A Game Palette and Guidelines for Game Development for Minority Languages: Case Karelian Language

This paper, by Paula Alavesa and Leena Arhippainen of the University of Oulu, presents a palette of simple vocabulary games and design guidelines for teaching the Viena Karelian dialect, a minority language, to native Finnish speakers. The work covers a development process from June 2018 to November 2019 that produced 18 games (G1-G18) out of over 40 concepts, with user evaluations involving learners and experts. The authors describe the games as categorised against a language learning model by Triando and Arhippainen (2019) and extended into a palette aligned loosely with CEFR levels. Evaluation samples varied: one game was tested with 38 players at the GamiFIN 2019 conference, and five games were tested with 16 participants aged 10 to 84.

The authors report that most older participants did not see points, high score lists and rewards as particularly important, saying learning itself is the reward, while younger players were more interested in adventure and content creation. They also note that participants invented over 30 themes related to past and modern living and culture. The authors state that the palette and guidelines are limited by their Finno-Ugric starting point and call for further validation with other minority languages.