Building The Artificer’s Intelligence Machine: A Very Meta AI Literacy Adventure

Creating a video game to teach students critical AI literacy

Posted on September 14, 2026 in Blog Posts

Greetings, Fellow Traveler!

As a systems librarian at a community college whose non-system duties center around teaching, I am always interested in how library technology best serves our patrons and intersects with student success, particularly in the classroom. Additionally, as someone who enjoys games and gaming, I have judiciously incorporated games as a tool for teaching information literacy concepts and research practice. In spring 2025, for my sabbatical project I designed the first iteration of an AI literacy game, using generative artificial intelligence tools to assist in its creation.

Shall We Play a Game?

Inspired in part by Adrienne Mayor’s book Gods and Robots, Dungeons and Dragons, and fantasy media in general, The Artificer’s Intelligence Machine is an educational, role-playing game (RPG). To set up expectations accordingly, one might dub the game “RPG-lite.” The AI curriculum is delivered via three separate but interconnected game modules, each taking around an hour or so to play. (Note: Related but separate activities in the curriculum add to the total completion time.) In Module I, students engage with basic concepts, definitions, and an overview of AI in a playful, low-stakes space. The second and third modules of the game (which have not yet been built) will expand on the first. Module II will focus on how AI works and give students an opportunity to use it in a way that reveals its benefits and limitations, and Module III will explore the ethics and societal impacts of AI.

The game’s action takes place in a magical world, where the player assumes the role of a Seeker, a citizen of Umberwatch in the faraway realm of Freymyst. “Seeker” is the formal title of a “student of knowledge” enrolled at the highly reputable Umberwatch Academy. The Seeker is recruited by the Knowledge Temple via the sacred Oracle to investigate a mysterious technology that has gatecrashed the city. The stolen tool of the Knowledge Gods, the “artificer’s intelligence machine,” of course, is our world’s AI, but explored through the lens of fantasy.

The Seeker is charged with visiting the Knowledge Deities’ realm to consult with them. They conduct research exploring artifacts from the “Terra Realm” (our real world) and must return to the Temple to share this knowledge. Each of the four deities represents a facet of knowledge and a different attitude toward their mortal subjects’ societal integration of the new “machine,” allowing varying perspectives toward AI to emerge through character dialogue. By the end of Module I, the Seeker has stumbled into a sinister plot by bad actors who intend to use the technology for dark purposes.

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Assembly Required

Before I began building the game, I identified several important requirements. First, it needed to be modular and portable, a digital object that could fully integrate with Canvas, our learning management system (LMS), and be easily inserted into a course on demand. Because of its costly production time, it had to be editable and constructed in a way that would give it a decent shelf life. Also, I wanted to tackle the topic of AI, as both a learner and a learning facilitator. Prior to this project, I read about the topic, but even as a technologist, I had purposely, at that point in time, little experience using it. After consideration, I did not believe I could effectively teach students about its rapid, ever-evolving impact on our information ecosystem without understanding it on a more practical level as well, so I began experimenting with it.

Overall, the main goal was to create a player experience that was engaging and pleasurable. In his book, The Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell describes the basic elements of a game: aesthetics (look and feel), story (narrative), mechanics (how the game specifically works), and technology (the game’s medium in which all these dynamic elements interact with each other and the player with them). Each element should reinforce and complement the others to provide an enjoyable space for the player to achieve the game’s overall goal. In an educational context, game designers have an additional objective: to help students meet learning outcomes, while not overloading them cognitively.

In his chapter “The Role of Video Game Narratives in Education Engagement,” P. N. Rito discusses how a video game, through its narrative and interactive and immersive components, can “encourage students to engage with complex problems dynamically,” and is thus well suited to present the questions critical AI literacy demands us to engage with. The multifaceted world of The Artificer’s Intelligence Machine exists to support specific AI literacy learning outcomes and is, in turn, able to mirror the complexities of our real world. These core mechanics foster the potential for inquiry-based learning as the story unfolds from one module to the next, especially as Umberwatch’s various characters’ and sociopolitical entities’ motivations are revealed through plot points.

In her book, Teach Like a Gamer: Adapting the Instructional Design of Digital Role-Playing Games, Carly Finseth identifies instructional design best practices culled from RPGs, including practice, feedback, subsets, achievement, discovery, and identity. A variety of these heuristics are purposely incorporated into the game. The table below shows how the different elements of The Artificer’s Intelligence Machine work to employ a pedagogical and/or game design method that fosters engagement and/or learning:

Multimedia	Interactions	Lessons
Establishes narrative and push it forward Introduces characters and societal context Sets the scene and tone of the game Creates and reinforces game aesthetics	Use identity – immersive role play Offer dialogue choices/outcomes Explore spaces and objects World discovery	Convey AI literacy curriculum Use subsets – scaffolded learning method Use on-demand/just-in-time learning – info presented as needed Use Regime of Competence – challenging but not too hard
Knowledge Checks	Assignments	Final Quiz
Supply safe and ungraded space to practice new concepts before moving on to the next lesson in a “fun” (or “less boring”) space Use Achievement	Provide a deeper dive into the topic beyond the lessons Convey AI lit curriculum Allow for critical reflection Use on-demand/just-in-time learning – info presented as needed Use Regime of Competence – challenging but not too hard	Provides a cumulative academic challenge and assessment Uses Achievement

Furthermore, the game is an accessible “point-and-click.” Progress is automatically saved, so students can leave and return to the module without any loss. In its current iteration, the player can personalize their character name, select from dialogue choices, and gather in-game objects. There is a built-in “My Quest” feature that allows players to track their progress and, if desired, take a deep dive into the lore, which contains details about the game’s universe. The “Inventory” option displays any items the Seeker gathers during their adventure. Lastly, there are built-in knowledge checks and an auto-updating Notebook feature that summarizes key lesson points to help Seekers “study” for a cumulative quiz at the end (which is optionally graded and recorded in the LMS). The game curriculum is supplemented with Discussion Board questions designed to make the student/player critically reflect on their own experiences with AI.

Here There Be Dragons

As I conducted research in the areas of game design, game-based learning research, and instructional design best practices for my project, I also spent some time thinking through my project goals and weighing the options available to me, within the specific parameters of time and resources, and well, because of the AI factor … ethics. I had, after much arduous deliberation, made the choice to use images and voices generated by AI to build this game. All the other aspects of the game are human-generated.

In terms of the project’s management, because of my sabbatical, I could afford the time to do research, world-build, write the fantasy narrative, and learn Adobe Captivate, the clunky, albeit powerful, eLearning authoring software that I chose for this project. I had the resources and skills needed to build the digital medium and mechanics of the game space. What I utterly lacked were the time and resources required to make the game super media-rich and aesthetically pleasing in the way I had envisioned. So, in the end, I decided to use generative AI to help me create the character, setting, and object imagery, as well as the characters’ voices. 

Using AI as prudently as possible, I assembled a reusable asset library—a collection of AI-generated characters, locations, and props that could be layered and combined in different configurations. Every final image used in the game has been digitally altered in Adobe Photoshop in some way; all the audio and video manipulation and editing have been my own. AI-generated voices were used to flesh out the characters aurally. The music and sound effects a player hears in the game are culled from the generous creators who allow use of their work under a Creative Commons license and selected from sound and music libraries.

The game was purposely designed to be a self-referential experience for players; that is, the Seeker’s journey is that of the student’s own: the journey is the research and learning process, as it relates to AI. But after some reflection, I realized the very meta experience of building the game itself was similar to the Seeker’s journey as well. During the development process, as I learned more about AI, I asked the same questions I hope students will take the time to ask when they encounter the tool: “When is using this tool appropriate and in what context?”, “What are its limits?”, “What are the costs of using it?”, and “What am I sacrificing when I delegate creative labor to a machine?” I take ownership of the choice to use generative AI and recognize that some of the questions I am still asking myself are much larger matters of ongoing deliberation. This, too, is indubitably part of the learning process and a dilemma I hope the game will reveal to students as well.

The Road Ahead

Game-based learning can be a useful strategy for engaging students to garner new or reinforce existing knowledge and skills (Plass, Mayer, & Homer), and RPGs give them the added opportunity to explore more elaborate concepts in a fun, safe space. Science fiction author and futurist, Arthur C. Clarke states in his “Third Law,” “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The big-picture takeaway of The Artificer’s Intelligence Machine is that each of us has a role in the responsible and ethical use of this new technology that is dramatically reshaping our world. Can we gaze beyond the shiny object, the illusory “magics,” and choose to preserve and further cultivate our humanity rather than dull it, or worse, obliterate it? How can we use AI to improve our world? The very meta message for players embodying the venerable role of “student of knowledge” is that through research, critical reflection, and understanding we can empower ourselves and have the potential to enact positive change in the real world, one Seeker at a time.

And so, while the road ahead is indeed fraught with uncertainty, there is hope.

Epilogue

We are now a team of three developing the game, and I am grateful for the creativity, reflective thought, and enthusiasm my colleagues bring to this entire project and process. Module I will be play-tested, piloted, and marketed in fall 2026. We will then continue to iteratively build out Module II and III and begin some form of evaluation to assess the game’s impact on student learning. As we move forward, we will remain curious and cautious about how we use AI. We also welcome any thoughts others wish to share.

➡️ Want to stay up-to-date with The Artificer’s Intelligence Machine? Check out Marie’s website.

Notes

Clarke, A. C. (1973). Profiles of the future; an inquiry into the limits of the possible, (pg. 39). Pan Books.

Finseth, C. (2018). Teach like a gamer : adapting the instructional design of digital role-playing games.

McFarland & Company, Inc.

Mayor, A. (2018). Gods and robots : myths, machines, and ancient dreams of technology. Princeton University

Press.

Plass, J. L., Mayer, R. E., & Homer, B. D. (2019). Handbook of game-based learning. The MIT Press.

Rito, P.N. (2025). The role of video game narratives in educational engagement: Insights and perspectives. In C.

Mateo-Guillen & A. Cortijo Ocaña (Eds.), Challenges of educational innovation in contemporary society (pp.

267-298). IGI Global Scientific Publishing.

Schell, J. (2008). The art of game design : a book of lenses. Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann.

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