Produced artefacts (in
Portuguese) by the community are available at
https://scratch.mit.edu/ (interactive books) and at
www.felizcidade.org (readers comments can be
found in BookTown and MathVille virtual spaces).
Please note that the size of the created community,
over 3,000 participants, far exceeded our
expectations. Such a size signals a large potential for
disseminating awareness on the considered
challenges. The numbers in the chart for DsoftKPI
3
in Figure 5 also signal there were changes in the
players’ perceived capability to transform a reading
and writing experience into a tool for building new
utopian worlds – gender-violence free, in this case.
5.5 Discussion
Results for qualitative (soft) and quantitative (hard)
indicators provide evidence that playing
Despandemia improves the competence and interest
of players to transform a reading and writing
experience into a process for building new utopian
worlds where Covid-19’s challenges, in terms of
worsening academic performance and gender-
violence, can be addressed.
In the project research study, impressions were
collected from over 2,900 readers of Despandemia’s
gamified interactive books (so-called “vaccines”) and
119 full-game players in Brazil. Even if these
numbers may seem adequate for statistical
significance, the collected evidence must be
considered with care for authors’ (i.e., players’) bias
and other undesired influencing factors, such as
cultural and contextual aspects, which may be
considered validation threats (Gravetter and Forzano,
2019). First, players were free to recruit readers for
their books and to ask them for evaluations of the
game’s artefacts – such freedom could cause traces of
Despandemia: Serious Game in Alternate Reality for Reading and Rewriting Our Intercultural World during the Covid-19 Pandemic
433

selection bias and social interaction threads to internal
validity. Family or friendship ties may have caused
favorable testimonials. Hence, such testimonials were
not considered as any formal evaluation indicator as
the soft- and hardKPIs were. But these testimonials
indicate readers were made somewhat aware of the
problems of interest here. DsoftKPIs’ valuation by
the 119 players was better controlled because it was
done under the supervision of the course’s professor
using a same, structured questionnaire for all.
DhardKPIs were used to compare students’
performance in different classes of the same
“Introduction to Computer Science” course, at the
same university. Course instructors were different
however and applied the tests as they saw appropriate.
There was no intentional design for tests to have
identical contents nor the same weight in grading.
This, in turn, raised risks of instrumentation threat to
internal validity of the experiment as well. These
threats limit claims of external validity of the
Despandemia approach to other contexts (e.g.,
geographical location, culture, time, pandemic’s
challenges).
Formally, the validation experiment can be
considered to have produced “face validity” (Holden,
2010) – i.e., the Despandemia’s approach appears it
will serve to improve players’ chances of academic
improvement and of gender-violence awareness.
Despandemia developers and practitioners (i.e.,
teachers) should look at replicating the experiment
with their players (students) to properly steer their
game design decisions considering the reality of their
target-context.
In spite of its limitations, the evidence in this
paper contributes insights into alternate reality serious
games design and development for computer-based
education on Covid-19’s social impacts.
6 CONCLUSION AND ONGOING
WORK
The Covid-19 pandemic worsened social problems
such as faltering school performance – due to
emergency remote training (ERT), and gender-
violence or more precisely, intimate partner violence
(IPV) – because of domestic confinement in
lockdowns. The United Nations consider these
problems as important, attributing increases in the
challenges they represent as implications of
Covid-19 – as laid out in its sustainable development
goals (numbers 4 and 5 respectively -
https://sdgs.un.org/goals ).
This paper presented a serious game in alternate
reality, Despandemia, based on the ReadAct platform
(Barros et al, 2018), which blends aspects of
storytelling, tutorial-based education and theatrical
reading and writing of intercultural multimedia
contents by the players in order to address problems
with three quantitative indicators in mind: 1) decrease
course dropout in ERT; 2) improve learning
performance; and 3) create a connected community to
raise awareness about gender-violence.
A trial run of Despandemia was carried out with
119 engineering students of an “Introduction to
Computer Science” (ICS) course in ERT mode in
September to December 2020 at the Federal
University of Campina Grande (UFCG) in Brazil.
Pre- and post-game qualitative evaluations by the
players showed improvements in their perceptions of
their own competence to address the problems.
Results for quantitative indicators 1 and 2 showed
gains when compared to other ICS courses at the
same University and during the same period and also
in ERT mode, but which did not apply Despandemia.
Indicator 3 was achieved with an over 3,000-member
community around the game’s artefacts they
produced: the gamified, multimedia books which
readers can interact with, inserting their own
comments and twists to the stories which are being
told. During the running of the game, it seemed as if
the books functioned as a “virtual vaccine” against
(some of) the Covid-19 pandemic’s woes.
Despite observed gains, one needs more
experiments with Despandemia to better ascertain its
effectiveness. In order to achieve this, the 119 initial
main players who played the game during the ICS
course volunteered and were trained to serve as
(auxiliary) tutors of an online “Introduction to
Computers” course for public intermediate and high
schools in the state of Paraíba in 2021. Also, this
approach is being used in the training of tutors for the
training of health professionals and managers in the
primary care of diseases during the pandemic such as
obesity, diabetes and hypertension, in stateunits of
SUS (Unified Health System), in Brazil. These new
experiments will be conducted as ongoing work under
the sponsorship of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of
Paraíba state, and of the Ministry of Health of Brazil,
respectively. The authors also plan to adapt the game
interculturally for a re-trial in Germany in 2021. The
gamified hero journey of the GreenErasmus game
will help exchange students develop hard and soft
skills for reducing their carbon footprint. Before and
during their semesters abroad the mobile agents of
change will identify, research and document
innovative ecological approaches in their host
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countries. Like in Despandemia they will create
ReadAct communities with the help of social media
in order to manage and facilitate the transfer of
ecological innovation back to their home countries
after their return to their home universities.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank the students and faculty of the
undergraduate programs of Education (city of Sumé,
state of Paraíba) and Computer Science (Campina
Grande) of UFCG, and of Biology of the State
University of Paraíba, the Secretariat of Education of
the cities of Campina Grande, Congo and Caraúbas,
and the staff of the Public Prosecutor's Office of
Paraíba state for their active participation in the
prototype design and trial run of Despandemia. They
also thank the Brazilian Fund for Education
Development (FNDE), the Brazilian Ministry of
Health and the Brazilian Research Council, CNPq, for
their financial support. Comments and suggestions
by anonynmous CSEDU referees made us (try to)
improve the quality of the paper. Their contributions
are much appreciated.
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