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Serious Games To Develop Conversation Capabilities And Improve Negotiation Skills


The Suspect, developed by The Project Factory, was also selected as a finalist in the 2015 Serious Games Showcase and Challenge in the Business Category.

The Suspect is an interactive interrogation experience where participants must prove themselves smarter than a man with a mind as dangerous - and yet as charming - as Hannibal Lecter.

You play the game by conversing with Markus Winter, a serial killer suspect. The conversation is the Serious Game context in which both of you need to build a relationship and discover your goals along the way: players get inside the mind of a psychopathic serial killer and keep him talking to save innocent lives. Your objective is to get to the end of the conversation with the best possible outcomes for yourself and all the innocent people involved.


The game uses a chat AI engine – Dialog - to create the context for learning empathy with restraint, communication and negotiation skills.

Developed for a PC Browser, The Suspect also requires a companion iPhone/Android app - The Suspect: Police Scanner - to experience the game in full. This app manages police messaging and allows your official handler to feed you information and make sure you are on the right track. It also monitors the suspect's emotional state, giving you vital clues as to where you should take the conversation.

The Project Factory considers The Suspect an experimental game that utilizes different platforms to tell different parts of the story. The companion app that shows how the suspect is feeling and receives messages from the police handler, although playing a small role in the overall story, adds a unique flavor to gameplay…


… while the chat AI engine (Dialog), directed to “getting inside the mind of a psychopathic serial killer”, could be easily applied to several other learning contexts in which players are to develop their conversation capabilities to build mutual trust and improve their negotiation skills.