5 games for promoting open access
As I write this, Open Access week is still many months away. But it never hurts to plan ahead right?
Sure you could organize talks to promote open access but why not switch it up and try to educate users with a fun interactive game?
Creating a good game is not easy, but fortunately libraries around the world have done amazing work in designing some games around open access and in the spirit of openness have made them open that you can consider using
1. Open Access Escape Room - University of Essex
Library and escape games are a not a new thing though I think by and large they were still more common in Public Libraries rather than academic libraries until recently. See for example Andrew Walsh's "The Librarians Book on Teaching Through Games and Play" which has a nice chapter on it.
As such you won't be surprised to know that librarians have created a Escape Game around Open Access.
If you are not familar with the concept of an Escape Game, the idea is a team of players solve a series of puzzles that leads them from one clue to another until they "escape" the room.
I personally found it difficult to fully understand every detail of the game on first reading the package provided but perhaps easiest is to start from Open Access Escape Room - Instructions
Open Access Escape Room - Instructions
Next look at the Open Access Escape Room - Script.docx
Open Access Escape Room - Script.docx
As you can see from the script, the game requires a "villian" to play a dramatic role which can be pretty fun. The game starts with a choice, players can go the Green Route or the Gold Route and go through a series of clues before finishing the game.
I'm not going to describe the whole game, but the following layout might be helpful to give an overview of the game stages.
Open Access Escape Room - Layout
The author of the game Katrine Sundsbø just published an article - Open Access Escape Room: the key to OA engagement? which provides more insights into the game. The paper describes the motivation for creating the game , how it was tested and the experiences running it at the University of Essex during Open Access Week 2018, followed by another run for early career researchers in Jan 2019. From the article it seems the game is pitched at just the right level of difficulty where everyone is likely to finish the game in a reasonable time (50 minutes was mentioned) but there are provisions for the presenters to give hints if the players are stuck.
There's reference also to a modified version by University of Kent which includes details about altmetrics and licenses.
I have never seen this game played, but it does seem fun, but the setup looks the most involved of all the games listed in this article. This is despite a very detailed open package that include designs for everything including props.
2. The Publishing Trap - UK Copyright Literacy team
Next up is a board game by the UK copyright Literacy Team. This is one of the most well developed games on this list, with the prototype first developed in 2016.
Like most games in this article, this game is made open so you can make a version to use yourself.
I've reviewed this game before last year and I am just going reproduce my review based on the version I reviewed then.
How the game works is you roleplay as a researcher who has just finished his Phd (from one of four areas - Astrophysics, English Literature, Microbiology and criminology.)
As you go through the stages of the game you are faced with various decisions and your choices moderated by your skills ( namely Presentation, Research ,Writing, Teaching) and the roll of a die determine how many impact, knowledge and money tokens you win.
So for example, one of your earlier choices as a newly graduated Phd student is to decide if you want to embargo your thesis or not and you can choose to ask your Phd supervisor for advise or attend a class by a librarian.
Below shows what advice you will get from a PhD supervisor - though the advise is non-binding.
What I love about this game is it's feel quite real. It's almost like The Game of Life boardgame. I remember playing as a child but for researchers and faculty, covering some common and some not so common situations you might face.
For example you can get accused of plagiarising or get involved in a feud between faculty members.
As you become more senior you can decide whether to publish an academic text or a textbook for students and if the later you can choose to publish it with a commerical publisher or make it open.
Probably, the one card that caused the most laughter during a playthrough I witnessed was the one where you are accused of having a affair with your PHD student!
Notice that if you get lucky and roll 1-3 you get away scot free and gain knowledge and impact tokens. Personally I think the phrasing of the card seems to imply that if you manage to get a breakthrough in the field, all is forgiven!
I am very impressed by the variety of situations depicted in the game, but I can imagine this game can be extended even further with a lot more wildcard scenarios.
Eventually you finish the game and the game tells you how the scoring is done based on the tokens you have won. I won't spoil your fun to tell you how the scoring is done (hint : academics and researchers aren't in it for the money apparently) .
I think this part of the game seems quite arbitary to me and I can see players disagreeing with the scoring criteria, but I guess that's the point? Also it looks to me that the game is designed to be played through once as once you know how the scoring is done , the game loses much of the fun factor.
One thing I think that can improve the game is to have more characters beyond the four areas represented. This can take quite a bit of effort, since you can see how well customized the scenarios are for each of these four areas but with some joint effort, I imagine one can create researchers in other common areas like Finance, Psychology etc.
Currently the game is available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license and to get access to the resources you need to fill in the form here first as the team is seeking feedback. The ND portion of this surprised me since you now can't modify it and publish it, though they urge you to contact them if you intend to do so.
Overall this game is a breath of fresh air and to me is a novel way to get researchers to learn in a fun way by simulating their future career.
3. The Game of Open Access (University of Huddersfield)
The name of this game evokes the popular book and TV Show - "Game of Thrones" and is a simple board game by by staff from Computing & Library Services at the University of Huddersfield.
The game works like a game of Snake and ladders , you throw a die and follow the instructions when you land on each section.
Sections may ask you to move forward or backward various number of squares. Certain squares will direct you to try to answer a question from an OA card and if you are correct you keep it.
Once you reach the end of the game (aka when you are published), you see how many OA cards you have in your hand. The person with the greatest number of cards win. See also poster and presentation here.
My view? It's a relatively simpler game compared to the publishing trap and it feels to me to be less immersive, as answering questions from a card with a definite correct answer isn't as true to life. Still it's a great way to encourage researchers to learn as compared to lecturing at them!
4. A Game of Coins: The Losses and Gain, the Winners and Losers in Scholarly Communications (Texas A&M Libraries)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhiiuKngQ6s
This game is somewhat different from the others mentioned so far. While the other games are meant to educate users on various aspects of open access, this game has only one point that it tries to make.
Like the earlier game that plays on the TV show name "Game of thrones" this one plays on the theme of money or coins.
Essentially the purpose is to drive home the point that most of the effort and cost of producing the research paper comes from researchers (and the institutions that pay them) and yet at the end of the process , it is the publishers who capture most of the value.
How is this done?
The game begins by introducing the audience to 5 main players
Established scholar
Promising young scholar
Librarians
Publisher (with a name that sounds suspiciously like a famous publisher)
Bank of Academe (basically representing the University)
The last two are the only players who start with a pile of cash.
There's also a very special "player" called "Artie" the baby (represented by that little cute doll in the centre of the photo below)
I've seen this game played a couple of times, and one point of confusion I noticed is sometimes the audience doesnt catch that "Artie" represents the article at least not initally , so this is worth repeating if you are running the game.
How the game works is that the audience is guided through a simplified publication process that consists of four steps from the initial idea and research all the way to publication.
At each stage, the audience will be asked how much effort each process takes and who does the work and decide collectively the answer.
They will also be asked who owns the baby artie at each stage. So for example in the early stages of research and submission, the baby arte is owned by the researchers until the acceptance stage where it will be owned by the publisher after signing of the copyright transfer
For example take the first stage of doing research and writing the paper.
Audience may decide this is High work/effort = 5 bricks. They then decide say the work is mostly done by the promising young scholar and assign 4 bricks to her and a bit of effort is from the established Scholar and the presenter places 1 brick for that player.
Work/effort is never free, someone will have to pay for it. But who? The bank of academia or Publisher?
In terms of montetary terms, one brick of effort is taken to represent 10k. So using the example above, if the audience decides at this stage the effort is 4 bricks from the promising scholar and 1 brick from established scholar, this represents 50k of cost.
As they are paid by the institute, $50k of cash is moved from the bank of academia to the baby/artie who is now worth $50k. This continues until the four stages of the publication process is complete.
Of course I think for many even faculty who rarely think of such matters, half way through the game it will start to dawn on them what is happening (if they didn't already know), that still doesn't prevent the game from being effective of course.
Overall this game requires relatively few props. All you need is a few slides and print out a few posters. A bit of play money and a few props to represent the effort.
The advantage of this game is that it can work with relatively large audiences and unlike games like the Publishing Trap which while realistic may be considered a bit juvenile for established faculty, the point this game makes on the flow of money can be effectively used at events like Faculty meetings etc.
5. Monographopoly - University of Northampton
Dimmock, N. (2018) Monographopoly. Poster presented to: Repository Fringe 2018, Edinburgh, 02-03 July 2018.
I came across this via twitter, but I'm not sure if this is a real game as I'm unable to find more details.
Others
There are probably other games on Open Access out there.
Open access the game - a cute little video game "developed in Fiocruz, a brazilian research institution, the intent of the game is to promote the cause of the open access to articles". The set up is a virus is spreading and you need to find articles to help save the day. There isn't much to it beyond controlling an avatar and running to buildings representing research institutions and hoping the article needed is open access.
Jeu de l'OA by Lilliad, the library of the University of Lille, Sciences and Technology - "a goose game designed to help showcasing open access and topics related to open science (data preservation and dissemination; copyright issues...) to Phd students and researchers."
Updated 12/03/2019 - the always amazing Alison McNab shared her wakelet of Research & Publishing games which has more games of interest. See also this thread.
Conclusion
Educational , interactive games do seem the way to go to spice things up. The main difficulty - crafting such games is mostly settled by reusing a well tested game - such as those listed in this article. While this reduces the learning curve, one must not underestimate the time needed to create the props, do trial runs to get a sense of how long each game lasts and to consider the appropriate audience to invite the game to.