By Alexandros Sainidis
Anyone who has had a decent amount of exposure to videogames has at some point heard of the term Artificial Intelligence. No, we are not talking about the plot of a videogame where a Terminator-like robot takes over the world. Rather, we are referring to the AI that rules the minds of in-game characters and the ways they respond to the environment and the actions of a player. Though the AI in videogames is, for the most part, scripted behavior and not that much machine learning AI, it certainly has been familiarizing multiple generations of gamers with AI. At the same time, a lot of us learned many things from videogames, such as words in English, some facts about history or even logic for programming.
For the things they didn’t teach us, for sure, they developed the passion of many individuals when it came to certain sciences and disciplines. This balance between what games can teach us and what games can incentivize us to do is what makes gamification an attractive option for education. This is even more interesting in the case of vocational education and training, where there are attractive applications of AR and VR for skills development.
However, there are practical problems when it comes to maximizing the value of gamification in the context of education. For the most part, educators and trainers are limited to simple, generic applications that gamify formative assessments or simply use reskins of existing game mechanics that get old very quickly. This poses a risk, as it creates an illusion of engagement, since, on paper, gamification is practiced, and the box is ticked. However, the proper implementation of gamification techniques requires careful adaptations and calibrations to match the purposes of a lesson. Otherwise, as we mentioned, the students will be limited to repetitions that can easily bore them.
The obvious solution is to create a videogame tailored to the needs of each subject. However, a solution is not only rated by its essence; the solution’s suitability also depends on how easily it can be implemented – and at what cost. This is especially crucial for VET providers, due to the fact that so many activities are tied to specialized equipment and domains. In contrast, disciplines that rely much more heavily on knowledge, rather than skills, are easier to gamify, since the aesthetics (the setting) in a videogame are much more easily adjusted. Gamification of skills, on the other hand, relies heavily on mechanics, which are much harder to craft and requires specialized coding experience.
To provide a model example of gamification, the Japanese game Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin is an indie game that offers quite a detailed simulation of rice cultivation. The added value of the simulation is so great that this game that started as an Indie title, created by only two developers (The Indie Game Website, 2020), has made such a great impact, that it fostered an official collaboration with the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (Dempsey, 2024). The problem, however, is that even an Indie game, that has much shorter development cycles still take, on average six months to three years (ARS Academy, 2023). It is therefore apparent that while the creation of videogames that assist with knowledge and skill gamification can be exceptionally impactful, it is not practical to expect that each VET school can develop such programming gems. It is both costly and time consuming; not to mention the tight schedules of both VET teachers and IT departments.
This can all change with the rising influence of Artificial Intelligence. Already, examples such as rosebud.ai (Rosebud AI, n.d.) which uses the Phaser framework (Phaser, n.d.) to develop prompt-based video games with the use of generative AI, indicate that there are leaps in such commercially available AI. It can even create sprites and assets that you can easily tweak in the code that you can access. This is interesting for generative AI, since most of the commercially available generative AI models do not let you tweak their output.
Screenshot from Claude, prompted by Alexandros Sainidis
For example, Claude AI doesn’t let you tweak the code directly on their platform – you need to resubmit a prompt to cause a change in the code (unless you copy it and tweak it yourself). It is still noteworthy, however, that Claude advertises its game-making capabilities too, a GPT model that is a direct rival of OpenAI’s model.
The results are not perfect. The games generated need a lot of polishing and therefore AI cannot, yet, cover months of development work. However, we can see that the players in the AI market are actively pursuing to build such AI capabilities. Therefore, it is apparent that, in the near future, gamification in VET education can be greatly benefited by the broad availability of easy game code creation.
This adds some interesting insights to the current discourse. While the main argument is that AI should be adapted to serve industrial needs, shaping the ways VET graduates adapt to work, it is important to remember that VET is also a specialized sector that should absorb all the specialized features that AI models can offer when it comes to gamification and, by extension, simulations. With procedural generation and the integration of adaptive AI behavior to the logic of computer characters in videogames, as well as the increasing capability of the entire code’s generation, it is very possible to create meaningful games that will transform VET as we know it.
References
- ARC Academy (2023, May 10). How Long Does It Take to Make a Video Game? Retrieved from: https://arc.academy/interesno-2/how-long-does-it-take-to-make-a-video-game/#:~:text=These%20games%20are%20usually%20simpler,to%20develop%20an%20indie%20game.
- Dempsey L. (2024, June 28). Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin Anime Reveals Collab with Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Crunchyroll. Retrieved from: https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/latest/2024/6/28/sakuna-of-rice-and-ruin-anime-ministry-of-agriculture-forestry-and-fisheries-collaboration?srsltid=AfmBOoq6fAH6rYrEacS8o2dmgJKxM6sPWyw5h1FkuqweQoNTtwXBqamF
- Phaser (n.d.). Main page. Retrieved from: https://phaser.io/
- Rosebud AI (n.d.). Main page. Retrieved from: https://www.rosebud.ai/
- The Indie Game Website (2020, November 9). Sakuna: Of Rice And Ruin Review. Retrieved from: https://www.indiegamewebsite.com/2020/11/09/sakuna-of-rice-and-ruin-review/