A HOSTILE WORLD A pervasive urban game to sensitise and foster a cross-cultural reflection

A Hostile World is a persuasive game designed for an urban context with a high level of multiethnic presence, a recurrent feature of the contemporary megalopolis. Our players are ordinary native citizens who are plunged into an alternative reality where they can realize how complex and demanding it is to deal with gestures and tasks of everyday life in a foreign context, trusting them to live a destabilizing experience that aims to increase the sensitivity, understanding, and empathy towards foreigners, soothing the existing multicultural tensions. The game is a quest-based system; quests recreate situations of everyday-life needs, from shopping to bureaucratic adventures; it's designed to be modular and its sessions may change in the number and quality of quests adapting to different cities, contexts, and targets. The authors identify its effectiveness through the analysis of data collected during and after actual gameplay.