Our mission is to make games more accessible for education.
The Research Origins of Ludolio
Ludolio is an outcome of several different research projects and our experiences teaching with games.
Games in Schools
Since 2021, Jen and Marcus have been collaborating on research co-designing curriculum for teaching with commercial games in schools, but the technology kept getting in the way. Teachers wanted to integrate games, and had strong pedagogical reasons for doing so, but getting students affordable, ICT- and data-compliant access was a massive barrier.
What we found, though, was that games weren’t just engaging: they enabled students to interpret narrative, character, and theme through choice, embodiment, and multimodal play in ways that extend print and multimodal literacies. At the same time, teachers struggled to adapt existing frameworks to these dynamic, player-driven interactive texts.
That gap between the learning that games make possible and what classrooms can currently support kicked off the plan to build Ludolio, a data and ICT compliant games distribution platform that would make games easy for teachers to use in class.
Both projects were increasingly attentive to the role of game distribution platforms in shaping the kinds of games that can get made, and thus the play experiences available to young people. This attention to the political economy of the games industry has shaped our approach to Ludolio's financial model, which seeks to create a new avenue for game creators to make sustainable revenue from creative, artistic and educationally relevant games that may not currently be commercially viable.
We had struggled for years to get university students to engage with games as important cultural texts, rather than simply as entertainment. Using Ludolio to give students equitable access to games - particularly creative, interesting and intellectual games - creates a shared foundation for discussion and learning, but more importantly, it opens the door to something transformative: when students spend time with thoughtful, challenging games that expand their sense of what games can be, they engage more deeply, think more critically, and ultimately have richer learning experiences.
Built Through Co-Design
With support from the Commercialisation Office at The University of Sydney, we engaged the expertise of Eduardo and Jen to design the core functionalities of Ludolio, and co-design Ludolio with teachers, librarians, ICT staff, and game developers.
Foundationally, this work resolved infrastructural questions, ensuring Ludolio works on enterprise managed computers, and how to put privacy-first in Ludolio’s design. In tandem, the co-design also led to the design of Ludolio’s instructor dashboard, where educators can leverage insight into students' play to enhance teaching and create new learning experiences. On these opportunities, we’re excited to work with early adopters of Ludolio to continue co-designing new experiences.
Centering Accessibility .
Ludolio is built with accessibility in mind from the start. That principle grows directly out of our research: working alongside leading scholars in disability studies, including Professor Gerard Goggin and Dr Victor Zhuang, Ben and Marcus have spent years examining how games and virtual reality have paid remarkably little attention to disabled users.
Our book The Limits of Immersion: Disability and Virtual Reality makes the case that technology is too often built around able-bodied assumptions, and calls for a disability-centred approach to design. Ludolio is where we put that into practice, ensuring the Ludolio client meets WCAG 2.1 standards and through an Accessibility Wizard: a guided process that prompts developers to think about disability more carefully than they ordinarily might, bringing to light considerations that are easy to miss. Crucially, this information is shared with instructors so that educators can prioritise accessibility when choosing what games to use in teaching.
Naming Ludolio
“Ludolio’s name reflects our academic roots in ludology, combining ludus (Latin for ‘play’) with biblioteca (Portuguese/Spanish for ‘library’).”
It’s pronounced loo-DOH-lee-oh, like four smooth syllables.
