OTTAWA — Thomas Burelli and Alexandre Lillo teach video-game law at the University of Ottawa, but until the COVID-19 pandemic, they’d never made a game themselves.

With an Ontario government grant aimed at creating virtual-learning tools while in-person classes were shut down, they created Reset 2047, an adventure game set in a dystopian future where video games are banned.

The player, as an investigator on the trail of an illegal gaming ring, learns about the social and legal history that led to the (imaginary) “Game Over Act” of 2021.

Reset 2047 is meant to be a teaching tool for students taking their course, but anybody can play it in a web browser. Creating it turned out to be a learning experience for the scholars.

“We were very naive about this,” Burelli told The Logic in an interview alongside Lillo. “We asked for too little money, to be very honest with you.”

A grant of about $39,700 from eCampus Ontario helped pay for a writer (a PhD student with a background making documentaries), an artistic director, a graphic designer, a programmer and a coder. But Burelli and Lillo said they put hundreds of hours into it themselves—brainstorming, writing, revising, preparing the notes for the player character’s in-game files, writing quizzes that are the most academic part of the game. Some of it while training together for a half marathon.

“I think the video game itself is maybe seven to eight or nine hours of game play, but the scenario is 400 pages,” Lillo said. “And that doesn’t include any of the documentation that the player has access to, or the quizzes or anything else.”

Burelli estimated the game sits atop as much as 700 pages of material in all. Despite that, the project’s primary purpose was to be fun—for a certain kind of player, at least.

“Most of the time, it’s really easy to know that you’re in an educational game,” he said. “It’s not the most playful, ‘gameful’ environment. And I’m not saying that we were able to accomplish that, but one of our objectives was to try to make a game [that talks] a bit about education in video-games law, rather than the other way around.”

At the university’s law school, the pair specialize in environmental law; Burelli has been a professor there for five years and Lillo is currently a part-time professor who did much of the work on Reset 2047 as a postdoctoral researcher. They share a research chair in teaching innovation and they’ve been using games and simulations as instructional tools for years.

“Five years ago, we did a simulation of an international negotiation,” Burelli said. “So the student needs to negotiate an agreement. Every year [since], we just kept adding stuff—like one year we added a superpower as a delegation. Another year, we added a fake Twitter account. You know, we just added little things to make it more gamified and more entertaining and engaging for the students.”

Eventually, that simulation became about as complex and detailed as they thought they could make it and they looked for a new thing. That turned out to be, in spring 2020, a project in which students built a detailed virtual version of the law-school building they suddenly couldn’t be at in person—in Minecraft.

Both Lillo and Burelli are gamers, of course. Lillo ranges through indie games. The pandemic made Burelli, who said he all but stopped playing video games years ago to focus on his studies, into someone with about 2,000 matches played of League of Legends. He plays with his wife, who bought him a Nintendo Switch after he finished his PhD.

“As we like to joke about it, ‘It’s fieldwork,’” Lillo said.

Working lawyers talk a lot about the lack of practical instruction in law schools, said Kellen Voyer, whose Vancouver-based firm makes a specialty of video-game law in both Canada and the United States.

“I’ve seen some of the stuff coming out of different video-games courses, and I find it’s been more theoretical or intellectual than the nuances about, you know, ‘How do you set up a video game studio? What does the corporate structure look like? What are the common legal issues? And how are they addressed for these kinds of companies?’”

A typical tech startup founder has a business mindset, he said, but video-game makers tend to start with an artistic sensibility.

“When they come to form these companies, they kind of need to be educated on the corporate-law aspect, because it’s often their first time interacting with a lawyer,” Voyer said.

Making a video game usually means—as the professors learned—raising enough money to make a complete product at once, he said.

“The publishing event or a Kickstarter campaign is that big financing event, as compared to a tech company where they’re going through multiple seed-financing rounds, Series A, Series B, Series C, et cetera,” Voyer said.

Dealing with a publishing company or setting the terms of a Kickstarter, clearly laying out who owns intellectual property, working out revenue sharing if a game becomes a hit and writing employment agreements are the bread and butter for lawyers working in the industry, he said.

(Voyer, for the record, says he has too little time to play demanding games these days—who needs to learn some complicated new control system? Though he does enjoy a little What the Golf? from time to time, a goofy golf-based physics-simulator game.)

The difficulties of making Reset 2047 will inform the way they teach, Burelli and Lillo agreed.

For instance: They wanted sound effects. “You know, for the door opening, for the phone,” Burelli said. “And we tried, but it was a disaster. So we had to stop…you need someone dedicated to this—you know, choosing the audio sounds, implementing it, testing it. And we couldn’t do it. We didn’t have time, we didn’t have the resources.”

For now, also, Reset 2047 is only in French. An English translation is in the works. It’s supposed to take six months. “So, reasonably, a year,” Burelli joked.

They also have dreams of working with a studio or studios to make games out of course material.

“The idea would be to find partnerships with video-game companies because they have the technology,” Burelli said. “So they could help us and make it very easy to create an environment for us. And then we could fill it with material and pedagogy and stories.”

Correction: A previous version of this story said Thomas Burelli has spent more than 2,000 hours playing League of Legends. After publication, he told The Logic he in fact has played about 2,000 matches, adding up to 1,192 hours.