Eutopia-Mt. teaching mediation skills using multiplayer on-line role playing games

Abstract

The last twenty years have seen the development of best practices for teaching and developing mediation skills. Role-playing is a widespread didactic methodology in this context. In this way, mediation skills learning process comes through an experiential dimension (Learning by Doing). Nevertheless there are some problems not yet overcome: a) knowing the identity of those who are involved in the role-play may influence the scenic action; b) the emotional involvement could be elevated and invalidate the learning process; c) the organization of a role-playing session could mean high costs expenditure.EUTOPIA-MT (Miglino et al., 2008) is a European research project that aims to overcome these limits through a MORPG platform employment. The effectiveness of this solution has been tested in three situations of inter-community conflict, respectively in Cyprus (an international conflict acting in the city area between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots), Northern Ireland (an urban social conflict coming from an international conflict between Protestants and Catholics) and Southern Italy (an urban social conflict between native and immigrant communities). In this paper we illustrate the project outcomes.