Serious Games Interactive

We are excited to announce our new game, the Al-Gaddah Challenge!

In Al-Gaddah Challenge you play as 18-year-old Yasmeen, a Yemeni girl who doesn’t share her parents’ dreams for her future. Yasmeen wants to go to University but she also likes helping her Grandma with chores, which means going to the market to talk to different people. At the market, issues arise that Yasmeen has to deal with. Luckily her Grandpa just taught her how to use non-violent communication. Navigate the best way to solve issues, in this authentic narrative game set in Yemen.

Available for free in English and Arabic, for Android devices https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.seriousgames.arabiafelix9

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The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH implemented the Supporting Peaceful Coexistence in Yemen Project and produced the Arabia Felix game 9. It was funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and co-funded by the European Union (EU) in an earlier phase of the project.

Al-Gaddah challenge - Apps on Google Play

Can you make a game that brings peaceful coexistence to Yemen? That was the question we got one year ago, and as you may already have guessed, our answer was YES!

Our approach when cracking this nut was to look at the tools used to create peaceful coexistence. Here we found the technique of Non-violent Communication (NVC), a communication process using 4 components: Observation 👁 Feeling 🎭 Need 🫴 and Request 💬 By teaching the player this technique through diegetic gameplay, we may not create instant peace in Yemen, but we’ll give people a tool to better meet each other when issues arise and to solve issues before they grow bigger.
Games are a perfect medium for this, as the player takes on an active role when learning by doing in a fictive universe that gradually increases the difficulty through the game. When tools like NVC are taught using games, the retention of what you’ve learned is much higher than when reading or hearing about it.

We look forward to seeing if the players start using NVC in their own life, maybe even without thinking about it. We know that we as developers have, and we're amazed by the powers of this simple technique.
Stay tuned, as we’ll announce the release of the game VERY soon.

After having developed 200+ games over the years, we seem to have a quite good understanding of what makes learning stick and motivation high.

Therefore, we were super excited to participate in the EU-project Gamified Introduction to Gamification which evolved around training Greek teachers on how to develop their own collaborative and game-based learning modules using our new homegrown product DiBL.

We got to work with Dimitris and Marco and Ilaria from Europass Teacher Academy and a bunch of Greek teachers who have built their own dilemma-based lessons and are now spreading the news to their colleagues in Peloponnese, Greece.

Here's Sara in Greece, giving an introduction to the difference between quiz games and dilemma games.