A project by A. Gadon, N. Mimura, A. Trinh, and D. Choi at AthenaHacks 2020
This browser-based game is a software engineering simulation game, during which the player plays through a workday as a female software engineer. The player answers communications from coworkers and completes various tasks assigned to the female software engineer. The player is free to input any response to the coworkers, and the input is parsed by Google's Natural Language API to analyze positive/negative sentiment. Depending on the sentiment detected, the coworkers will have differing responses.
This game was developed with the intent of raising awareness about possible negative behavior that a woman in the software engineering field may encounter. This includes sexist comments, implications of inappropriate sexual attention, unnecessary condescension, and other toxic behaviors by coworkers. This game intentionally reinforces the invisible pressure put on female software engineers to be extra-polite and conforming to the status quo of the workplace in order to illustrate the less-obvious, but nonetheless toxic, environmental variables in the workplace that may serve to hamper the success and confidence of a woman in the field of software engineering.
This game utilizes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in conjunction with the Node.js framework to communicate with Google's Natural Language API. In order to run, this project needs a Google Cloud Natural Language API project and a service account with a private key. We hope to host the game online, but for a preview of the game's functionality, see our demo at https://youtu.be/Y6ORUUBInOc