Gamebadges, hidden competences, and why the friction matters

On April 14, Mirko Ahonen and I had the opportunity to present Arcada's work with Gamebadges at the Game Educators' Meeting 2026, hosted at Supercell in Helsinki. Gamebadges aim to be industry-relevant micro-credentials for the games sector, shaped in collaboration with around a hundred game industry professionals and educators (Gamebadges, n.d.; Gynther, 2026). I'd like to share a few things I took from that presentation, centered on a question I keep coming back to as a lecturer: how do we make sure that what students learn in higher education connects clearly to the realities they will face in working life?

One of the courses Mirko and I teach together is our Game Design and Production course, already built around practical, project-based learning. Students move through design foundations, prototyping, teamwork, iteration, pitching, production, and final delivery in a substantial 15 ECTS course over several months. The badges were not introduced to replace that structure. They were used to help us check and make visible the competences already being developed. That distinction matters because discussions around credentials too easily become disconnected from actual learning. For us, the value of Gamebadges was that they gave us a way to test whether our teaching was aligned with the kinds of skills students will actually need after graduation. We have always wanted to teach real-life skills students would use in the industry, and Gamebadges helped verify that we were on the right track, using a framework shaped by industry and education input. They also gave students clearer direction and helped teachers evaluate whether a course was already building competences that matter in practice.

What became clear in this process was that students are often developing more meaningful competences than they realise. In our presentation, we referred to these as hidden competences: competences students are already developing, but may not yet see, name, or explain clearly. Once we started mapping course activities against badge criteria and the wider Gamebadges Competence Map, it became obvious that students were already building a wider range of relevant skills than were formally being named (Gamebadges Competence Map, n.d.). For example, they were not only making game concepts and prototypes, but also negotiating scope, responding to feedback, managing uncertainty, and clarifying their roles inside teams. When competences stay invisible, students struggle to articulate their own value, whether to employers or to themselves. This connects closely to the wider Gamebadges aim of making game industry competence visible and easier to explain (Gynther, 2026). We also saw that badges can create motivation and direction. When students understand what kinds of evidence and ownership are expected, they tend to become more intentional about their own development. In our presentation, we shared that badges gave students a clearer picture of what they would actually need to do to pursue them seriously, and that this increased interest and engagement.

But the most important part of our presentation was about the friction. Developing competence and proving it with evidence are not the same thing. Students may genuinely build strong competences during a course, especially in team-based production, but still struggle to produce the kind of individual evidence required for a formal badge application. A team project can show a strong result, but a badge application still needs to show what the individual student contributed. The course timeline and the badge timeline don't align neatly. That creates tension, but I don't see it as a failure. In fact, the strongest conclusion from our presentation was exactly this: the friction is not a flaw. It is meaningful friction. If badges are going to matter, they cannot be automatic. They need real work, real ownership, and real evidence.

They need real work, real ownership, and real evidence.

It's worth noting that this friction isn't just something we ran into locally. There's a real ongoing debate, both in policy and in research, about how digital badges and micro-credentials relate to systems like ECTS. Badges and credits don't work the same way. ECTS is built on defined learning outcomes and measured workload, while the European Commission has argued that micro-credentials should also describe learning outcomes, assessment, quality assurance, and workload, using ECTS wherever possible (European Commission, 2020). Some researchers have argued that micro-credentials raise questions about how existing recognition instruments such as ECTS, the diploma supplement, and qualification frameworks should be used (Camilleri et al., 2018), while research on badges suggests that motivation and learning outcomes are not automatic, and depend on how badges are connected to meaningful activity and assessment (Tahir et al., 2022). There have been attempts to bridge the two, but questions around recognition, workload expectations, quality assurance, and employer interpretation are still very much open (Kato et al., 2020; MicroHE Consortium, n.d.). We're aware of this debate, and our work with Gamebadges sits within it, not outside it.

This connects to a much larger issue in Finland. We are trying to prepare future workers for industries that are changing quickly, while higher education operates under increasing pressure. Universities of applied sciences are expected to stay responsive and closely connected to working life (Ministry of Education and Culture, n.d.), while also adapting to financial realities that make that work harder, as Arcada has pointed out before (Arcada, 2025a; Arcada, 2025b). Institutions like ours can feel that pressure very directly. At the national level, the picture is also complex, with both pressure on public finances and continued investment in education, research, and competence (Finnish Government, 2025; Ministry of Education and Culture, 2025). In that kind of environment, we can't afford to think only in terms of traditional course delivery. We need to think more clearly about how learning is recognised and how students navigate a professional landscape that's becoming more demanding and harder to read from a transcript alone.

This is where AI comes in. Not as a shortcut or a replacement for education, but as something that works on several levels at once. It can help scale guidance, feedback, iteration, reflection, and evidence-building in ways that are increasingly necessary when time and resources are under pressure. In a badge process, that could mean helping students clarify their role in a team project, compare their evidence against badge criteria, or prepare better questions before asking for teacher feedback. It's also a practical response to tightening conditions, helping us support students without simply demanding more from already stretched teachers and institutions. But AI should not replace human judgement, expert assessment, or the student's responsibility to own their work. And maybe most importantly, AI is itself a future-work competence. Students entering creative and technical fields will be working in industries where AI is already changing workflows and production pipelines. If higher education ignores that, we're not protecting students. We're leaving them underprepared.

If higher education ignores that, we're not protecting students. We're leaving them underprepared.

For me, the combination of badge-based competence visibility and thoughtful AI integration points toward something bigger than a single pilot or a single course. It points toward a model where education becomes more transparent and better connected to the future students are actually heading into. We ended the presentation with a simple idea: this was the first step, and the next can be stronger. We identified several areas to improve, including making badge connections visible earlier, helping students find direction sooner, shaping coursework to naturally produce stronger evidence, and clarifying individual ownership within team-based work.

That's how I see this work at Arcada. It's not a finished solution. It's a serious attempt to respond to a real challenge. If we want to help prepare future workers in Finland who are adaptable, skilled, and able to show what they can do, then we need systems that make those qualities visible. Gamebadges helped us begin that. AI may help us strengthen and scale it. The real task now is to keep building.

Authors: Arash Sammander, Mirko Ahonen.

References:

Arcada. (2025a). Arcada initiates change negotiations. https://www.arcada.fi/en/article/press-…

Arcada. (2025b). Arcada's change negotiations concluded. https://www.arcada.fi/en/article/press-…

Camilleri, A., Ehlers, U.-D., Hudak, R., Pirkkalainen, H., & Uggeri, M. (2018). Support learning through microcredentialling: The case of the MicroHE initiative. EDEN. https://www.k4all.org/wp-content/upload…

European Commission. (2020). A European approach to micro-credentials: Output of the micro-credentials higher education consultation group. Final report. Publications Office of the European Union. https://education.ec.europa.eu/sites/de…

Finnish Government. (2025). Orpo Government: Decisions in mid-term policy review session will strengthen Finland's competitiveness and security. https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/orpo-gov…

Gamebadges. (n.d.). Skill Mapping and Micro-credentials for the Game Industry. https://gamebadges.eu/

Gamebadges Competence Map. (n.d.). Gamebadges Competence Map. https://map.gamebadges.eu/

Gynther, R. (2026). Making game industry competence visible. Metrospektiivi Pop. Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. https://metrospektiivi.metropolia.fi/en…

Kato, S., Galán-Muros, V., & Weko, T. (2020). The emergence of alternative credentials. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 216. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/b741f39e-en

MicroHE Consortium. (n.d.). Challenges and opportunities of micro-credentials in Europe. https://microhe.microcredentials.eu/hom…

Ministry of Education and Culture. (n.d.). Higher education institutions, science agencies, research institutes and other public research organisations. https://okm.fi/en/heis-and-science-agen…

Ministry of Education and Culture. (2025). EUR 8.9 billion budget proposal for the Ministry of Education and Culture for 2026. https://okm.fi/en/-/eur-8.9-billion-bud…

Tahir, F., Mitrovic, A., & Sotardi, V. (2022). Investigating the causal relationships between badges and learning outcomes in SQL-Tutor. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning, 17, Article 7. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41039-022-0018…