uMed: Your Choice—Conception of a Digital Game to Enhance Medical Ethics Training

Abstract

In this contribution, we present the conception of the serious moral game uMed: Your Choice for the training of medical students' moral sensitivity and resoluteness. First, we offer an overview of the moral competences that we aim to train through the game: an empathic concern for relevant groups; an awareness of one's susceptibility to biases and stress, moral schemas and scripts for automatized sensitivity under time pressure; a sensitivity to attitudes of moral disengagement; and skills for speaking up about ethical issues. Second, we present the educational game mechanisms and contents that we have selected and combined to achieve the desired learning outcomes: playing an intern at a clinic, learners deal with several cases, in which they have to interact with patients, patients' relatives, and co-workers. Their decisions, including the way they communicate, have immediate as well as delayed consequences, and players receive constant feedback in terms of three value categories (empathy, integrity, efficiency). Third, we discuss how we employ the game within our study program. We close with a discussion of a possible critique of our design and with an outlook on the further design process.

Ethics in times of physical distancing: virtual training of ethical competences

“…The Serious Moral Game “uMed: Your Choice” [ 5 ]: In this medical ethics video game, a digital role-playing game, students are confronted with difficult clinical-ethical cases from the perspective of an intern. The game consists of various dialogue options that are available in communication situations with patients, superiors, colleagues, nursing staff or relatives, which determine the course of action, whereby one’s choices have consequences that are sometimes difficult to foresee.…”

Design Bioethics, Not Only as a Research Tool but Also a Pedagogical Tool

“…There is a wide range of applications for such tools. For instance, one can use a serious game with the aim of improving moral competences (Katsarov et al 2020). Or as we do (Sader et al 2021) one can use serious games for debiasing physicians who are likely to be influenced in their practice and clinical reasoning by unconscious cognitive mechanisms (anchoring bias, confirmation bias etc.…”

“…The immersive component of the game allows to make more embodied decisions which are close to players' true reactions in the real world (Buzady 2017;Gorbanev et al 2018). This virtual reality experience increases users' attention and openness to critical feedback (Gorbanev et al 2018(Gorbanev et al , 2019Katsarov et al 2020;McCall and Baillie 2015;Schrier 2015). Serious games also allow players to explore, at their own pace, various chains of consequences.…”