An accessible serious game builds media literacy among young people

Serious games are growing in popularity as instruments for reaching social goals. Playing a game can build knowledge and skills, or encourage a change in behaviour. Mediajungle, an initiative of Niels Bloembergen, is one such serious game. It is aimed at young people, including those with a mild intellectual disability, and its subject is media literacy.

Vulnerable, and in need of guidance

Fifteen per cent of young people in the Netherlands have an IQ below 85 (source, Trimbos Institute (opens in a new tab), in Dutch). They often find it hard to make their way through the digital world. Care professionals report that young people with a mild intellectual disability frequently run into trouble online, including cyberbullying, sexting and grooming. A common cause, unfortunately, is the lack of any targeted guidance in online media literacy.

Mediajungle offers a way to make these young people aware of both the opportunities and the dangers of using media, playfully and without lecturing. A board game combined with a web app makes subjects that are hard to raise, cyberbullying and screen time among them, something a group can actually talk about, in a light and enjoyable way. The games are not only fun to play: they genuinely contribute to the development and wellbeing of the players.

Designed with accessibility in mind

This audience also gets a great deal out of the built-in ReadSpeaker read-aloud feature. It means that young people with reading difficulties, or with dyslexia for instance, can take part in the game comfortably. The audience was involved in the development of Mediajungle from the very start, so the game matches what they need, and care professionals helped shape its content.

Making serious games more accessible widens where they can be used, in healthcare and education among other fields, and increases the impact they can have. Organisations can use them to teach knowledge and skills to the audiences they want to reach, effectively and playfully. For that to work, the games have to be accessible to everyone, including people with low literacy, people with reduced vision, and people who simply prefer to listen to a text rather than read it.

We placed the ReadSpeaker technology behind an avatar in our app. Click the little microphone and the avatar flies into the screen and reads out all the text. So for us ReadSpeaker is more than a read-aloud feature: we have made it a visual part of our game as well.

Niels Bloembergen, initiator of Mediajungle

Games with a social purpose

In an age where social media are woven into daily life, it matters that young people learn to be media literate. Niels and his Mediajungle project make a real social contribution. Making young people with a mild intellectual disability aware of the possibilities, the risks and the opportunities of media use helps them handle the whole range of online platforms more safely and more sensibly.

All in all, Mediajungle is an excellent example of how a serious game can be built and used to make a significant difference for a wide audience.

We hope this article has given you ideas, and we are glad to introduce you to Mediajungle at www.mediajungle.eu (opens in a new tab).