Periodic Reporting for period 1 - i-Game (Building a community for the co-creation of games with high impact on innovation, sustainability, social cohesion and growth)
Période du rapport: 2024-02-01 au 2025-04-30
Video games are a powerful medium for culture, creativity, and community. Yet access to game creation remains limited to specific technical profiles, excluding diverse voices and sectors. The i-Game project addresses this gap by developing an open-source co-creation platform that empowers a broad range of stakeholders—including museums, fashion industry actors, and citizens—to collaboratively design games that promote inclusion, sustainability, and innovation. Grounded in a transdisciplinary methodology, i-Game integrates social sciences and humanities with design, AI, and ethics. It investigates how games can foster social cohesion, democratize digital creation, and enhance cultural engagement. The project emphasizes accessible design, ethical game development, and community-driven innovation. Through its co-creation platform and multi-sector pilots in Greece, Italy, and Estonia, i-Game aims to catalyze cross-sector collaboration, promote ethical and inclusive design practices, and reshape the video game industry as a space of responsible, culturally relevant innovation. The expected impact ranges from strengthened networks and learning ecosystems to novel economic and creative opportunities in Europe's Cultural and Creative Sectors and Industries (CCSIs).
During its first 15 months, i-Game made significant progress in developing an inclusive and ethical platform for game co-creation. Key technical and scientific achievements included the release of an early version of the i-Game platform, integrating multiple modules that support co-design, accessibility, and ethical game development. The platform offers both text-based and visual interfaces, empowering users with little or no technical expertise. A core accomplishment was the design and implementation of the Experience Co-Creation Methodology (XCM), which structures the creation process into four iterative phases, which work as a guide but do not refrain creativity and freedom: Kick-Off, Game Design, Storytelling, and Aesthetics. This methodology was tested in several participatory activities and co-design workshops among partners, along with usability evaluations. The team successfully defined 27 high-level user requirements, 15 user personas, and a stakeholder map covering diverse groups, including museums, fashion professionals, game developers, and non-experts. Advanced technical work focused on embedding ethics and accessibility into the platform, including explainable AI (XAI), AI, automated accessibility validation tools, and legal/ethical prompts throughout the design flow. While full deployment pilots are planned for the next phase, preparatory implementations were conducted in three countries (Estonia, Italy, Greece), involving local communities in museum and fashion contexts. The project also delivered a robust multi-dimensional impact assessment framework and began initial measurements, setting the foundation for evaluating outcomes such as inclusion, and capacity building during the upcoming pilot phase.
i-Game delivers a novel open-source platform that enables inclusive, ethical, and AI-assisted co-creation of educational games by users with diverse backgrounds and low to none technical expertise. It surpasses existing tools by embedding accessibility, legal, and ethical safeguards throughout the design process. This is achieved through explainable AI (XAI), AI, automated accessibility validation, and interactive legal prompts, making responsible innovation operational in practice. The platform’s low-code and visual interfaces expand access to non-expert creators, while AI-supported storytelling and aesthetics modules facilitate creative expression. This technical backbone is combined with the Experience Co-Creation Methodology (XCM), a unique framework blending inclusive design, participatory workshops, and cultural prototyping. To scale impact, i-Game identified future needs including full-scale pilot deployment, improved interoperability, and business modelling. Its contribution lies in shifting game development from a technical niche to a participatory, socially impactful practice, creating new opportunities for creative industries, civic innovation, and digital inclusion.