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Can Game Motivate Our Next Generation

A review of outcomes and impacts of playing computer games

Dr Elizabeth Boyle

University of the West of Scotland, High Street,

Paisley, PA1 2BE
liz.boyle@uws.ac.uk

Games for entertainment, learning and behaviour change

* Over the last 40 years computer games have had a transformational impact on how we spend our leisure time and have increasingly replaced more traditional leisure activities
* More recently there has been much interest in and speculation about whether games could be used for learning and changing attitudes and behaviour but less empirical evidence that games work

Literature reviews of games at UWS

* At UWS we have been involved in carrying out a number of literature reviews on aspects of GBL
* In this presentation I will describe a literature review which aimed to examine evidence very broadly about the outcomes and impacts of playing computer games
* Focus was on positive impacts
* Will highlight some interesting papers
* Psychologist’s perspective!

Objectives of literature review

* determine what research has been done on outcomes and impacts of playing computer games
* interested in entertainment games, GBL and serious games
* try to find a way of organising the diverse research in this area
* describe how the different projects have defined and measured outcomes and impacts

Search terms

(“computer games” OR “video games” OR “serious games” OR “simulation games” OR “games-based learning” OR “MMOG” OR “MMORPG” OR “MUD” OR “online games”)

* AND (evaluation OR impacts OR outcomes OR effects OR learning OR education OR skills OR behaviour OR attitude OR engagement OR motivation OR affect)

Databases searched

databases relevant to education, information technology and social science.

* ACM,
* ASSIA: Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts,
* BioMed Central,
* Cambridge Journals Online,
* ChildData,
* Oxford University Press (journals),
* ScienceDirect,
* EBSCO (consisting of Psychology and Behavioural Science, PsycINFO, SocINDEX, Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts, CINAHL),
* ERIC,
* IngentaConnect,
* Infotrac (Expanded Academic ASAP) and
* Emerald.

Selection of papers for inclusion in the review

* Abstract: papers had to include an abstract.
* Empirical focus: the paper had to report empirical evidence relating to the impacts and outcomes of playing games.
* Date: papers from 2004 onwards were selected for inclusion in the current review: building on previous literature reviews
* Age: use of games by adolescents over the age of 14 years

Categorising Games

Games can be categorised in a number of ways:

* Digital /non digital – Can non-digital games provide useful guidance about design of digital games?
* The main aims/intentions of the game –entertainment, games for learning, attitude or behaviour change
* Game genre (different kinds of game)
* Platform/ delivery
* Subject discipline or game domain

Game genre (Hertz, 1997)

* action games (reaction based games including shooting and platforms)
* adventure games (solving logical puzzles to progress though a virtual world)
* fighting games
* puzzle games (such as Tetris)
* role-playing games
* simulations
* sports games and strategy games

Platform/delivery

* computer games
* video games
* console games
* mobile games
* online games
* MMOGs
* ARGs
* virtual worlds

Categorising the impacts and outcomes of games

* Positive or negative effects
* Intended or unintended effects
* General or specific effects
* Outcomes and impacts

Positive or negative effects

* Negative effects: promote aggressive behaviour (Provenzo, 1991) and gender stereotyping (Bryce & Rutter, 2002); addictive (Griffiths & Hunt, 1998)
* Positive effects: highly engaging; support perceptual and cognitive skills (Green and Bavelier, 2006); games support learning, behaviour change, social outcomes

Intended or unintended effects

* Many of the outcomes of playing games are unintended, i. e. they were not intentionally designed into the game to achieve particular goals.
o For example, violent games were not designed purposefully to make people more aggressive but they do seem to have this unintended consequence (Gentile and Gentile, 2007)
o Entertainment games were not intentionally designed to improve visual perceptual skills but appear to do so
o (Green and Bavelier, 2006).
* Learning games are intentionally designed to support learning.

General or specific effects

* Some papers examined the generic effects of playing games. For example several papers considered whether playing violent games generally makes players aggressive
* Other papers examine the impact of playing specific games, e. g. emotional and physiological reactions to specific violent events in playing a game; does a game designed to support learning actually do so.

Frameworks for categorising outcomes of games

* Garris, Ahlers and Driskell (2002)
* O’Neill, Wainess and Baker (2005)
* Wouters et al (2009)

Garris, Ahlers and Driskell (2002): learning outcomes

* skills based learning outcomes
o (technical and motor skills)
* cognitive outcomes
o declarative (knowledge of facts and data)
o procedural (knowledge about how to perform a task)
* strategic (the ability to apply rules and strategies)
* affective outcomes (beliefs or attitudes)

O’Neill, Wainess and Baker (2005)

CRESST model identified five “families of cognitive demands”:

* content specific
o content understanding
o problem solving
* content independent
o collaboration / teamwork
o communication
o self-regulation

Wouters et al (2009)

Identified four different kinds of outcome that games might have –

* cognitive outcomes – knowledge and cognitive skills
* motor skills
* affective outcomes
* communicative outcomes

Our categorisation of outcomes

* knowledge acquisition/content understanding
* perceptual and cognitive skills
* affective, motivational and physiological outcomes
* behaviour change
* motor skills
* soft skills/social outcomes

Diverse range of papers found

Papers focusing on entertainment games (64)

* Questionnaire studies/ development of models of time spent playing games/ game playing patterns/reasons for playing entertainment games
* Validation studies of measures of engagement (flow, immersion)
* Experimental studies of immersion in games, physiological responses
* Experimental studies examining perceptual and cognitive benefits of playing games
* Studies evaluating use of entertainment games for learning

Papers focusing on games for learning (52)

* Evaluations of the effectiveness of specific GBL in supporting learning
* Studies examining pedagogical variables which influence effectiveness of games for learning

Papers focusing on games for behaviour change (8)

* evaluations of the effectiveness of specific games in supporting behaviour change

Affective and motivational outcomes

* Most of the papers categorised under affective and motivational outcomes looked at aspects of motivation and engagement in playing games
* Digital games are clearly highly engaging, but engagement is a somewhat elusive and underspecified construct
* Engagement/enjoyment is an outcome of playing games but also a reason for playing

Indicators of engagement in games

* numbers of people who play games
* the amount of money spent on games
* models of amount of time spent playing games/patterns of playing games (TAM model; addiction)
* models of reasons for playing games (U&G theory)
* the games that people play
* subjective enjoyment of games – questionnaire measures
* harder, more objective, measures of engagement

Models of time spent playing games

* Reasons for playing games: U&G theory identified competition, challenge, social interaction, diversion, fantasy and arousal (Lucas and Sherry, 2004); applying U&G to sports games, Kim and Ross (2006) identified knowledge application, fantasy and identification with sport
* TAM theory: social variables (social norms and critical mass) were more important than traditional TAM variables (perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness) in predicting time spent playing entertainment games (Hsu and Lu, 2004)
* Self-regulatory mechanisms (relieving boredom, reducing loneliness, passing the time, providing an escape) are important in controlling amount of time spent playing games; the experience of flow make it more likely that players will have difficulties in regulating media consumption (Lee and Larose, 2007)

Studies of flow, immersion and presence

Immediate feelings of enjoyment and engagement experienced while playing games

* Flow relates to the activity
* Presence relates to the technology
* Immersion relates to involvement with game

EGameflow: Fu, Su and Yu (2005)

* Sweetser & Wyeth’s model of GameFlow provided an integrated account of enjoyment of entertainment games.
* Included eight dimensions: challenge, player skills, concentration, control, goal clarity, feedback, immersion and social interaction.
* Fu, Su and Yu (2005) added a knowledge improvement scale to their EGameFLow model to measure “the level of enjoyment brought to the learner by e-learning games”.

Immersion (Jennett et al, 2008)

* term used to describe the extreme involvement and enjoyable feelings experienced while playing computer games.
* but lack of clarity concerning precisely what immersion means
* series of experimental studies designed to develop better questionnaire measures of immersion (subjective measures) as well as exploring the possibility of developing harder, more objective measures of immersion and relate these two together.

Immersion Questionnaire (Jennett et al, 2008)

A validation study identified 5 factors underlying the immersion experience questionnaire. These were 3 person related factors

* cognitive involvement: “How much effort did you put into playing the game?”
* real world dissociation: “To what extent was your sense of being in the game environment stronger than your sense of being in the real world?
* emotional involvement: “To what extent did you feel emotionally attached to the game?”

and 2 game related factors

* challenge: “To what extent did you find the game challenging?”
* control: “To what extent did you feel as though you were moving through the game according to your own will?”

Immersion (Jennett et al, 2008)

* Predicted that participation in an immersive task would reduce the ability of players to subsequently “re-engage” with the real world and this could be measured by their performance on the subsequent task.
* Time taken to complete the subsequent (Tangram) task was longer following the immersive game (Half-life) than following the non-immersive task (“square clicking”).
* Interesting point: participants rated “square clicking” as quite immersive!
* Participants’ eye movements significantly increased over time in a non-immersive condition but significantly decreased over time in an immersive condition. In an immersive game eye movements will decrease as players’ attention becomes more focused on visual components relevant to the game.
* Also found more immersion with faster stimulus presentation.