Entertainment-Education 1 Entertainment-Education through Digital Games by Hua Wang University of Southern California Arvind Singhal University of Texas, El Paso Contact information: Hua Wang School of Communication Annenberg School for Communication University of Southern California 3502 Watt Way Los Angeles, CA 90089-2081 Tel: (626) 315-7362 Email:
[email protected] Arvind Singhal, Ph.D. Samuel Shirley and Edna Holt Marston Endowed Professor, and Senior Research Fellow, Sam Donaldson Center for Communication Studies Department of Communication University of Texas @ El Paso El Paso, TX 79968, USA Tel: 915-747-6286 (voicemail) Fax: 915-747-5236 Email:
[email protected] To appear in Ute Ritterfeld, Michael J. Cody, and Peter Vorderer (Eds.) Serious Games: Mechanisms and Effects. New York: Routledge. Entertainment-Education 2 Entertainment-Education through Digital Games Imagine you are an asylum seeker from Haiti; an Indian green-card holder; a Polish American citizen with legal paperwork issues and a record of misdemeanor; a Japanese foreign student; or an illegal, undocumented migrant worker from Mexico, south of the U.S. border. What happens to you if you drink and drive and are caught? Or if you engage in petty shoplifting and the shop owner calls the local police? How can these bad choices come back and haunt you? Or how about if you make better choices: For instance, not knowing a word of English, you purposefully enroll in English-language classes? These are not hypothetical scenarios, but rather based on real cases. In early 2008, Breakthrough, an international human rights organization based in New York and New Delhi, launched ICED! I Can End Deportation1, a free, 3D downloadable game that teaches players about the unjust nature of U.S.