Different Strokes for Different Folks
Digital game-based learning experiences are typically presented to a captive audience that has to play, as opposed to entertainment games that players can select themselves and choose to play. The captive nature of learning games introduces an interesting issue: Not everyone may be familiar with the genre of the game they have to play or be motivated to play it. Students have individual differences that may make a learning game particularly ineffective, uninteresting, or inappropriate for some learners. The authors present work that frames important differences between students in terms of their game literacy, motivation, goal orientation, and mind-set. This understanding leads us to envision game design variations to serve specific combinations of particular individual differences at the intersection of learning and gaming. The authors present their initial work on identifying and automatically accommodating these differences within a single digital game-based learning experience.