Prompting Destiny: Negotiating Socialization and Growth in an LLM-Mediated Speculative Gameworld

TL;DR

This paper introduces an LLM-mediated role-playing game that explores socialization and moral responsibility, providing insights into educational guidance and social development through reflective gameplay and analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel game system grounded in socialization theory that facilitates reflection on moral and social development in an educational context.

Findings

Players negotiated responsibility and role positioning.

The game revealed tensions between open-ended expression and engagement.

Players reflected on how educational guidance shifts with socialization.

Abstract

We present an LLM-mediated role-playing game that supports reflection on socialization, moral responsibility, and educational role positioning. Grounded in socialization theory, the game follows a four-season structure in which players guide a child prince through morally charged situations and compare the LLM-mediated NPC's differentiated responses across stages, helping them reason about how educational guidance shifts with socialization. To approximate real educational contexts and reduce score-chasing, the system hides real-time evaluative scores and provides delayed, end-of-stage growth feedback as reflective prompts. We conducted a user study (N=12) with gameplay logs and post-game interviews, analyzed via reflexive thematic analysis. Findings show how players negotiated responsibility and role positioning, and reveal an entry-load tension between open-ended expression and sustained engagement. We contribute design knowledge on translating sociological models of socialization into reflective AI-mediated game systems.