REG (Robot Enactment Game)

Social robots are designed in studios and labs — but the people who live and work alongside them rarely get a say in how they behave. REG is a modular card game built to change that. We designed five interconnected tools: a scenario-building game based on Freytag's narrative pyramid, a drawing-and-guessing activity for robot embodiment inspired by Gartic Phone, an AI simulation module using ChatGPT to test robot behavior scripts, an expressiveness testing toolkit for multimodal emotional cues, and an "Oh but wait—" ethics card set that surfaced value conflicts like dignity, cultural sensitivity, and autonomy mid-play.

What emerged wasn't just a game — it was a participatory design toolkit for a care robot named ROSE. Participants consistently found that embodiment communicates more than function: a mop handle reads as a threat, not a helper. Our ethics cards turned abstract values into active design constraints, mid-session. REG ships as one comprehensive card set and also connects to a custom ChatGPT GPT so you can keep playing in text and voice mode.