A Platform of Serious Video Games Co-built for the General Interest

Abstract

In a context where training takes place both in initial courses and in lifelong continuing education, the use of games offers a way of promoting effective and sustainable learning: by its very nature, this medium is an open work in which players can become involved and give meaning to their learning. Ikigai - Games for Citizens offers a unique ecosystem for creating serious, expert video games and offering them free of charge to people who want to learn while having fun, as well as producing a set of learning-related data that can be used for research and customizing training courses. By bringing together universities, Grandes Ecoles, research laboratories, associations, and institutions, Ikigai is a collaborative consortium of general interest, implementing the co-construction of videogame services between scientific experts, video game professionals and educational engineers. Together, they are producing a centralized platform of serious games and associated services that can be used by teachers at a moderate cost by pooling resources: the building blocks of each game can be reused in other games developed. The consortium is committed to general interest and popular education by making the games available free of charge to members and the general public. The decentralized infrastructure set up by Ikigai, which respects privacy by design, means that game usage data can now be collected on a national scale, but conceptually it could extend much further. The data collected in compliance with the RGPD will eventually be used to draw up enriched user profiles to offer personalized courses, teaching recommendations and progress monitoring as close as possible to the learner, using AI in particular. Ikigai is also heavily involved in the construction of new digital standards in education, which are needed to ensure the interoperability of data for lifelong monitoring of learners. But also, for the digital education ecosystem, to guarantee a sovereign, efficient, coherent, and sustainable cloud on a European scale.