Portal U de A

By: Carlos Olimpo Restrepo S. Journalist at UdeA Communications Department  

The aim of a project led by researchers from four public universities in Antioquia and Santander, including UdeA, is to help adolescents and young adults recognize and reflect on situations arising from the armed conflict in Colombia. It also seeks to identify, through pedagogical strategies like a video game, the events faced by victims and perpetrators, as well as the relevant national and international standards related to armed conflict. 

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Teaching tools that include play have shown great potential in addressing topics that can be difficult to understand if studied in more conventional ways. Photo: Courtesy  
 
The Colombian armed conflict is complex, long-standing, and involves different actors, which is why it can be difficult to understand. To address the topic in a more comprehensible way, academics found in play a striking tool to explain and raise awareness about a phenomenon that has marked the country's history among students in the last years of high school and first semesters of university. 

An interdisciplinary team from Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS), Universidad Francisco de Paula Santander, Ocaña, Institución Universitaria ITM, and UdeA, including journalists, writers, philosophers, systems engineers, economists, administrators, and pedagogues, developed a gamified tool that uses game techniques for teaching in educational and work environments. This tool is designed to teach and raise awareness about the complexity of the Colombian armed conflict and the importance of the national and international standards that regulate it through an experiential and participatory approach. 

This is a video game called Operation Chameleon, and it is the main outcome of the project "Testimonios de Paz - Propuesta pedagógica gamificada sobre historias de paz y reconciliación de actores del conflicto armado colombiano" (Testimonies of Peace - Gamified pedagogical proposal on stories of peace and reconciliation of actors in the Colombian armed conflict). It was developed by Universidad de Antioquia and funded through call 890 of 2020 from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (Minciencias). The call aimed to generate "products of new knowledge, technological development, innovation, and social appropriation of knowledge" by higher education institutions (IES). The project required an ethical commitment from the scientists, which was managed by the UIS. 

The initiative’s main objective is to enable young people to approach the complexities of the Colombian armed conflict through memory, testimonies, and play, while also encouraging them to critically think about and question the situations faced by millions of Colombians. 

"We devised a teaching strategy to help young people understand the conflict, have more empathy for those affected by that violence, whether directly or indirectly, and understand that together we can build a more just, equitable, and peaceful society," said Andrés Vergara Aguirre, a journalism and literature professor at the UdeA Faculty of Communications and Philology and the project's principal investigator. 

Because this project involved young people, participants were required to sign an informed consent. In the case of minors, their parents signed this document or whoever exercised parental authority, per the requirements of the ethical component of Minciencias’ call for this project, which can be consulted here.  

A collective construction 

Andrés Vergara Aguirre from UdeA and Martha Liliana Torres Barreto, director of the School of Industrial and Business Studies and the Galea Educational Innovation Laboratory, from UIS, led the project, which lasted 36 months between 2022 and 2025. 

Vergara Aguirre recalled that “In 2019, in the Literary Studies Group, attached to UdeA’s Faculty of Communications and Philology and classified as A1 in Minciencias, I proposed creating the line of work called Violence and Peace in Colombia: Representations in the Press and Literature. Then the researcher Martha Liliana Torres Barreto contacted us because she was interested in working on a topic that had to do with the armed conflict. We started talking, and little by little, we devised the project. 

For the 2020 call, Minciencias required that the proposals include a university not accredited by the Ministry of Education and a technical institute, to guarantee the transfer of knowledge between IESs of different levels. In this way, Universidad Francisco de Paula Santander, from Ocaña, and the Institución Universitaria ITM, from Medellín, joined the initiative, and the project's final design was completed. 

Martha Liliana Torres Barreto, a professor and researcher at UIS, reiterated that the video game was designed for young people to explore the stories about peace and reconciliation of the Colombian armed conflict. 

To this end, the professor added, "We worked with real testimonies collected by the entire inter-institutional team and combined them with the preferences and needs of future users to create a design truly focused on them." 

The research was carried out in three stages. The first was the search for and selection of people willing to give their testimony and the construction of the narratives, that is, the first-person accounts based on the interviews. 

"We conducted 19 in-depth interviews with people from Antioquia, Santander, and Norte de Santander, the three regions covered by the institutions participating in the academic research. These sources were directly involved in the conflict, either as victims or perpetrators. Most of the conversations were face-to-face, and a few were conducted via video calls for safety reasons," explained Vergara Aguirre. 

Following this process, the interviews were transformed into stories, which respected the accuracy of the testimonies at all times. The research team analyzed them from its different disciplinary perspectives, and the most representative stories were identified to create the game's four characters: Francisco, the civilian; Milo, the soldier; Julián, the paramilitary; and Elena, the guerrilla. 

"With this, we designed the gamified tool, the video game, as we call it when talking to students. It is based on interactive dynamics in which the player faces ethical dilemmas and must make crucial decisions," said Professor Vergara Aguirre. 

For example, in the soldier role, the player must decide whether to hand over unarmed insurgents to the judicial authorities or present them as "combat casualties." In another, the participant in the guerrilla role watches over a group of soldiers who surrendered after a battle and faces the dilemma of obeying their commander's orders, who tells her to take "no enemy prisoners" or leave any survivors. 

After these scenes and other similar situations, which may be more or less severe depending on personal judgment, the game clearly displays on screen the ethical and legal consequences of the decision, including references to international conventions such as the Geneva Conventions or rulings of the Constitutional Court, among other standards. Additionally, screenshots that review historical facts and figures about the armed conflict occasionally appear. Their sources are the Truth Commission and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, among others. 

According to the Truth Commission's final report, between 1985 and 2018, 450,664 murders, 121,768 forced disappearances, 50,770 kidnappings, and 752,964 displacements were reported as part of the internal armed conflict. Some of this data is included in the video game, as are Constitutional Court rulings related to the Colombian war.  
 
 
More than 500 young people have played Operation Chameleon, thanks to which they now have a different perspective on the armed conflict. Pictured: university students interacting with the game. Photo: courtesy 

The user experience 

Accompanied and guided by their teachers, over 500 students from public schools and universities in Antioquia, Santander, and Norte de Santander have used the tool. Consistent with its ethical component and pedagogical purpose in classroom use, the video game warns that it is designed based on "sensitive scenes and dialogues related to the Colombian armed conflict, derived from the testimonies of various actors involved, both victims and perpetrators." 

The students have then debated the ethical dilemmas involved in their decisions, such as the blind obedience to orders or impulses, the truth, solidarity, empathy with victims, and the legality of certain actions. 

Lina Mesa is a UdeA psychologist who promotes the university’s emerging research groups. Her professional work has focused primarily on interacting with adolescents and young people. Because of this experience, she was asked to use the tool. " It's a safe space for reflection and promotion of empathy. It allows us to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and breaks stereotypes by offering multiple perspectives on the conflict. Furthermore, the game promotes civic and moral development, as it questions the player about their decisions and exposes them to the rules of war," she said. 

Sindy Marcela Zapata Mora is a teacher at the Presbítero Antonio José Bernal Londoño educational institution in northern Medellín and participated in the project. Therefore, she invited the researchers to bring the initiative to her classrooms and encouraged her students to take ownership of it. When the Operation Chameleon educational tool was ready to be used, an event at the school was organized. Around 150 students played the video game, participated in conversations that prompted reflection on the various moral dilemmas it generated, and expressed their points of view on the matter. 

"They understood that it's a significant tool, one that addresses real stories from victims and perpetrators and allows them to understand the reality of the armed conflict in Colombia," said Zapata Mora. 

According to the researchers, the tool has generated significant reflection and a greater understanding of the armed conflict among players. "The game is neither violent nor explicit. It's user-friendly and understandable because it contains historical facts, laws, and explanatory articles. It helped me understand contexts of vulnerability often ignored from a privileged position," said María José Montoya Machado, a second-semester Communications undergraduate student at UdeA’s Faculty of Communications and Philology. 

For Pedro, it also meant a change. This 11th-grade student from a school in northern Medellín—a minor whose real name has been kept confidential—said, "It helped me understand more about how people suffer because of the armed conflict, about the places where it happens, and get to know and understand what those involved in the war do and why they do it."