WHY SOCIAL SEDUCEMENT? Social Seducement promotes self-entrepreneurship through an on-line gaming experience. Social inclusion means enabling every citizen, notably the most disadvantaged, to fully participate in society, including having a job, that means: • Adequate income support together with help to get a job • Inclusive labour markets making it easier for people to join the work force, • Access to quality services helping people participate actively in society, including getting back to work. The fight against poverty is at the heart of the Europe2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth: 2011 statistics states that 24% of all the EU population (about 120 million people) are at risk of social exclusion – 20,5% of those over 65, and 9% of those with a job [DG employment and social affairs]. One of the most promising areas to address these problems is the promotion of business creation by people who are disadvantaged in entrepreneurship and self-employment. In the last years the employment losses where concentrated among temporary and permanent employees and overall there was job-creation among the self-employed [EU Employment Observatory Review2010]. A great example is represented by cooperative enterprises. According to the ILO an increase of cooperative start-ups has been noticed [EACB2010], showing resilience over the last 165 years, adapting to different political regimes, continuously integrating new needs and aspirations linked to the deep social and economic transformation through democratically controlled enterprises [2014, Resilience of the Cooperative Business Model in Times of Crisis,ILO]. Despite these significant challenges, many people with disadvantage still want to, and can have careers as entrepreneurs. What they often lack are the support systems, funding, access to training and especially the encouragement that can make the difference in bringing their entrepreneurship hopes and aspirations to fruition. The inclusive aspects of cooperative enterprises can lead to self-empowerment including confidence-building and social inclusion for individuals at risk of exclusion. HOW IT WILL HAPPEN? Consistently with Erasmus+, the project will contribute to improve the level of key competences and skills of disadvantaged individuals that are potential or actual self-employers, through strengthened cooperation between education and training, work and the social economy, non-profit and voluntary sectors, in a EU dimension. Operationally this will be achieved by developing and testing an ONLINE ROLE-PLAY PLATFORM, designed to discover, enhance and promote entrepreneurial skills WHY A GAME? Playing is maybe the most natural human instinct and it is the best way in which people learn and experience reality. Most people intuitively understand that when they play, they learn. Learning within serious games occurs through smart play. In this context, the partnership sees ‘play’, as a construct of innovation connecting, reorganizing and redeploying from small groups to more players around specific endeavours and enabling them to self-organize based on their capabilities, interests and reputation capital. WHY AN ON-LINE ROLE PLAY GAME TO APPROACH SELF-ENTREPRENEURSHIP? Starting from these considerations, the partnership thought about the potential use of games in transferring knowledge and competences in the context of Social Economy, focusing in particular on social entrepreneurship and cooperation. What makes cooperatives unique and powerful is the centrality of each member, in particular of those with experience of vulnerability. Being a member of a cooperative is about building relationships, sharing rules, common intents and working together in order to produce mutual benefit. This inborn humanity is what makes cooperatives flexible and resilient, in some way it is what makes them so similar to Role Play Games (RPG). In RPGs each player has its own proper abilities, strengths and weaknesses, he/she has to face threats and seize opportunities. Through cooperation with other players, he/she can achieve objectives that would have been impossible to reach if alone. Players can’t help but learn the skills necessary to master a game while they play, and they usually improve quite rapidly. This approach improves access to learning for vulnerable groups while shifting from costly and infrastructure-heavy training and development programs to more flexible contextual learning models that allow people to develop emerging new skills as needed.
The Social Seducement project started with the ambitious idea of empowering the game creator community and social innovators to drive real-world impact – in terms of inclusiveness and employability - through online games. Social Seducement began in 2014 with the development of the proposal, putting together a complementary network of partners that over three years were to provide the space for testing this approach and also in a fast evolving scenario for the chosen topic. The partners’ network was represented different areas in in 5 EU countries (UK; IT; ES; SE; BE) to approach a comparison in different approaches to inclusive entrepreneurship and use of ICT and gaming for getting social impact: •pedagogical and didactic competences: TIHR and UNIR •ICT and gamification development competences: Ecobyte and UNIR •modelling game as an empowerment process to pursue social impact: LE MAT, COOMPANION and REVES •inclusive entrepreneurship, cooperative finance and cooperative development: COMPANIOON and REVES •competences on active labour and welfare policies and strategies: REVES. The early main focus was “what evidence is there as for social impact for digital games?” The objective was to define a prototype tool helping users improve their employability chances while improving the coherence and collaboration in how stakeholders work together, trying to align creative design with evidence across the various involved disciplines. By bringing together representatives from different domains partners aimed to stay deeply open to many kinds of impact that the game could have. The activities undertaken by Social Seducement can be summarised as: •Researching and collecting activity to develop the game environment •Identifying and analysing the target groups and their needs •Developing the game features and the game storytelling – imagining all the possible scenarios and thus identifying the game rules. This has been the most difficult activity in terms of depth of analysis of all the possible options and in terms of identification of the most suitable way to translate them into a digital game given this was an Erasmus + project, under the education and training area and not directly a project under the ICT research area. •Implementing the game into a real virtual environment. This activity required an important and constant adaptation of the gap between what was set up conceptually and what was possible when translating it into practice. •Developing and identifying the most suitable training materials for the users •Developing the training paths and training materials for the game facilitators and holding the trainings •Testing the game in the various countries. •Drafting the guidelines for an assessment of the results and achieving some valid conclusions and recommendations. All those activities happened within a shared and constantly renewed network environment inspired by the following core values, which have been transposed to the game as well: •Inclusiveness: this project included and engaged individuals from across the range of stakeholder groups, sectors, content areas, and expertise to accommodate a broad set of goals, methods, and outcomes. •The project built on the theoretical models developed by researchers in gaming, incorporating primary source material. The purpose was to expand social impact game design and evaluation beyond a particular content area, and give the full social impact game community the resources to utilize new approaches and supplement their existing methods. •Transparency to increase communication with interested community members, to promote accountability in achieving the project goals and foster greater openness in discussing process and methods. Some key findings from across project activities are: •Social impact digital games benefit from increased communication and collaboration between key stakeholders •Stakeholders from different sectors benefit from sharing practices in design, impact measurement and dissemination. The partnership worked on the basis of the following principles: • Facilitative, by illuminating the working dynamics between different stakeholders, sectors and disciplines to capitalize on shared goals and increase collaboration. • Evidence-based: being informed by researchers and studies to support the methods identified in Social Seducement. •Accessibility: the project’s content aimed at becoming an approachable, unified entry point into the social impact games, through which stakeholders and potential collaborators can continue building partnerships and sharing ideas even now that the project is formally completed. •Visibility: dissemination is a key element for the success of such projects, allowing the initial community to include comments and ideas of other communities, ensuring the content has a real-world forum to be discussed in and expanded upon.