True Story

True Story is a free narrative educational game for mobile devices, developed by Amnesty International Czech Republic and released in December 2022. The English version currently contains three self-contained stories, each taking around 25 minutes to complete. The game is designed primarily for human-rights education and is supported by lesson plans for classroom use.

What is it for?

The game brings personal experiences of discrimination and marginalisation into a short digital format. It grew out of Amnesty Czech's human-rights education work and its use of the Human Library approach, with the aim of encouraging students to think about racism, xenophobia, discrimination and the experiences of people who are often represented through stereotypes or statistics. Amnesty International Czech Republic's educational materials provide further context and activities for using the game.

The intended audience is mainly secondary-school and university students, although the game is freely available to the general public. The accompanying teaching materials are an important part of the offer, allowing educators to use the stories as a starting point for discussion rather than treating the game as a stand-alone learning experience.

It is not designed as humanitarian or development training. There is no simulation of humanitarian management, policy or field operations.

How do you play it?

The English version contains three stories:

Where Is My Home? — Jirka, experiencing homelessness after the death of his parents.

Journey to Freedom — Kareem, an Egyptian student experiencing surveillance, detention and torture before fleeing to seek asylum in the Czech Republic.

Ah, Talk to Me... — Natálie, a 15-year-old autistic girl dealing with social exclusion and pressure at school.

The game uses a comic-style visual-novel format. Players make dialogue and personal choices at key points, affecting relationships and the direction of the story. Different choices can lead to different outcomes, while information boxes provide additional context about human rights and discrimination. Each story concludes with a video reflection connected to the real-life experience behind it.

The format is deliberately short and easy to use in a lesson. Amnesty provides activities for 45- and 90-minute sessions, allowing teachers to combine the game with discussion and other classroom exercises.

Is it any good?

True Story is effective at creating a simple entry point into difficult subjects. The personal stories are more immediate than an abstract discussion of discrimination, and the short format makes the game practical for classroom use. The accompanying teaching materials also give educators a way to turn the experience into a broader discussion.

There is some evidence of real-world use. Amnesty's 2024 Human Rights Education report describes its refugee and human-rights education work in the Czech Republic, including 14 workshops involving 369 school-aged children. Amnesty reports a quantifiable increase in awareness and compassionate attitudes among young people following this work. However, the report does not explain the evaluation method or provide enough detail to establish whether these changes can be attributed specifically to the game.

The bigger weakness is the game design itself. The choices provide some sense of agency, but the mechanics are fairly shallow. Most decisions are scripted multiple-choice prompts, and there is little opportunity for experimentation, strategy or problem-solving. In this respect, it is closer to an interactive story or classroom activity than a game with substantial game mechanics.

That is not necessarily a problem for its intended purpose. A 25-minute narrative that can be discussed immediately with a teacher may be more useful in a classroom than a more elaborate game that requires several hours to complete. It does, however, explain the relatively modest engagement and learning-value scores.

How humanitarian is this?

Only to a limited extent.

Journey to Freedom is the clearest connection to humanitarian work because it deals with persecution, forced displacement and seeking asylum. It can therefore support discussions about refugee experience and the human consequences of displacement.

The other stories have weaker connections. Jirka's story touches on poverty, homelessness and welfare support, while Natálie's focuses on disability, education and social exclusion. These are important social issues but are not specifically humanitarian or development contexts.

There is no humanitarian organisation, aid programme, camp, case-management system, coordination process or operational decision-making. Players are not asked to manage resources or make programme choices.

The game's place in this catalogue is therefore mainly as a supplementary resource for discussing lived experience, particularly in relation to refugees and marginalisation, rather than as humanitarian training. This is why the sector-realism score is low despite the game's relevance to some humanitarian themes.