Speak Your Heart

Organization:

Carnegie Mellon University

Dev Category:

Student

Release Year:

2025

Speak Your Heart is a dating sim that explores campus free speech debates through player-driven storytelling. Developed at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, the game uses humor and romance to engage players with complex topics like heckler’s vetoes, trigger warnings, and academic freedom. Players shape both relationships and campus policies through choices, with multiple satirical endings reflecting ideological extremes.

Game Overview

“Speak Your Heart” teaches players to identify and understand complex free speech concepts such as the Heckler’s Veto, content-neutral policies, trigger warnings, and the tensions between school policy, law, and social norms. The game cultivates critical thinking and empathetic reasoning by forcing players to navigate these nuanced issues through the perspectives of different characters, each representing a distinct ideological stance, thereby helping players understand the real-world consequences of speech-related decisions.

The main goal is to navigate the complex social and ideological landscape of the university campus by forming meaningful relationships with the three characters, each of whom represents a different element of the free speech debate. A deeper, and more challenging goal is to reconcile these conflicting perspectives and steer the entire campus towards a balanced policy on free speech, which requires making careful, nuanced choices that consider legal, social, and ethical implications. Players are also challenged to deepen their own understanding of free speech principles to such a degree that they can confidently participate in the final courtroom debate and advocate for their chosen outcome.

University students.

“Speak Your Heart” assesses player performance through a dynamic narrative system that measures their comprehension and ideological alignment. The primary assessment tool is the branching narrative itself, where the story’s direction and ultimate conclusion serve as a direct reflection of the player’s choices and their understanding of cause and effect within free speech debates. The game continuously evaluates the player’s performance through a hidden “affinity” system, where every dialogue choice earns them points with the character whose perspective they align with, effectively grading their ability to navigate and appeal to different ideological frameworks.

Speak Your Heart

Game Overview

Game Specs

Game Engine

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Game Video

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