Ethical Uses of AI in Playful Learning and Game Design
Artificial Intelligence is on everyone’s minds, regardless of whether or not you are in the educational space. One great aspect of board and card games is that they provide a really engaging and practical way to discuss and critique AI through a variety of opportunities. I’ve listed a few ways using games and game design – check it out!
1.Critiquing AI and Algorithms Through Play
Games often gives us a chance to explore content by making key choices and reflecting on our decisions in order to learn more about a topic. In Doomscroll, players actually take on the “AI” of a social media company by curating a social media feed of posts tailored to get the end user to buy a product. Through this core gameplay mechanic, players discover just how companies keep us glued to our screens using algorithms focused on our interests, then priming us to click on related ads.
At the end of the day, games like Doomscroll help us reflect on how AI impacts our daily life and can be used for both good and… not so good purposes. The good? AI helps our feed relate to what we might want to see for content, but the bad is that our feed becomes an echo chamber of ideas and can be too focused on keeping our attention rather than giving us healthy content.
2. Asking AI to Evaluate The Best Persuasive Response
We’ve all played a game where there is a human judge for the round who picks the best submission. Games like Apples to Apples or its older brother Cards Against Humanity use this system to incentivize players to make their most creative, persuasive, or entertaining submission to win over the person’s decision.
Well… what if everyone wants to create during the round? Or what if you only have two players or two teams? AI has advanced to the point where it is now possible to submit two verbal explanations or “pitches” to an AI platform and ask it to pick the best one! If you’ve tailored the AI to value what a game looks for (such as most persuasive, most creative, most entertaining, etc) and given it good data and documentation to use to make this decision, AI could be that judge for the round. In our upcoming game, Fantasy Loot Brawl, teams of players draft their perfect lineup about any subject and then debate why their team or player would be a better pick than the other team’s selections. We’ve had AI be the judge for these debates in testing, and it’s been impressive to see both the reasons for its choices AND the feedback for players.
3. Developing Custom Cards with Help of AI Visuals
One of the most exciting parts of playful learning is creating your own versions of games and adding your own flair to games you already love. In Gamestormers, players can create their own cards during gameplay OR use one of our free card templates to create custom cards to add to the game. If players are not feeling artistic, they could leverage an AI tool that sources non-copyright art to generate visuals for their card to give it more context and alignment to their chosen theme. Examples of AI art generators that are more transparent about where they access the art to generate images include Adobe Firefly and Canva’s AI art creation tools.
4. Getting Feedback on Rules from AI Assistant
There are a bevy of places where getting suggestions and feedback from an AI chatbot could help in the process of developing your own board or card game as well. One of the biggest challenges in making a game is creating clear and concise rules. Using an AI chatbot, a designer could either explain the rules via audio or video and then ask the AI to write them out in standard game instructions format (Introduction, Objective, Setup, How to Play, Sample Turn, End of Game, etc). Or a designer could write up their instructions and then ask AI to help reword it to be more streamlined or help to add key visuals for explaining the game. Humans are of course masters at creative ideas, but AI can help clarify, summarize, and reword those ideas into more understandable terms and visuals!