Games are increasingly being used to deliver educational content in a more engaging manner. However, educational games, as opposed to say entertainment games, have an added imperative to infuse learning content along with game and engagement content. This brings forth an interesting challenge as to “how much” content should one load onto a game without the game losing its meaning and its efficacy as a game. Related to the how much question is the “how complex” element.

I often use games and gamification (gamification being separate from games) as a tool to overcome tough pedagogical challenges or to scale complexity of tough-to-teach topics – i.e. use games a vehicle to onboard students to topics that are presumed complex or boring). Using cases from games that I have designed (includes board games, digital games, escape room games and process gamification examples), I will share the challenges and travails of content scaling in the game design process.

Rajiv Vaid Basaiawmoit Bio

Dr. Rajiv Vaid Basaiawmoit, Ph.D., MBA, is currently the Head of Sci-Tech Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is a polymath of sorts having a PhD in Biophysics (2007), a double Masters in Biotechnology (2001) and in Business Administration (MBA - 2011). Rajiv has since straddled various disciplines and spent various amounts of time in various fields such as Nanoscience, Molecular Biology, Organizational Psychology, Environmental Sustainability, Marketing, Social Entrepreneurship, Gamification, & Ludology. In parallel, he also launched a Game studio – Biosymfonix Edu Games under his consulting business Biosymfonix. One of it's flagship products is a multi-award-winning board game called ESHIP:NavigatingUncertainty which is currently in use in over 60 different institutions across 22 different countries. During COVID Rajiv used the down-time to create even more games and one is spin-off to the aforementioned flagship, now called GRANTED: The Research Grant Game – which helps interdisciplinary teams come together and create a skeletal grant proposal in under 3 hours.  

Owing to his multi-disciplinary background and ability to innovate as well as coach on how to innovate, he is an invited speaker and thought leader at many conferences, events and institutions around the world from TedX to NATO and many others. Rajiv’s multi-specialty achievements and interests have spawned various inter-disciplinary collaborations with disparate entities and individuals that range from artists to scientists, to philosophers to entrepreneurs as well as Museums, Communication agencies, Game studios and of course universities and schools.