Peaceland: Choose Your Memory

Do you want to work on a video game that has an important social message? A peacebuilding game that shows players the consequences of their decisions without judging their actions? If yes, we’d love to have you join us as we continue to design, develop, and create Peaceland with a collaborative skilled team.

“We remember in order to give meaning to the present and to gain power over the future”

Video trailer for Peaceland: Choose Your Memory

Our Story

The concept for this video game project began during the faculty leader’s 2022-23 Fulbright Scholar grant in Kosovo where she taught and led RIT Kosovo students on a two phased PeaceTech survey project. Students asked locally led peacebuilding organizations about how they used digital technologies to communicate their messages focused on bridging ethnic divides, gender, and youth. It became clear that in addition to using social media and other digital platforms video games are increasingly viewed as ways to engage youth in peacebuilding activities in Kosovo and beyond.

The content for this project is drawn from the faculty leader’s earlier research and work in early post conflict environments, recent observations, international collaborators, local external collaborators

This ongoing project is the prototyping phase. It builds upon two 2024 Brainstorming Workshops and a full time RIT in person IGM student co-op. The workshops, funded by PCCE (Partners for Campus Community Engagement, https://pcce.org) were collaborations between UR students, M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, and RIT students to begin developing game characters and stories. RIT Kosovo students who were in Rochester participated in these workshops.

Phases: The Discovery Phase, completed in Summer 2024 by a 19 member Summer Co-op team (designers, narrative led by a UR student narrative designer, UI/UX, concept artists, developers) drew upon workshop results to design and develop a game demo. We continued our contact with RIT Kosovo students. The 2024-2025 phases have focused on: Fall 2024: Reflect, Reevaluate, Reset project goals based on RIT Summer 2024 Co-op); Spring 2025: Revised game to 2D, built prototype, and first new playtest; Summer 2025: Designed, developed, a second game playtest based on the Spring game demo; Fall 2025: Continue designing and developing prototyping phase. Spring 2026 and Summer 2026 will continue final prototyping phases.

Our game: When one war ends, can we prevent another?

“Peaceland: Choose Your Memory” is a role playing video game set in a fictionalized country recovering from a conflict that took place 20 to 30 years earlier. The game begins when a player enters a museum and chooses a memory linked to a character in the present. The player must make seemingly small decisions as they face a series of challenges drawn from real memor