Serious games: a potential bridge between research and practice in the field of transitional justice?

The proposed paper is methodological in its essence and will consist of three sections. Firstly, the paper will present a concise review of literature that is devoted to the application of serious games in social sciences. Serious games are games used within a well-defined space that have an explicit primary purpose different from entertainment and recreation and intentionally and carefully link the game experience to reality. They allow observation of behavior in a controlled context. The value of games as a sound research method has been recognized in the social sciences, and in the public policy literature. Serious games are, in other words, research tools for conducting quasi-experiments. Nowadays, serious games (simulations) are regarded as a method that allows grasping and integrating the technical, physical and socio-psychological complexities of political problems. The mentioned features of serious games can be used also for other purposes, such as facilitating teaching knowables. In this case, games can be used to demonstrate complexities of certain phenomena. Secondly, the paper will discuss the possibility of using serious in the field of transitional justice (TJ). Here, the main problem that is planned to be addressed is the fact that on the one hand, there is a growing number of literature that explains different aspects of the phenomenon of TJ. On the other hand, the ever-growing understanding of the phenomenon seems not to be taken into account in practice, although the number of situations, in which TJ is applicable, grows. We will try to identify the potential areas, in which serious games and TJ studies can overlap and lead to the creation of an added value. Finally, the paper will provide some empirical evidence, extracted from the project aimed at „translating'' one of the problems widely discussed in the TJ literature (the so-called peace vs. justice dilemma) into the language of a serious game for the sake of bringing the existing abundant theoretical knowledge in the field of TJ closer to practitioners. Here, attention will be paid not only to the benefits, but also to the limitations of such a practice.