Reality is complex and everything in it is intimately connected. The pandemic, more than any other event to date, has shown us this, disrupting our way of living, working, and relating: a virus, an infinitely small creature, also conveyed by human actions, has been able to heavily influence our existences. Young people have been the most affected by these changes and their difficulties have exploded, growing out of all proportion. Even in Star Wars there is something that ‘holds’ everything together: the Force! Both to use the Force and to move in this new post-pandemic world, one must be aware of one’s choices: in other words, one must act in a systemic way, taking into account present and future variables, in order to make more conscious and far-sighted decisions.

The objective of ‘BE THE FORCE’, conceived as an educational tool in the hands of European youth workers, is precisely this: To approach and educate young people to systemic thinking, understood as acting in a harmonious way, in the same way as Jedi masters educate Padawans to the Light Side of the Force, opposing them to the Dark Side, which for us is the old binary way of thinking, which does not take into account the consequences of one’s own actions, but focuses on satisfying personal needs, to the detriment of those of others and of the whole system-reality.

The game, which will be a hybrid of Role Playing Game and Board Game, has no dynamics, mechanics and content already given: everything will be co-designed, tested and validated during the various stages of the project, by the young people and Youth Workers involved in the development team, with the support of external experts.