In an attempt to open new critical territory for both the field of peace studies and literary criticism, this thesis investigates the relationship between twentieth-century violence/nonviolence and fiction/literary theory. While war literature has been used, primarily, as a source of insight into the war experience, peace-studies literary critics, such as Michael True, Gregory Mason and John Getz have sought to identify a literary canon which embodies and inspires the values of peace or the principles of nonviolence.

Similarly, literary criticism has failed to confront these issues. The use of imaginative literature as a source of philosophical inquiry into the nature of social order, oppression or conflict, as well as the role of violence and nonviolence in personal and political action, has been largely neglected by the field of peace studies. While we found no significant statistical relationships between our data points that would confirm or reject our hypotheses, we conclude by discussing possible reasons for this result as well as how we can improve the game and the study in the future.

We also theorized that the player’s inherent predisposition toward empathy and conformity would influence their decisions in-game. We theorized that, as players learned more about the game world, they would use that information to choose to stop conforming to the directives they are given. This chapter outlines our process for creating such a gamified experiment. Through carefully designed narrative and gameplay elements, we test the extent to which players will choose to contribute to a system they may neither agree with nor understand. Through Integrate, we have created an interactive experience that aims to study players’ predispositions toward obedience and conformity.

Interest in using video games in various behavioral research topics has grown in tandem with recent technologies and development similarly, there exists a growing wealth of games that explore psychological concepts and issues.

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