RePresent: Enabling Access to Justice for Pro Se Litigants via Co-Authored Serious Games

RePresent: Enabling Access to Justice for Pro Se Litigants via Co-Authored Serious Games

RePresent: Enabling Access to Justice for Pro Se Litigants via Co-Authored Serious Games

Casper Harteveld, Nithesh Javvaji, Omid Mohaddesi, Erica Kleinman, Kathy Daniels, Dan Jackson, Giovanni M. Troiano

Abstract

"Increasing numbers of people represent themselves in legal disputes—known as pro se litigants. Many lack the skills, experience, or knowledge to navigate legal proceedings without a lawyer, resulting in limited access to justice. Serious games may provide an effective, interactive, and engaging way of educating pro se litigants about the law and enabling their access to justice. Through participatory design with legal experts and an authoring tool, we co-designed RePresent, a serious game that helps individuals with limited access to legal support prepare for pro se litigation. A total of 965 people played RePresent, and 149 provided feedback on their player experience. Results show that RePresent was engaging and valuable for learning about the law and pro se litigation. Our work highlights avenues for co-design methodologies with co-creative authoring tools that facilitate serious game design, contributing a potentially scalable solution to enable access to justice via co-authored serious games."

Reference

Harteveld, C., Javvaji, N., Mohaddesi, O., Kleinman, E., Daniels, K., Jackson, D., & Troiano, G. M. (2024). RePresent: Enabling Access to Justice for Pro Se Litigants via Co-Authored Serious Games. In *Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '24)* (pp. 3225–3245). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661632

Keywords

serious games, access to justice, law, pro se litigants, participatory design, authoring tools