Gaming for Learning

With the ubiquity of smart mobile devices, a typical gamer is no longer the stereotypical teenage boy and his gaming console or desktop setup. The Entertainment Software Association’s 2013 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry reveals that the majority of gamers, at 36% is over 36 years of age, and adult women make up 31% of the game-playing population whereas boys under 17 years of age account for only 19%. On mobile devices, 45% of app sessions on smartphones are games, and 21% of time spent on tablets is for gaming. Although players may not be actively seeking teaching games, there can be arguable educational benefits to games such as Zynga’s Words With Friends (over 53 million installs on iOS and Android platforms as of 2013) which can increase vocabulary and strategic thinking as well as offer a social dimension to gameplay, or PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies which offers increasingly difficult strategic planning as the game progresses.

The majority of self-identified serious or educational games are targeted towards children or students, attempting to teach or offer practice on material that the user will eventually be tested on by educators. Many of these games may not be enjoyable in terms of game mechanics and gameplay and are merely an interactive self-test, such as quizzes or flash cards designed with a test in mind. The App Store and Android Market also offer many games targeted to preschoolers to teach key concepts such as colors, numbers and letters to children before they begin to attend classes, similar to educational television programming. Although there are a limited number of serious games being marketed to adults, there are several papers written by university educators attempting to bring gameplay into the young adult classroom in order to introduce or reinforce key concepts whether through games designed by the educator or by the students themselves. Attempting to move beyond online tests or assessments, Longtreet and Cooper (2012) present a meta-model for educational games that explicitly ties desired course outcomes of knowledge requirements and transferable skills to game production in higher education. Researchers at both the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (Zarraonandia, et al. 2012), and at the University of Genoa (Pranantha, et al. 2012) propose the use of mini-games as learning tools particularly in teaching science. Occasionally, professional work places such as the United Nations or government employers will utilize gaming as part of their professional development programs. When games are a requirement of a course or an occupation, we must consider whether or not these are still properly defined as games.

Behavioral psychology suggests that an intrinsically motivating game, which pushes the player to act freely for the sake of playing, will compel the player to remain engaged in an immersive gaming experience. A game with extrinsic motivations in the form of a reward or threat, however, pulls the player out of the activity itself, and the motivation to play the game will eventually dissipate. Therefore, it is important to consider the psychology behind an intrinsically motivating game, such as self-determination theory, and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of flow.