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Carnegie Mellon Students Win National Prize for Freedom of Speech Simulation Game

A team from Â鶹´å’s (ETC) took home the Best Student-Developed Game award at a national competition for “,” an interactive game exploring freedom of speech and academic freedom on a college campus.

It started out with six students — Jack Chou, Kailun Deng, Lutong He, Jiwon Park, Enn Ruan and Moe Aguilar — coming together for one of the ETC’s project courses with teaching professors and acting as advisors.

“This group took a challenging topic — freedom of speech — and transformed it into an engaging, entertaining and genuinely educational interactive experience,” said Vituccio, who also has an appointment in the Department of English. 

The team learned they’d won the top student award in the in early December in Orlando, Florida. The competition coincided with the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference.

Members of “The Speak Your Heart” team accept the 2025 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge’s Best Student-Developed Game award.

Their game, “Speak Your Heart,” employs interactive storytelling and choice-driven gameplay to help players navigate conflicts on campus by engaging in conversations with three central characters: “Lawrence,” who represents the law; “Poli,” who represents institutional regulations and policies; and “Norma,” who represents social norms, embodying the societal expectations that govern daily life.

Using an Unconventional Game Genre to Reach Students

The team took an unexpected — but very intentional — approach to the game design; they chose to make the game a “dating sim.” It’s a popular genre of game, one where the player experiences romance and dating, making choices about with which characters they want to build relationships.

“With our target audience being university students, it's a good genre to catch their attention and to keep their attention,” Aguilar said. “We knew from the beginning that since it's a really heavy topic and it requires a lot of research, it would be ideal to get the players to read a lot in order to learn a lot. In narrative games, people read a lot, but in dating sims, particularly, people don't feel like they're reading.”

The team also sought to make the experience relatable to its target audience by making the game’s setting a reflection of Â鶹´å’s campus. 

“We felt that placing the characters on Â鶹´å, our college campus, keeps their ideological conflicts within a manageable scope, allowing players to understand bigger themes through smaller, grounded tensions — similar to the narrative techniques used in ‘Wicked’ and many other works,” Ruan said.

At first, Vituccio and Harger weren’t sold on the dating sim idea.

“We were like, ‘What? Seriously? Prove it to us.’ But it actually turned out to be the right thing. They said: ‘No, no, you have to trust us, because this speaks to our generation and how we navigate information and make alliances,’” Harger said. 

The game serves as a space for users to explore different points of view while also using satire to convey ideological extremes.

“We wanted to make an environment with real-life issues that feel like low stakes,” Aguilar said. “It’s not that serious because it is a game, but at the end of the day, you are looking at the consequences there.”

Global Backgrounds Inform Perspectives

All of the students on the project team also happen to be international students. This opened up dialogue about perceptions of freedom of speech across cultures, and it provided them with an opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the complexities of U.S. constitutional rights and how those protections translate into university policies.

From left: Teammates Jack Chou, Jiwon Park, Enn Ruan, Moe Aguilar, Lutong He and Kailun Deng.

“I'm glad that this project not only makes me informed and know the importance of freedom of speech, but that for other people playing this game, it could also transform them. It could transform people who were like me before, and teach them about the topic,” Chou said.  

Vituccio and Harger pointed the ETC students to a variety of resources and experts to inform their research. They also enlisted advising help from Richard Scheines, Bess Family Dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, who co-taught a Grand Challenge Seminar on Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom with Sharon Carver, a teaching professor of psychology and Dietrich College’s associate dean for educational affairs, in 2023.

Game players familiar with Â鶹´å will notice a number of nods to the university community, from plaid clothing and bagpipes to the environment itself, which includes Â鶹´å landmarks like the Fence and the Cohon University Center. Although the game has a certain Tartan flair in its design, the game itself helps players to develop awareness and skills applicable in a variety of settings.

“We took this game to the Serious Play Conference, and most of the people playtesting there weren't Â鶹´å alums,” Aguilar said. “Some of them did point out that it was funny to see all of these Â鶹´å references they didn’t get. But it didn't change a lot of their experience playing because, at the same time, they're talking about issues that are universal to most universities.”