Aedou is a social & collaborative multiplayer game (low poly 3D) to learn languages like you would do while traveling a foreign country in a supported, structured and guided way (customizable). You learn through immersing yourself in your language of choice - hearing, reading and speaking in a contextualized environment with other people. The biggest difference is that all content is adapted to your personal language proficiency. This means that you will always have manageable content to interact with and use in your surroundings, preventing you from being overwhelmed. This differs vastly from most formal education approaches that abstract away most of the context and leave you alone in a fixed system to sink or swim.
The international target audience mainly consists of…
- gamers
- everyone that has tried learning a language but stopped few weeks in due to a lack of engagement and motivation
- people looking for practice partners and tandems
- pupils that do not feel safe going to school or have limited access to high quality learning material
- teachers searching for creative, active learning opportunities to supplement their courses or even to offer their own courses in the game.
Each language has its own world where you need to use the language to interact with the environment. Through learning and exploring, you progress in the game and narrative, and vice versa. As the active usage of a language is the main mechanic to play the game, you need to get better to progress, resulting in intrinsic motivation and self-directed deep learning.
All worlds and their contents are built, inhabited, governed and curated by independent DAOs consisting of first language (L1-)speakers, language professionals and high-level players (the latter need to succeed in an assessment first). This is made possible through distributed & modularized creation. You can contribute what you love and what you are best at. We are building the most intuitive level editor that splits the creation process into small parts and removes most of the complexity of creating a level. This is done through ProtonGraph, an FOSS-tool for non-destructive procedural 3D-modelling, which we are extending and adding intuitive interfaces and workflows (founder is on our team). https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/404305
https://github.com/protongraph/protongraph
We are also integrating Atala PRISM DIDs into our DAOs to independently prove your learning progress, language proficiency and in-game reputation via VCs in and outside of the game. At this point, we are thinking of creating our own emergent trust registry to protect against sybill attacks, meaning that DAO members need to verify new members in a personal chat and thus vouch for their proficiency and for them being humans, not bots. Emerging trust is build up from a person-to-person network and does not rely on KYC-services and support of your government.
We will collaborate with RootsID as our identity wallet provider once things are ready for this step. RootsID is the most promising open-source identity wallet for Atala PRISM, funded through Catalyst.
Aedou is designed with low barriers in mind and to provide a safe space for vulnerable groups. This includes private and anonymous participation, customizable button mapping and interfaces, options to integration of accessibility controllers/interfaces for disabled communities (e.g. playable with only-audio and only-visual), …
Game-based learning - why we believe that games are ideal learning environments
Good games are designed to learn, practice and apply knowledge/skills. Games are creative, multi-sensory and intrinsically motivating experiences that allow for moments of flow with just the right amount of challenge to stimulate curiosity and avoid overload. This is crucial for deep learning, prolonged interest and continuous improvement. Also, you are only participating of your own free will, which is the core defining criteria for games in general (& having rules).
In games, failing isn't bad, but an existential part of the path to mastery. Try anything as often as you want, get stronger and eventually overcome your challenges. Experimentation, a.k.a. freely trying out stuff yourself, is not included in most formal curricula. In Aedou, experimentation is encouraged as you learn through actually using your new knowledge in a failure-safe environment. As 3D-games are synaesthetic and entertaining by nature, you will have lots of self-motivated positive associations, resulting in deep learning opportunities. Take your time and become fluent!
MMOs are dynamic and active learning environments for social and collaborative (or competitive) experiences, where content and places are clearly structured and always open to self-paced exploration. Players are encouraged to organize themselves in social groups. Sandbox games use the power of the community to create and manage vast amounts of content and interactions. Exploration of deep, rich and interactive content is key to both of these genres, and thus they are ideal for situated learning of complex topics, e.g. languages, in an immersive world.
Languages
At the start, the game is playable in 14+ supported languages. These are: English, Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, French, Japanese, Swahili, German, Amharic, Oromo, Indonesian, Russian, Hindi and Portuguese.
To reach as many people as possible, we included the six official UN-languages (English, Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, French, Russian) and added Hindi + Portuguese for two other massively and widely spoken languages. With these eight languages alone, we are able to offer half of the worlds population access to the game, which is super exciting!
We then thought about recent partnerships of Cardano and how to deliver maximum value and possibilities to these early adopters. In Tanzania, Cardano is building infrastructure with the World Mobile Group, so we added Swahili, which is another really important lingua franca across the African continent. The deal with the Ethiopian ministry of education is why we included Amharic and Oromo.
We recently added Indonesian and German to the list. Together with Japanese, these three languages have huge, active groups of L1-speakers in the Cardano community and great interest by language learning communities, which is why we need to strengthen the connections with these ecosystems right from the start.
All blockchain components are optional but offer lots of value
To earn, you need to become a member of a DAO with your DID and thus verify that you are a human being. This is necessary to protect us from bad actors that want to game the system. You can also simply play without verification, but you will also play without the added blockchain-benefits in that case.
We have our own native token which is the in-game currency and fuels the system. All revenue streams are exchanged to ADA via Smart Contract and redirected to the game's treasury. You can burn your tokens to redeem your fair share of the treasury.
Reputable members of the DAO get a small plot of virtual land for free to cultivate and build on top of. The land size increases depending on your rank and reputation inside the DAO. These land plots can also be rented out by their owners to create additional revenue streams for them, but the main idea is to give everyone the opportunity to represent themselves and to link to your existing services and goods.
All items can be minted into NFTs (e.g. mounts, pets, cosmetics, collectibles, …) which you can mint on our platform and trade on other marketplaces. We will integrate open source wallets like GameChanger, Nami or CCvault.
We love the philosophy of SSI (Self-Sovereign-Identity) to own and control your own data. Likewise, you can choose to monetize your anonymized data through including them in a data set/package. Researchers and companies can then buy a data package to use in their researches, while you can earn a share of the generated revenue.
Market
Godot is the biggest open source engine in the world with a market share of 5%, and it's evolving at a rapid pace. Educational games have also seen huge interest and competition in the last decades with double digit growth per year. If you need further proof: Minecraft, the most-sold game in the world with 238 million copies, is building an education series for formal education in classrooms (same is true for Roblox). Games like Minecraft, Roblox or Fortnite, that also offer user-generated content, an own in-game economy and currency, report several hundred million monthly active users each.
Aedou is a Catalyst-funded, meaningful and inclusive play-to-earn game on the Cardano blockchain that has massive potential to adopt millions of gamers, students, teachers and researchers from outside the blockchain space. Through combining informal education with gaming, Aedou is enabling radically new ways of blockchain gaming and more sustainable business models & practices.
One unique opportunity is to become one of the first games that successfully combine playing with education. This has been tried by many with gamification or so-called "serious games", although the results are mostly standard educational approaches in disguise, resulting in a feeling of being cheated and thus being neither entertained nor educated. This is due to a lack of expertise in playing and a vast underestimation of the potential of games, belittling multiple genres with billions of users to only a "waste of time" and "useless". Aedou is designed by life-long gamers & learners that know what a true game needs to be a good game. All while having the nice benefit that you actually learn a new language and play cooperatively, not competitively, and get additional, undebatable value from playing a game while possibly spending hours inside of it.
There is NO real game yet that deals with learning languages. This is a huge chance to achieve mass adoption for Cardano and Atala PRISM (MineCraft & Roblox are trying to get into the formal education sector).
Most gamers know that the NFT-craze and play-to-earn is receiving lots of hate and pushback from the global gaming community, and rightfully so. Cardano needs wholesome and meaningful games that include rather than exclude. This is why we do not press blockchain features onto people that just want to play and learn and do not want to get involved with blockchain in any way. All earning functionalities are optional and only activated once you become part of one of the DAOs of the game and thus decide to partake in the blockchain components of Aedou. We do not want to give players exclusive ownership of their assets and make them rich through speculation and greed. Our focus is to connect people from around the world to share, learn and communicate with each other while earning off of the game's general revenue and helping each other grow. We want gamers to benefit as much as content creators while not raising any unneccesary barriers but to connect them more deeply and give gamers a say in the direction of Aedou's future.
Aedou also has the potential to attract new users to the platform that do have no connection or even heavy biases against blockchain technology. This is why all blockchain components are optional, but easily within reach for every user to explore at their own leisure and only if they decide for the massive benefits.
Every part of Aedou will be made open source, so it will benefit all game developers on Cardano and related projects (e.g. treasury smart contract & very accessible level editor). Aedou will also run on distributed hosting & computing services (e.g. Arweave & NuNet).
Cardano & Godot engine development delays resulting in blockers. Godot has launched their fourth alpha for the upgraded Godot 4 version, which enables highest-standard 3D-rendering capabilities like Vulkan and generally an even stronger engine. Our team is highly experienced in the Godot stack and can already work efficiently with the current alpha, which is already very stable.
Obviously, the development of Cardano protocol & Atala PRISM capacities are crucial to enable cheap and efficient smart contracts & handling of PRISM credentials & DIDs in connection to DAOs. If we do not have a scaling blockchain in Q4, we will only implement the most necessary parts and keep it lean until there is more capacity.
Another risk would be a lack of partnerships & collaborations on the language and blockchain part. The same is true for Community engagement & adoption. We have set up Discord servers to unite language enthusiasts and professionals to achieve the best possible outcomes.
The risk of creating boring content is mitigated by extensive research into game-based learning and play-testing a lot with both unexperienced & seasoned gamers to achieve the most engaging outcomes for all.