I have been thinking a lot about games and their role in researcher development for some time. Initially, this came about through my previous work with colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire, when we used and expanded on a set of conversation cards to support engagement with equality, diversity and inclusion. Since then, I have encountered a number of resources - physical and digital - that have been created to support researcher development. One category of these has a particular focus on Open Research. But why this topic?
The answer might lie in some features of the body of knowledge itself. Firstly, Open Research is complex, emerging as an area of scholarly communication, itself an overlap of (potentially) all disciplines and fields, publishing, media and communications infrastructures, national and international research policies and funding, and information and library science. It is at once ubiquitous and ambitious, which poses a unique challenge for novice researchers trying to understand what it means for them, and to decide whether or not they need to engage in it at all.
Broken down to its most basic elements, Open Research can be characterized by a set of principles, policies and practices that extend or diverge from the traditional models of knowledge production and dissemination associated with academia. However, from the series of recent conversations on the PGR Matters Podcast series, it is clear that simply providing information - however concise and targeted to an audience - does not capture the essence of Open Research, which is decision making.
Each researcher will face thousands of decisions in their career, and that is true of postgraduate researchers as well. Games, such as Copyright Dough, use roles and task-based scenarios to allow individuals to step outside of their current experience, inhabit a different persona, and perform a set of actions. These actions, which involve creating and/or re-using intellectual content (via modelling dough) and applying certain Creative Commons licences, have consequences in the game world that mirror those in the real world. Essentially, the researcher is forced to consider why they have taken such an action and who this affects (including themselves).
As Dr Samuel Moore explains in the third episode of the Open Research series on the PGR Matters Podcast, researchers need to apply the all-important why to principles, policies and practices around Open Research. The recent MORPHSS report provides a framework for rethinking some of the accepted ideas around openness, included the binary of open versus closed. This is timely work. At my own university, we are working with the University of Essex on a resource creation programme that aims to co-create training materials in a game format with postgraduate researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences. These are disciplinary clusters in which engagement with Open Research tends to be lowest - at least through our current lens. Funded by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership, we welcome our cohort in April 2026, and will be providing updates on the project in the coming weeks. Watch this space!