Making a Connection

This chapter will make a connection between game genres, game characteristics, and constructivist teaching structures. Constructivist teaching structures, like open learning environments and anchored instruction, have the same aims as serious games – to facilitate higher order learning skills and knowledge. However, constructivist teaching structures are not games and serious games are grappling with how to design games and keep the fun and learning in perfect balance. Making connections between game genres and characteristics (where much of the fun resides) and teaching structures (where much of the learning resides) will highlight commonalities that can be taken advantage of in the design of good serious games – where learning and fun are in perfect balance.

Learners' Cognitive Load When Using Educational Technology

Taking advantage of the rapid evolution of educational technology, simulations and games have been embodied in a variety of teaching and learning procedures. To a large extent, their effectiveness, in common with the effectiveness of all instructional design relies on how material and activities are optimally organized. That organization should be determined by the nature of human cognitive architecture when dealing with complex, biologically secondary information. Cognitive load theory has been devised to deal with such knowledge. Therefore, embodied simulations and serious games should take evidence-based cognitive load principles into account in both design and implementation.

Effective Knowledge Development in Game-Based Learning Environments

Serious games are, at their core, exploratory learning environments designed around the pedagogy and constraints associated with specific knowledge domains. This focus on instructional content is what separates games designed for entertainment from games designed to educate. As instructional designers and educators, the authors want serious game play to provide learners with a deep understanding of the domain, allowing them to use their knowledge in practice to think through multifaceted problems quickly and efficiently. Attention to the design of serious game affordances is essential to facilitating the development of domain knowledge during game play. As such, the authors contend that serious game designers should take advantage of existing prescriptions found in research on knowledge development in exploratory learning environments and tests of adaptive instructional designs in these environments. It is with this intention that the authors use evidence from research in cognitive processes and simulation design to propose design heuristics for serious game affordances to optimize knowledge development in games.

Video Games Revisited

When Greenfield wrote her chapter on video games in her 1994 landmark book Mind and Media, video games were played primarily in arcades, and popular opinion held that they were at best a waste of time and at worst dangerous technology sure to lead to increased aggression. As a cognitive psychologist and media scholar, she was interested in what was really going on in these games and brought the theoretical rigor and research tools of her discipline to bear on games and their cognitive effects on game players. Part anthropologist and part stranger in a strange land, she studied games and game players and played games herself. Her conclusions at the time were both surprising and prescient; research failed to support the common sense connection of games and violent behavior, and games in fact appeared to have cognitive benefits unseen by those who did not play them. Her conclusions both provided a glimpse of then-current research and laid the foundation for a rigorous empirical study of games and cognition. What is shocking upon rereading this chapter today is how relevant it remains and how many of the research possibilities remain largely unexplored. Her chapter is reprinted here along with her current analysis and thoughts about her original ideas, 25 years later. Its placement as the first chapter in a book dedicated to cognitive perspectives on games is appropriate, both as a reminder of where we come from and how far we have yet to go.

Introducing Flowometer

A CyGaME is an online instructional game designed to make concept learning more intuitive while assessing changes in players’ targeted knowledge and self-perceptions of flow. CyGaMEs stands for Cyberlearning through Game-based, Metaphor Enhanced Learning Objects, a research program supporting federal education road maps targeting cyberlearning and assessment as key to 21st-century learner-centered education. The author situates the CyGaMEs approach to instructional game design and assessment within structure mapping, flow, and game design theories. She introduces the CyGaMEs toolset for assessing game-based learning as realized in Selene: A Lunar Construction GaME. Identifying similarities between CyGaMEs and production-oriented approaches, she suggests CyGaMEs’ design and assessment generalize across both methods. She presents the CyGaMEs adaptation of the double transfer paradigm as a research design for studying game-based learning. Then she derives the flowometer tool, illustrates a flowometer research implementation, and suggests scholars use the CyGaMEs Selene environment to investigate the relationship between game-based learning and flow.

Elemental Learning and the Pyramid of Fidelity

One of the emerging issues for educators who recognize the importance of digital games and virtual worlds is fidelity to learning outcomes, both intentional and incidental. In this chapter, from the perspective of an educator, the author introduces an integrated framework that emphasizes elemental learning. The model, based on learning analysis and direct measurement of learning is iterative, as opposed to a front-end-only approach, and includes five major cognitive learning outcomes: actual elements, simulated elements, procedural understanding, conceptual understanding, and related knowledge. For each of the learning outcomes, the author provides design propositions and an example.

Developing Serious Games for Learning Language-In-Culture

This chapter will focus on the instructional design process used to create Alelo’s language and culture training programs. The objective of the design process is not just a serious game, but an integrated learning environment which combines serious games with other supporting learning activities. Learners apply their newfound communication skills and cultural knowledge to complete tasks in a simulated environment. The chapter will specifically focus on the design and development phases of the process, which uses interdisciplinary teams combined with an iterative approach to meet customer needs. The authors employ innovative learning technologies such as artificial intelligence and speech recognition; these add greatly to the learning experience but also introduce unique challenges for instructional design. Central to the instructional design process is situated instructional design and rapid prototyping. Authoring techniques that facilitate the creation of lessons and games that scaffold the learner from beginning- to intermediate-level proficiency are also be described. In addition, the chapter will explain how Alelo’s technology instantiates current theories, models, and research findings in the fields of language learning, serious games, and artificial intelligence.

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.

Cognitive Load and Empathy in Serious Games

The design of serious games does not always address players’ empathy in relation to their cognitive capacity within a demanding game environment. Consequently players with inherent limitations, such as limited working memory, might feel emotionally drained when the level of empathy required by a game hinders their ability to cognitively attain the desired learning outcome. Because of the increasing attention being given to serious games that aim to develop players’ empathy along with their cognitive competencies, such as Darfur is Dying (Ruiz et al., 2006), there is a need to investigate the empirical relationship between players’ cognitive load and empathy development capacity during serious game play. Therefore this chapter examines cognitive load theory and empirical work on empathy development to propose a conceptual framework to inform the research and design of serious games that have empathy as part of the learning outcomes. Future research should focus on implementation and empirical validation of the proposed framework.

MMORPGs in Support of Learning

This chapter provides an overview of current massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) research and creates a conceptual framework for their use in support of learning. Initially, a definition of MMORPGs in education is considered in light of research to date. Here attention is paid to how MMORPGs differ from most video games in terms of types of player–game interaction, levels of player–player interaction, environments in which interaction occurs, and the ability for MMORPGs to tap into student motivation levels. Based on this definition and considering previous theoretical and empirical studies on MMORPGs from a variety of disciplines, including education, psychology, and linguistics, a conceptual framework for the use of MMORPGs in support of learning is created. Next an overview of current research trends in MMORPGs is examined, concluding with suggestions concerning future research of the use of MMORPGs in support of learning.