The Suspect, developed by The
Project Factory, was also selected as a finalist in the 2015 Serious Games Showcase and Challenge in the Business Category.
The Suspect is an
interactive interrogation experience where participants must prove themselves
smarter than a man with a mind as dangerous - and yet as charming - as Hannibal
Lecter.
You play the game by conversing with Markus
Winter, a serial killer suspect. The conversation is the Serious Game context in
which both of you need to build a relationship and discover your goals along
the way: players get inside the mind of a psychopathic serial killer and keep
him talking to save innocent lives. Your objective is to get to the end of the
conversation with the best possible outcomes for yourself and all the innocent
people involved.
The game uses a chat AI engine – Dialog - to create
the context for learning empathy with restraint, communication and negotiation
skills.
Developed for a PC Browser, The Suspect also requires a companion iPhone/Android
app - The Suspect: Police Scanner - to
experience the game in full. This app manages police messaging and allows your
official handler to feed you information and make sure you are on the right
track. It also monitors the suspect's emotional state, giving you vital clues
as to where you should take the conversation.
The Project Factory considers The Suspect an experimental game that
utilizes different platforms to tell different parts of the story. The
companion app that shows how the suspect is feeling and receives messages from
the police handler, although playing a small role in the overall story, adds a
unique flavor to gameplay…
… while the chat AI engine (Dialog), directed to
“getting inside the mind of a psychopathic serial killer”, could be easily applied
to several other learning contexts in which players are to develop their
conversation capabilities to build mutual trust and improve their negotiation
skills.
