Arcademia: A Global Game Ecosystem for Learning, Research and Community

Abstract

Game jams have become widely recognised as effective environments for experiential learning, rapid prototyping, and collaborative creativity within computing and game design education. However, these events are often temporally bounded activities that conclude once the development sprint ends, limiting their potential as a sustained educational and research infrastructure. This paper introduces Arcademia, an international academic initiative that reconceptualises the game jam as a foundational component within a broader ecosystem designed to support teaching and learning, research and community engagement. Arcademia connects educational institutions across continents through a network of collaborative activities, shared infrastructure, and playable artefacts, positioning playful production and legacy archival as an enduring practice rather than a one-off event. Within this ecosystem, the international game jam functions as a mechanism for engagement, a collaborative development sprint where students rapidly ideate, prototype, and deliver playable games in response to a shared theme. Extending beyond this initial activation, the initiative is structured around three interconnected pillars. The first pillar, teaching and learning, frames Arcademia as a pedagogical ecosystem that encourages interdisciplinary collaboration, reflective practice, and authentic problem-solving as students present their outcomes through short pitches to local and regional judges. The second pillar, research, treats the initiative as a living laboratory for the scholarship of teaching and learning, supported by data collection, artefact analysis, and cross-institutional collaboration among educators. The third pillar, community engagement, ensures the persistence of student work by deploying completed games on physical arcade cabinets at participating institutions, establishing a distributed archive that symbolises global academic collaboration. By articulating this conceptual model, this paper contributes to discussions in game-based learning on how playful development environments can be structured as sustainable ecosystems that transcend conventional event-based constraints, thereby strengthening collaboration among institutions, students, researchers, and industry professionals.