CiteSaga: Lessons Learned in Serious Game Development for Academic Integrity Education

CiteSaga is a serious game designed to teach academic integrity, specifically citation practice, to higher education students. The paper presents lessons learned from both an analogue tabletop prototype and a later experimental digital version, developed at North-West University in South Africa beginning in 2023. The authors frame their work as a response to student disengagement with citation, which many learners perceive as an arbitrary compliance burden rather than a meaningful scholarly practice. The project is positioned as a resource-conscious intervention suited to South African conditions, including large class sizes, multilingual cohorts, uneven infrastructure, and varied digital access.

The analogue phase was shaped by participatory design and structured playtesting with students, evaluated through the "Play with Purpose" heuristic framework. Key findings include the value of embedding citation tasks directly into gameplay mechanics, the strategic advantage of a low-tech format for equitable access, and the need for structured debriefing so that in-game learning transfers to students' academic writing. The authors also report that the labour involved in serious game creation remains substantial despite AI advances, and that AI tools were most useful for empowering small teams in generating narrative and visual content.

The digital phase explored "vibe coding," a natural-language, AI-assisted prototyping approach, through which a single developer produced a functional single-player prototype within weeks. The authors note that generated code did not understand pedagogical nuance and created maintainability risks, so they treat the digital build as a proof of concept rather than a deployable product. The paper advocates a hybrid model combining AI-augmented prototyping with traditional engineering, along with modular design and creative funding to manage tight budgets. The study involved no human-subject data, and the authors call for future research on longitudinal learning outcomes, curricular integration, and ethical frameworks for AI-assisted educational game development.