Fairy Tales as a Card Game: Engaging Digital Audiences in Value-Centred Discourses using Storytelling

Casual games are an established way to engage online audiences in topics that otherwise might be less accessible, which makes them an ideal tool for collective reflections around cultural heritage. The VAST project studies the transformation over space and time of ethical values. Particularly interesting and approachable by means of games are the dualities of values. These are pairs of values that are mutually opposed, yet none is unequivocally preferable, such as tradition vs. innovation, individualism vs. collectivism, lawfulness vs. autonomy. Fairy tales attractively narrate choices between such dualities which online audiences, and digital natives in particular, might want to challenge. Games allow doing this without exposing one's identity or suffering actual consequences. Within the VAST project, narratives from different places and significant periods in European history were annotated to explicitly represent the occurrences of values. The annotations include fairy tales from different European countries, a type of intangible folklore heritage. The multiplicity of variants, typical of fairy tales, is a good match for the variation required to create an interactive game.