Open Education and Games — The Open Game Project

Usage of games and game mechanics in education is becoming increasingly popular. Their potential stems from their most prominent features — games are highly interactive, immersive, and engaging. They are also great learning tools by design — high levels of critical and analytical thinking are required to solve puzzle games, or complex patterns have to be learned and mastered while defeating various enemies or bosses. Games also have the unique ability to give the player immediate feedback and a safe space for failure while still encouraging and motivating the player to try again, learn, and master the skills necessary for success. Furthermore, games are also generally highly accessible and internationally available (Kowal et al., 2021). This allows the teachers to use them for teaching in a classroom, as well as for distant or autonomous learning. All of this makes games seem like a highly effective tool for teaching.

However, digital game pedagogy is still facing all sorts of criticism. The main problems include the closed nature of the video game industry, expensive development, and unattractiveness of educational game development. According to recent research (Silveira, 2016; Silveira & Villalba, 2018), Open Education Movement can be the answer to the problems current educational game development is facing.

Using games in education

Nowadays, there are four widely recognized approaches to implementing games into a learning and teaching process: gamification, game-based learning, serious games, and educational games. What is the difference between them? Serious games, or games for learning, are games created with purposes other than fun and entertainment (Becker, 2021). As opposed to educational games that are usually used in a formal learning environment and designed with a specific learning outcome in mind, serious games are used as tools for presenting difficult social or political issues, advertising, or mental health issues. Game-based learning utilizes the use of any kind of game in the education process. Gamification uses popular or the most effective game mechanics in the learning process (you can read more about gamification in my last Medium entry).

How “open” are games?

Game development is a rapidly progressive industry with huge profits and huge investments — the video game market generated up to $180 billion in 2021 (Newzoo, 2021). That also makes it highly competitive, therefore the knowledge, processes, tools, and technology are often a part of the company’s trade secrets (it is not unusual for employees to sign a non-disclosure agreement to work for the company). Game development is also a long process that combines multiple specific disciplines — designers, writers, programmers, artists, and music composers are an integral part of the creation process. This by itself makes game development very expensive, resulting in very few games being published for free or under an open license.

Last but not least, educational games are facing their own unique set of problems when it comes to development. In general, they are usually less profitable than commercial video games, making them unattractive for potential investors and development studios, they have numerous language and cultural barriers, therefore, having a narrow range of applications. According to research, they are also often deemed extremely boring (Silveira & Villalba, 2018). The whole design process also involves more individuals — curriculum professionals and learning experts, and testing on students as a primary target group is required (which, again, further complicates the whole process). Also, as of now, not enough research is available to proove the expected positive outcomes of game-based learning (Silveira, 2016).

Open Education Movement and Games

The Open Education Movement is based on the concept of Openness. Its main philosophy pillars are transparency, freedom, and unrestricted access to information. The outcomes of the Open Education Movement are the Open Education Resources : “…educational materials available in the public domain, published under an open license, which allows people to access, use, remix, reuse, redistribute and retain it.” (Silveira, 2018). According to Silveira (2018), applying these principles to educational game design has the potential to solve the problems illustrated above. He provides a new framework he calls the Open Educational Game Design and Development. The games created using this framework should be using open resources only (such as open art and music), provide open design documentation illustrating the mechanics, publish the created games under open licenses and on free and accessible platforms and give access to the source code (Silveira, 2018). This gives other creators the ability to adjust the Open Education Games freely to suit their needs, students, and curriculum and share it further in their communities.

Open Game Project

The Open Game Project is a very unique example of this. Not only is it an Open Education Game, but it also teaches teachers about the open education principles and how to use them and implement them in their classes. The aim of this project is “…to contribute to the uptake of Open Education Resources and Open Education Practices among educators in Higher Education in an innovative and motivating way, through the developing of a gamified and situated learning experience on Open Education.” The design of the game is based on real-life cases (Open Game Project, n.d.).

The main results of the project is a Handbook for educators that teaches them about open teaching practices, the Open Education Competences Framework, Open Game Course Curriculum and Content that consists of 8 modules focused on 8 core competences, an online learning game Catch the Open! that follows the journey of a young teacher Alex, that is trying to learn about open practices and later tries to convince others of its benefits. Part of the resources is also the Transferability Toolkit for anyone that would like to adopt all the resources mentioned above for themselves (Open Game Project, n.d.).

Catch the Open! Online Learning Game created by the Open Game Project

Since the Open Game Project is a fairly new project (the resources together with the game were published in 2021), it will be quite interesting to watch what impact of its actual use in practice.

References:

1. Becker, K. (2021). What’s the difference between gamification, serious games, educational games and game based learning? Academia Letters, Article 209. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL208.4
2. Kowal, M., Conroy, E., Ramsbottom, N., Smithies, T., Toth, A., & Campbell, M. (2021). Gaming Your Mental Health: A Narrative Review on Mitigating Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety Using Commercial Video Games. JMIR serious games, 9 (2), e26575. https://doi.org/10.2196/26575.
3. Newzoo. (2021). The Games Market and Beyond in 2021: The Year in Numbers. Retrieved March 25, 2022, from https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/the-games-market-in-2021-the-year-in-numbers-esports-cloud-gaming/
4. Open Game Project. (n.d.). Project Summary. Retrieved March 24, 2022, from https://www.uva.nl/en/about-the-uva/about-the-university/about-the-university.html
5. Silveira, I. F. (2016). Open educational games: Challenges and perspectives. XI Latin American Conference on Learning Objects and Technology (LACLO), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1109/LACLO.2016.7751778.
6. Silveira, I.F., Villalba, K. (2018). An Open Perspective for Educational Games. Journal of Information Technology Research, (11), 18–28. https://doi.org/10.4018/JITR.2018010102.