International Journal of Film and Media Arts

Editorial - Games and Learning: Consolidating and Expanding the Potential of Analogue and Digital Games

Pedro Pinto Neves — 2023-06-19

For a long time, Games Research suffered from what Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waern classified as the Digital Fallacy – the tendency to regard analog games as a subset of digital games rather than the other way around. Where boardgames were once associated with the past of games and learning and digital games with the future, there are now fresh insights and applications for boardgames in learning – alongside with their renaissance as games for entertainment. Even as boardgames found new relevance in learning, the already-recognized possibilities in digital games for learning have continued to expand, with more flexible and ubiquitous tools and platforms allowing for a greater variety of avenues of learning research and practice to be explored. Augmented and mixed reality as well as virtual reality are frontiers in learning that beg for further exploration.

Using Game-based Learning in Order to Enhance Decision Making Under Uncertainty

Dimitrios Lappas — 2023-06-15

How do people make their decisions? Searching for the answer in the relevant literature, we can find that decisions are based either on rationality or intuition. Rational thinking is mainly observed in situations characterized by certainty (in terms of data or the consequences of decisions), while heuristic intuitive methods are mainly observed in situations of uncertainty. Training for the enhancement of decision making skills usually employs problem-based activities which mainly focus either only on rationality or only on intuition. However, problems in real life cannot always be solved with the contribution of only one way of thinking. In a decision making process often rationality works up to an extent and then intuition will lead to the final decision. For this reason, we designed and developed a game-based learning activity that enhances both rational and intuitive decision making skills. More specifically, we created a decision scenario in a virtual environment in which participants were provided with uncertainty-based information in their decision making process. As they tried to follow a rational decision making process, most of them realized that based on the given information they were confused and they had to decide intuitively at the end. This experiential learning activity was a tickler for the participants to decide under uncertainty and trust their intuition.

Beats & Units: A story-game design framework

Nelson Zagalo — 2023-06-15

There are no recipes or rules to develop games, any more than there are to develop stories. When we try to define a game system that not only has to create a balanced experience, but also has to tell a story, which can engage players in creating empathy and meaning, everything gets complicated. We faced this problem when we had to develop a serious game with the goal of promoting discussion and awareness among children around nutrition: FlavourGame. In this regard, we needed not only to design game mechanics that would feel complete and progressive, but also to create a narrative that provided meaning to the game experience, in order to ensure an underlying layer to the context of nutrition. For that, we had to develop a framework that could help the team in guiding the telling of the story while designing the progression of the game. In this article, we present the full framework as a story-game design approach to be employed in the creation of serious narrative games.

Game-Based Learning in Higher Education Using Analogue Games

Vicky Maratou — 2023-06-15

Games have been effective in helping people to interact with one another and learning more about the culture they inhabit (Piaget, 1962). The importance of games and their centrality to culture is pointed out by Huizinga (1944) who suggested using them as a medium to organise our lived experience and as an escape from their pragmatic focus (Ruckenstein, 1992).
The “playful” nature of games results in escapism because it often hides the seriousness of their outcomes (Bateson, 2014; Henricks, 2006). For instance, games can be implemented in war where they are viewed as a deadly sort of game, with elaborate rules, strategies, and codes of sportsmanship. Furthermore, the widespread use of games has gained traction as a rapidly evolving teaching and learning tool in the educational sector as well. This rapid growth in the use of games as an educational tool has led to the creation of an immense number of diverse games, aiding teaching and learning in a multitude of disciplines from economics to art, and numerous encyclopaedic websites of previously developed games have been created. Despite this rapid growth, it is debatable whether this is due to increased effective learning from games, or simply the increased engagement and enjoyment observed in comparison to traditional pedagogical methods. To that end, the current paper explores the practices of analogue GBL across European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and the challenges and opportunities associated with Game-Based Learning (GBL) from the perspective of educators and game designers.
Gamification – including simple game mechanics, such as points for correct answers (Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Kim, Song, Lockee, & Burton, 2018; Rotgans & Schmidt, 2011) – is often used as a teaching aid to increase student engagement and enjoyment. However, simply adding a game mechanic into classic, lecture-based teaching does not necessarily assist in cognitive retention in classrooms, or develop 21st-century skills. As a matter of fact, more academics are seeing the benefits of GBL (Qian & Clark, 2016), in which games are specifically designed to enhance learning and the development of a certain skillset. It may also involve adapting a game that is already designed for use in the classroom, such as using open world-based board games to teach the interaction between geopolitical groups, or the use of LEGO® blocks to help improve comprehension of city planning. A good GBL intervention will ensure that the central mechanic of a game is linked to the expected learning outcomes of the module (Arnab et al., 2014).

Game Player Types and its Influence on Game Dependency

Hee Jhee Jiow — 2023-06-15

This study investigates the relationship between video game dependency and player type typology.

As video gaming grows to become an integral part of the lives of many youths, concerns about the consequences of excessive gaming have arisen too. These concerns appear to be grounded as video games have been reported to damage family, school, social and psychological functioning – collectively describing the effects of game dependency (akin to pathological gaming measures).

Moreover, over the years, various gamer typologies have been developed to provide insights into the different behaviours and motivations of gamers. While these typologies were initially developed for game designers to create more appealing games, their applicability has since extended beyond. This study adopts such gamer typologies and establishes a framework of player types (Achiever, Guru, Socializers, Explorers) and investigates its influence on game dependency. Through literature review, this study hypothesised that (H1) Achievers will be positively associated with Game Dependency, and (H2) Socializers and Explorers will be negatively associated with Game Dependency.

Secondary school students, aged 13-17, were invited through schools to participate in an online survey. Data was collected with the permission of the respective schools to be used for research purposes. A total of students (n=999) was included in the sample, gathered from three secondary schools in Singapore. Game Dependency measure satisfied the reliability criteria with a Cronbach alpha of 0.94. Correlational analysis and comparison of means were performed on the data collected.

Our findings showed statistically significant support for H1 and H2. This study explains that the Socializer player type, who are more people- than game-centric, are more likely to follow their social contacts in a game and expand their social network and resources. And as such, they are more likely to play with their friends and would hence have a lower game dependency. On the other hand, the Explorer player type may spend less time in games due to the limited exploratory possibilities present; they may choose to exhibit these tendencies by viewing videos or talking to other players. These constitute activities outside video gaming that are not captured in the current tool used to capture game dependency. The Explorer player type also does not enjoy challenges within the game and may thus stop playing once games get difficult. Therefore, the Explorer player type requires the least measure of commitment (i.e., time, effort, money), which in turn causes an opposite influence on their game dependence.

While the measures used are theoretically derived and consistent with other studies, this study went a step further by quantitatively showing its association between the two variables and discriminating between game dependency groups. This study provides a nuanced understanding of the Uses and Gratifications Theory, demonstrating how different gamer types (akin to gratifications) play the game (akin to game dependency). While nascent, this venture has proven useful for identifying problematic ingame tendencies, thus informing the rehabilitative work among pathological video gamers, which the authors seek to undertake.

Cover and Table of Contents

2023-06-15