CiteSaga: Conceptualisation of a Serious Game for Citation and Reference Styles

CiteSaga is a conceptual proposal for a serious game designed to teach citation and referencing styles, including Harvard, APA, and Footnote, within higher education. Its central argument is that citation skills are frequently taught poorly, often through limited and isolated modules, and that game-based learning can strengthen students' understanding of citation conventions, their motivation, and the quality of their academic writing. The paper positions the game as a response to these gaps and as a means of integrating such training into research-focused curricula.

The proposed approach combines educational design, design science research, and agile iterative development. Its design framework specifies learning objectives spanning academic integrity, critical thinking, research skills, collaboration, and self-assessment, alongside development objectives covering vision alignment, planning, and quality assurance through a game design document. The work follows a four-phase cycle: stakeholder and curriculum alignment, design and construction, implementation and playtesting, and theoretical maturation. The authors note the use of AI tools to rapidly generate character and environment concepts, and they identify a stakeholder map that includes educators, designers, students, and quality assurance personnel.

The paper's contribution is methodological and conceptual rather than empirical. It presents no evaluation data, learning outcomes, or playtesting results, and its conclusions rest on the expectation that combining these methods and embedding serious games in curricula will prove effective. The supporting bibliography draws on literature from roughly 2011 to 2023 covering serious games, gamification, and design science research, including work on citation literacy, which provides the theoretical grounding for the proposal.