Motivating students to learn law through co-creation and participation in game designing and gameplay

Abstract

The gaming industry has increased dramatically in a worldwide sense in recent years and this has brought significant importance to legal issues, such as intellectual property rights and contract law. This has meant for the continuous success of gaming companies that the understanding and use of IP instruments of protection is vitally important, however, it remains a challenge in many cases. Recently, the need to make the law more accessible to people and communicate legal information in a clear way has been recognized by legal designers, who are applying human-centred design to make legal services usable, useful and engaging. In our article we explore the co-creation process of an educational board game. Our research question is: How to facilitate 1. The learning of complex legal topics of the gaming business and 2. The training of soft skills by utilizing the principles of design thinking, service design, legal design and game design? We chose a board game as the presentation method of legal design, as the game environment is a context which is familiar to the game students. In addition, games enable the utilisation of different orders of legal design interventions, such as plain language, visual composition, interactive tools and creating a motivating learning environment. Learning by playing is an efficient way for learners to internalize the knowledge they have learnt. Our research approach was qualitative and we applied a design-based research method with which the educational game had been simultaneously developed and tested in practice. In this article we describe the collaborative game development process including the iterative development cycles with various stakeholders. In this article we focus on the co-creation of the contents of the board game describing its design process utilising legal design. Our observations highlight the potential of the game development process and playing the game in improving the students’ motivation to understand the legal topics and processes relevant to game businesses. As our intermediary result we present the 1st version of the “Game Law-Law Game” educational board game. Our innovative findings will be of interest for researchers, practitioners, and teachers in the field of educational games, legal design and pedagogy.