A role-playing game that’s uniquely UChicago

Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, you've just been accepted to a selective university made up of five islands—each with a unique way of teaching, learning and approaching the world.

Oceanic Island, which features the humanities, is a place that celebrates diverse languages, cultures; while Tidal Island, where the social sciences are based, is committed to learning about contemporary human interactions, society and history. On Artificial Island, the home of the biological and physical sciences, scientific method and hypothesis testing are celebrated alongside the use of technology and engineering to better humanity. Coral Island, where the arts are practiced, is committed to exploration, design thinking and creative assignments as ways to generate knowledge; and Volcanic Island, the central administrative zone, overlooks it all.

Throughout your exploration of this world, you discover a number of mysteries and solve puzzles, all while interacting with characters and your fellow students en route to discovering deeper truths about the university—and working together to make a big decision.

This is Haven Academy, a multimedia role-playing game created by UChicago scholars and students to help orient first-year College students to the Core curriculum, university life and the Chicago Principles of free expression. This summer, more than 1,000 incoming first-years engaged with Haven during Orientation—and the game has been made available to all undergraduates to play and experience over winter break.

“It's really about putting the Chicago Principles into practice,” said Christopher Wild, faculty director for the Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse in the College and the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Germanic Studies. “It’s recognizing that there's a difference between principles on which most of us can agree on and the messiness of practice, all the spaces in which students talk to each other and practice public discourse.”

Wild notes that students come to UChicago from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs, and orientation provides an opportunity to collectively ground incoming students on a number of topics as they start their undergraduate journey. So the Parrhesia team began to brainstorm alternatives to lectures and webinars that had been used in the past.

Learning is play

The goal of this new orientation programming was to give students a fun place to learn about and practice open discourse, free expression and engagement of difference.

Enter the team of scholars and students at UChicago’s Weston Game Lab. The Lab not only houses the University’s Media Arts and Design (MADD) program, but has also become a space that invites students, faculty, staff and members of the community to play with games and design their own since it opened in 2019.

“Learning should be a form of play—it’s joyful experimentation, a way of exploring a space in order to find new possibilities,” said Prof. Patrick Jagoda, renowned scholar of media theory, game studies and design, who had created orientation games for UChicago in the past. “Our charge for Haven was to develop not only a general orientation game for incoming students to play, but also a game that grounds them in UChicago’s values of free expression and open discourse.”

Beginning in early 2024, Jagoda and Ashlyn Sparrow, the Lab’s creative director, started planning the game. By the spring, they and a larger team began to build the game from scratch, largely over the summer. A group of UChicago undergraduate students along with a graduate and two high school students tackled programming, storytelling, puzzle design, and more—all while brainstorming how this game could also teach what it means to be a student at UChicago.

Mack Minter, a third-year in the College double majoring in English and media arts and design, said they and members of the narrative team would often sit down with Jagoda to review individual scenes. They’d ask questions to check their work—what theme is this promoting? How are we incorporating free expression, open discourse and diversity? How are we incorporating dissensus into this interaction?

“How we thought about free expression developed as we worked on the game throughout the summer,” said Minter. “What that term means in an academic setting, in a university setting, is very different from what people might be used to.”

“One thing that really stuck with me is that you don't necessarily have to speak specifically about what freedom of expression is as part of the game,” said Jamie Shiao, a fourth-year in the College studying media arts and design who was a member of the Haven puzzles team. “You can facilitate those values just by having people work together on a puzzle where you're creating a discussion in which people have different opinions and different viewpoints. That, in and of itself, is promoting freedom of expression.”

Jagoda describes the pilot game, in many ways, as “enormous.” It consists of 130,000 words of text, 47 puzzles built by the team, original music composition, voice acting, character portraits and environmental artwork. Undergraduates offered important perspectives, having just recently gone through orientation themselves and experiencing campus life.

“While we each had our own respective tasks, a big part of game design and building a game is about communicating with the other teams because every part needs to understand the others,” said Shayla Beltran, a fourth-year in the College double majoring in media arts and design and gender and sexuality studies, who helped to program the game.

Students worked on their parts of the game throughout the week before everyone came together on Fridays for shared playtesting feedback and critiques of the game.

“To watch students take ownership of this project was really special,” said Sparrow, a senior research associate at UChicago. “They’re still advocating for their work on Haven—making sure that other undergraduates know how to solve these puzzles because they've spent time, energy and effort to create them.”

What’s next for Haven

The Haven team has been studying takeaways and feedback from its pilot year, and the game will undergo refinement before launching again this summer as part of Orientation.

“The pilot gave us a really strong foundation to now jump off and make adjustments for the next group of students, who will absolutely be different from the first group of students we interacted with,” said Sparrow, noting that the platform gives the team the ability to easily adjust the game year to year.

In addition to having a fun distraction, undergraduates who play the game over winter break during Haven’s re-release will also help inform additional modifications to prepare the game for the Class of 2029.

“The game is uniquely UChicago, and my favorite part is the final chapter,” said Shiao. “I don’t want to give away too much, but the end sort of comes out of left field, where you're not really expecting what you see. I’d encourage everyone to play until the very end.”

—Adapted from a story that first appeared on the College website.