Medical Careers: an online game to study online gaming and process addictions

As part of an e-learning project for medical students, designed to highlight some problems and approaches around addictions, we created some virtual patients to accompany an online primer. For the section on process addictions, we created an online game, modeled on the classic board game ‘Careers’. In this article, we describe how we used the OpenLabyrinth educational research platform to create a virtual scenario that could be played by 1-4 students, using a web browser. The internal activity metrics generated by OpenLabyrinth afford a very detailed look at what learners do within the game and how the game performs. We note some frustrations at engaging project reviewers and some mismatched expectations about e-learning resource usage. The e-learning resources are available for wider use and we encourage groups who might be interested in simple gamification approaches and learning analytics to explore these resources.