Meeting at Crossroads: An exploration of playful listening through a co-creative AI game

Abstract

Active listening is a well-established cornerstone of empathetic communication and a hallmark of “civic competence”, but is a challenging and energy consuming skill. Games offer a provocative lens to consider how active listening could be explored playfully. In this paper, we present Crossroads, an interactive social game which makes active listening fun by inviting players to co-create images about one another’s personal experiences. Deployed through a tablet-mobile web app, players take turns acting in ‘listener roles’ to generate AI images, and eventually uncover a collective picture along a “crossroad” shaped map. An initial mixed-method evaluation with 36 users demonstrates that players find the experience highly engaging and feel especially heard during in-game conversations. This work contributes a novel game which uses AI to mediate empathetic dialogue, and surfaces questions about the trade-offs of gamifying listening.