This was a qualitative research study approved by the institutional review board (LEC-BHR-P-05-22- 847) and followed the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki.
Focus Group Discussions:
Qualitative data was collected from three focus group discussions (FGDs) involving all the collaborators, the technical and instructor teams. A total of 6 participants were present for each FGDs with their mean age 33 ± 5.24 years.
The objective of the FGDs was to consolidate different challenges encountered by team members at different stages of game development. Prior to conducting the FGDs, the educator, the technical team representative, and a study moderator connected through a virtual meeting to structure the FGDs. The different phases of game-development were identified and labelled. Further field work for each phase included formulation of open-ended questions (OEQ) by involving the study moderator and game-developer team. Inputs were collected and further iterations were made.
The duration of each focus group discussion was about one to two hours. The first two FGDs included one phase each, while the third FGD included two phases of the game development. The FGDs were designed and moderated by a third person, the study moderator (RKP) who was not a direct participant in the game development. The Zoom Platform for videoconferencing was used to conduct and record the FGDs. As the FGDs were conducted and recorded online, a research assistant was not required for notetaking. The study moderator initiated the discussion by asking phase specific open-ended questions to capture participants’ experience specific to the selected topic of the game development. The audio version was transcribed by the study moderator and the data was analyzed with reference to the phase of the game-development identified. The analytical framework (Gale et al. 2013) method was used to derive developmental challenges experienced by stakeholders of the study. A set of codes (descriptive labels of each phase) was developed by the developer team. The summarized data was then categorized and concepts/experiences close to the described codes were identified, clustered, and listed under each phase of game development. The figure-1 captures the adopted framework and summarizes the developmental challenges.
The key discussion points from each phase have been described below:
FGD 1 Ideation and team development
The sustainability of the e-learning game development project depended on obtaining the right mix of passion and experience of multiple teams. The core team was created in about twelve months and included both internal educators and external technical experts. Over multiple meetings, the educators’ team engaged with the technical game developers to exchange ideas, set expectations, and roll out the process. Thus, the entry of cross teams with different levels of technical expertise facilitated next steps in the project.
The five challenges to ideation and team development we faced are listed in Fig. 1 with examples given in Fig. 2.
FGD 2 – Identifying and mapping the competencies with the cognition
The faculty in conventional teaching complete a defined curriculum of didactic sessions, hands-on practical training, and assessments, and demonstrate learning outcomes in trainees. Game playing is a supportive and supplemental mode of teaching to facilitate user motivation, engagement, reiteration, and retention of factual and sequential knowledge. These components are addressed when designing and developing the game. The team’s passion to gamify the topic, complemented by critical thinking on ways to transform the subject into game elements, helped optimize the use of limited resources. Thus, our teams decided the topics to convert into serious games. The filtered topics too presented us with several challenges listed here (See Fig. 1) by example (See Fig. 2).
FGD 3 (Combined Phases 3 & 4): Concept & prototype development – a. Defining questions & data points; b. Accumulation of content. Phase 4: Prototype testing and game packaging
Game concept development: The incorporation of fun elements added educational value to the student’s experience of the training. The educationists and facilitators in our project had only a superficial understanding of 2D and text teaching tools-, and the game-based learning tool on a digital platform was a new concept offered by the developers. We started with simple and basic concepts, and eventually our experience rose to a higher level of engagement in developing 3D game prototypes.
Multiple challenges and the response to each
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A minimal understanding of the subjects was essential to build and acquire data for game development. As a technical team member states, “The ophthalmic terms were new. For example, ‘sterility’ I understand, but deeper levels of the sterilization process were new.”
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A member of the education team says, “It took us considerable time to understand and attain the threshold level of knowledge about every subject, and then build on that.”
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The fusion of fun elements with the content earmarked for learning, mandated collaboration between the technical and educator teams.
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Time was initially invested for the team of educators to learn the technical details and for the technical team to grasp the subject in entirety. In the process of game development, team collaboration was critical to both data collection and data integration.
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Data collection relevant to a broad topic demanded frequent interactive meetings and follow-up. It called for the creation and sharing of subject-related content and high-quality clinical pictures in structured and special game-specific formats.
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The initial prototypes were subjected to closed feedback, the suggestions were shared with the team of developers and the corrections were implemented.
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Team dynamics and talent attrition in technical teams: The exit of developers from the technical team just when we had attained project efficiency significantly delayed the project. Given the boom in the technology market, engineer retention was a challenge in our short duration project for developing e-learning games. When an engineer resigned and left the team, it was observed that there was no return on investment for the high cost of knowledge transfer (KT) made during the training and development of the team.