Serious Games for Building Data Capacity

Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems 20(2), 179-189, 2022 SERIOUS GAMES FOR BUILDING DATA CAPACITY* Davide Di Staso1, **, Ingrid Mulder1, Marijn Janssen1 and Fernando Kleiman2 1 TU Delft Delft, The Netherlands 1 2 NHL Stenden Leeuwarden, The Netherlands 2 DOI: 10.7906/indecs.20.2.9 Regular article Received: 24 January 2022. Accepted: 22 April 2022. ABSTRACT Open data can support the creation of new services, facilitate research, and provide insights into everyday issues affecting citizens. Although public administrations are making efforts to create sustainable and inclusive open data systems, there is limited capacity to identify suitable datasets, clean, release, and reuse them. Serious games offer a possible solution for data capacity building and have already been used to train civil servants and citizens on the topic of open data. This research presents a review of serious games and discusses their potential for data capacity building. The games selected in the review are classified and described according to their different learning outcomes, formats, and type of media. Most serious games found in this review can be categorized as teaching games and are designed to raise data awareness, which is only a limited aspect of building data capacity. We found a lack of design games, research games, and policy games. Given their success for ideation in other fields, design games offer a particular opportunity to build data capacity by generating new ideas about how to reuse open datasets. KEY WORDS data capacity, serious games, open data CLASSIFICATION ACM: K.3.1, K.8.0 JEL: C18 *This is the extended version of the abstract published in: Vujić, M. and Šalamon, D., eds.: Book of abstracts of the National Open Data Conference. University of Zagreb, Faculty of Traffic and Transport Sciences,*Zagreb, 2021. **Corresponding author, : ; -; **Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Landbergstraat 15, 2628 CE Delft, The Netherlands D. Di Staso, I. Mulder, M. Janssen and F. Kleiman INTRODUCTION Open data is any data that is freely accessible and reusable by anyone for any purpose [1]. Open data can be reused to create or improve services, and to identify local issues and community needs more easily [2]. While public sector organizations play a significant role in releasing datasets to the public, the private sector may also open datasets to the public [3]. In this research, we will refer to the general concept of open data to include datasets released by both the public and the private sector. The opening and reuse of datasets involves different actors and services, such as data providers, publishing organizations, infomediaries, tools for data storage and analysis, and researchers looking for data [3]. Opening data can effectively create a network of complex interdependencies and networks of interaction, an “ecosystem” [3]. Within the open data ecosystem, non-expert users (such as citizens and public administrators) have an important role in that they are aware of the issues and needs of their communities, which can be addressed using open data [4]. On the other hand, expert users, such as civic hackers and developers, own the skills required to implement practical solutions using open data [4]. Mulder, Jaskiewicz, and Morelli [5] explored recent paradigm shifts that have the potential to seed change within societal systems and look specifically at how open data can become a new type of “commons’" that can support digital citizenship. In the current work, we explore the use of serious games for building data capacity in problem-driven societies. Alongside the delivery of open data-driven solutions, open data can only become a new commons if a larger community and culture of working with data is created around it. Serious games offer an important tool to bring together both expert and non-expert users and transfer the required knowledge and skills needed to work with open data. Serious games differentiate themselves from entertainment games in that their main purpose is not to amuse, but to educate [6] and they have been in use for over a decade to facilitate learning and ideation [7]. Some serious games adapt game mechanics from commercial video games to achieve educational objectives. For example, “Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher” [8] takes inspiration from “Ace Attorney”, a popular legal drama game which uses visual novel mechanics. The developers of Socrates Jones used Ace Attorney’s mechanics but created dialogues and game content to teach philosophical thinking. In the public sector, serious games have been used in different scenarios, such as to ideate service delivery principles [9] and to train railway traffic controllers [10], among others. In the remainder, we review serious games for open data and elaborate upon their potential contribution for building data capacity. We define building data capacity as the process that empowers citizens and civil servants to understand and reuse open data, thereby creating the needed practical and analytical skills. This research will answer the following research questions: 1. Which games – or types of games – have the potential to build data capacity? 2. What kind of data capacity can these serious games build? The review starts by looking at the list of games on the topic of open data compiled by Kleiman [11]. Entries are filtered according to four criteria, selecting interventions that: (1) are sufficiently documented, (2) fit the definition of a “game”, (3) must also fit the definition of “serious game”, and (4) have an educational purpose that is related to building data capacity. We analyze selected games using the classification by Grogan and Meijer [12], assigning them a type based on the kind of knowledge transferred or created by the game and its beneficiary. 180 Serious games for building data capacity CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK To analyze the serious games selected in the review, we use the classification by Grogan and Meijer [12]. Starting from the type of knowledge that the game deals with and its beneficiary (see table 1), Grogan and Meijer [12] identify four broad categories of games. Policy games are based on real world scenarios so that the participant can experiment with different solutions and gather knowledge about the scenario represented in the game. Teaching games are based on a fictional setting, with the knowledge transferred by the game being generalizable and not based on a specific scenario. Design games “provide a participatory environment” [12, p.545] and can be used to ideate new artifacts and create new knowledge. Finally, research games are used to observe participants in an experimental setting and test hypotheses. Table 1. Classification of games according to knowledge type and beneficiary [12]. Knowledge beneficiary Knowledge type Participant Principal Generalizable Teaching Experiential learning Dangerous tasks Research Hypothesis generation and testing Artifact (...truncated)