Pro se representation is common, especially for those who can’t afford legal services. “RePresent,” created by game designers and legal experts, walks people through every step of the process.
Going to court is stressful enough, even more so if you’re your own lawyer.
Every year, millions of people enter the courtroom to represent themselves as what’s known as pro se litigants. Mostly seen in civil cases, pro se representation requires ordinary people, who often can’t afford an attorney, to understand how to navigate the complexities of the legal system.
However, a group of researchers at Northeastern University want to make that process easier –– with the help of video games.
“RePresent,” a video game that walks people through the experience of a pro se litigant, comes out of the close collaboration between Northeastern game designers and the NuLawLab, an innovation-driven legal laboratory in the university’s School of Law. The end result is an interactive experience that allows players to learn the ins and outs of the process in an engaging and authentic way.
“Going to the court requires all kinds of procedures, rules and whatnot, and it’s a lot. It’s a lot for people to take on, a lot for people to think through,” says Casper Harteveld, a professor of game design at Northeastern and one of the leads on the project. “What if you are able to experience the court and the whole process before you actually go to court?”
The need for a game like “RePresent” was immediately clear to the researchers.
If people can’t afford legal representation in a criminal case, they are often given a pro bono lawyer. But in civil cases, “you’re basically on your own and you can only get a lawyer if you can afford one, and many people can’t,” Harteveld says.
Beyond the financial challenges of affording legal services, people turn to pro se representation because they are skeptical of legal services or don’t understand how to navigate the legal system, Harteveld explains.
In a 2013 report, the National Self-Represented Litigants Project found that in the U.S. more than 80% of civil litigants were going to court without lawyers in cases that ranged from evictions to child custody. Since then, the situation has not improved. A 2022 Justice Gap report showed that low-income people in the U.S. did not receive any legal help for 92% of the problems that impacted their lives.
“RePresent” plays “kind of like an onboarding program” for going to court, Harteveld says. But it took the team a while to figure out what information to include in the game and how to present it in a way that wouldn’t overwhelm people.
Originally, the game only walked players through the experience inside the court. However, conversations with legal experts at the NuLawLab as well as legal aid experts and pro se litigants helped the team realize they needed to include every step of the process. That means starting from the moment you hear you need to go to court all the way up to right before the judge’s decision.
Eventually, the designers came up with the idea that players start in the court and go through the process before realizing they are in a dream. Once they wake up, players then have the opportunity “to really go through the entire process and learn what you need to pay attention to,” Harteveld says.
Players are frequently confronted with questions and prompts where they have to choose an answer based on the information they’ve learned. As they make the right choices, a confidence meter gradually fills up, representing the likelihood that their case will result in a positive outcome.
However, the game stops short of showing the judge’s verdict because the team didn’t want to guarantee that by playing the game, players would have success in real-world cases, Harteveld says.
Moving forward, Harteveld hopes to release different iterations of “RePresent” that will walk players through different kinds of cases. The first iteration of the game focused on a small claims case, while the second, “RePresent 2.0,” centered on an eviction case.
The challenge with making these kinds of “serious games,” Harteveld explains, is that it’s often hard to get them in front of their intended audience. With “RePresent,” Harteveld and the team were happy to see it reach people during their research and beyond.
As part of the study, the researchers put “RePresent” in front of 965 people both to solicit their feedback and to see if the experience actually helped them learn more about the law. Now available on Android and iOS, thousands of more people have since played “RePresent,” Harteveld says.
“Sometimes when you’re thinking about, ‘OK, let’s build an educational game. Let’s build something,’ do you really reach your audience?” Harteveld says. “We found that we did.”