Gamification: The Stakes for Content Design

Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada

The publication of a special issue on Games and Gamification by Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada (RBLA-The Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics) recognizes the role of games and gamification in the discussions on language and language learning/teaching. It not only invites researchers to report on their most recent findings in the area, but also legitimizes its relevance and value in furthering studies in Applied Linguistics in Brazil. Games and Gamification The relationship between play and learning is not new. Historically, play has been recognized as a mediator of learning processes, including all phases of early childhood education, simulators for training, among other things. In Homo Ludens-a seminal work published in 1938 on playfulness in its various forms in cultures of all places and across time, the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga argues that the activity of playing, or a playful attitude, is an archetypal experience that extends beyond human 1 Associate Professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). The tenets of her research have been complexity theory, situated learning, communities of practice, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) as well as mobile learning and mobile applications. 2 Professor of Secondary and Technical Education, and of the School of Letters-Publishing Technologies at the Federal Center for Technological Education of Minas Gerais (CEFET-MG). Dr Racilan specializes in language teaching and learning experiences in interface with digital technologies, mobile devices, digital games, and ecological approaches.

Gamification - Analysis, Design, Development and Ludification

2013

By Darcy E. Osheim Instructors find a gap between what they experienced in school in the mid-to-late 20th century and the experiences of students entering college in 2012/13. In the United States, the influx of almost universal access to technology has marked this generation in a way the previous generations must work to understand, and gamification is a strategy used in areas like marketing to gain participation from this age group. Gamification is a strategy that employs game mechanics, techniques, and theory in areas that traditionally are not set up to function like a game. The purpose of this study was to define gamification in the context of a college classroom. Using Foucault's concept of heterotopia, this study employs the method of heterotopian rhetorical criticism and the methodology of autoethnography to analyze World of Warcraft and re-imagine experiences in the game through critical communication pedagogy to enact change in the traditional college classroom. Three fundamentals of gamification emerged from the findings and laid out a general definition of gamification. It must consist of high-choice, lowrisk engagements in a clearly structured environment. v Games Gamification is a strategy that employs game mechanics, techniques, and theory in areas that traditionally do not function like a game. The word can be traced back as early as 2004 ("Gamification," n.d.), but the concept goes back further. The boy scouts, sports, and the military uses forms gamification, in which a person can gain a "level" or rank when successfully completing enough tasks (Geuter, 2012). New and digital ranking takes shape in gamified apps like Foursquare, in which a "player" is able to earn points, badges, and "mayorships" of businesses, homes, and other points of interest by letting friends and companies know that they are "checked in." Facebook® , which is one of the largest continually used collection of gamified applications (Schell, 2010), has the Words with Friends application that maintains 7.3 million daily users (Ward, 2012). Applications like these improve mundane tasks, by making them not only more likely to get done, but also enjoyable while being simple, pervasive, and easy to use. Apps like Chorewars and EpicWin help encourage people to finish daily and tedious chores (Lee & Hammer, 2011). Players experience internal motivation when completing tasks because the tasks are low-risk. Games are low-risk because players are not just doing, they are having fun. Games are play (Huizinga, 2006; Wright, 2007), and play is primeval education technology (Wright, 2012). Play differs across cultures, but collectively culture is inundated by play, because "play and culture are actually interwoven" (Huizinga, 2006, p. 100). Even animals play as a way to teach offspring survival techniques. Play allows humans and other creatures to master skills, concepts, and conflict resolution without

Digital Games and Gamification in Education, 2023

Digital Games and Gamification in Education Editors Dr. Nurullah Taş, Dr. Yusuf İslam Bolat In the "Digital Games and Gamification in Education" pages, readers embark on a captivating journey through a landscape where traditional education converges with the engaging world of digital games and gamification. This comprehensive volume is designed to provide a rich and multifaceted exploration of this transformative trend reshaping our educational systems' very fabric. As readers journey through the chapters of "Digital Games and Gamification in Education," they are invited to explore the dynamic fusion of play and education that holds the potential to revolutionize the future of learning. This book is an essential guide for educators, scholars, and enthusiasts, offering insights, strategies, and practical examples that illuminate the path to a more engaging and practical educational experience. Citation Taş, N. & Bolat, Y. İ. (Eds.). (2023). Digital Games and Gamification in Education. ISTES Organization.

2009

Each year, the Games, Learning and Society (GLS) program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosts a conference to facilitate conversation about digital literacy learning in the spaces of popular culture, fandom, and interactive media-like games. Each year, we bring academics, designers, educators, and media fans together to share thoughts and findings on how digital media, commercial and otherwise, can enhance learning, culture, and education. The event has been a surprising success in many ways, and we now boast an acceptance rate (13-30%) more stringent than some peer-reviewed academic journals and a waiting list for entry each year. In response, we have not only expanded our capacity for participants each year but also increased our audience through special issues in journals central to our community such as E-Learning. This special issue represents one of our attempts to connect important research themes represented at GLS to broader conversations about the nature and quality of learning through digital media more broadly. Although the title GLS specifies 'games', our interests are better conceptualized as 'learning through interaction' in more comprehensive terms. The community and field has expanded over the past five years to include research and design in areas well beyond video games alone to include popular culture and fandom communities, digital/visual cultures, and interactive design more generally.

International Journal of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences Studies, 2022

2012

Each year, the Games, Learning and Society (GLS) program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosts a conference to facilitate conversation about digital literacy learning in the spaces of popular culture, fandom, and interactive media-like games. Each year, we bring academics, designers, educators, and media fans together to share thoughts and findings on how digital media, commercial and otherwise, can enhance learning, culture, and education. The event has been a surprising success in many ways, and we now boast an acceptance rate (13-30%) more stringent than some peer-reviewed academic journals and a waiting list for entry each year. In response, we have not only expanded our capacity for participants each year but also increased our audience through special issues in journals central to our community such as E-Learning. This special issue represents one of our attempts to connect important research themes represented at GLS to broader conversations about the nature and quality of learning through digital media more broadly. Although the title GLS specifies 'games', our interests are better conceptualized as 'learning through interaction' in more comprehensive terms. The community and field has expanded over the past five years to include research and design in areas well beyond video games alone to include popular culture and fandom communities, digital/visual cultures, and interactive design more generally. In truth, we are going for less of a 'community of practice' (Lave & Wenger, 1991) than a 'fish-scale model of omniscience' (Campbell, 1969). And while there is no single common theory or research paradigm or context of study every community member adheres to or takes interest in (i.e. there is no 'hive mind'), there is enough overlap at the edges of each of our individual, narrow specialties to enable collective comprehensiveness in the face of our diversity (i.e. but there is 'collective intelligence' [Levy, 1999]). The articles included in this special issue represent the model; while there are identifiable common threads across many of the articles (e.g. commercial entertainment software, informal learning, design, discourse analysis, literacy broadly defined), no single theme dominates. Rather, different articles cluster around different commonalities. In the first article, '"Get Some Secured Credit Cards Homey": hip hop discourse, financial literacy and the design of digital media learning environments', DeVane presents a discourse analysis of hip hop forum discussions that highlights the characteristics of the online context which enable the space to function as a 'borderland Discourse' (Gee, 1999) bridging two seemingly disparate content areas: hip hop music (associated with urban youth culture and resistance) and personal finance (aligned with more traditional educational goals). In it, he argues for the usefulness of design heuristics, culled from studies of naturalistic contexts such as these, in the design of culturally relevant pedagogies for intentional learning environments such as those found in youth organizations. 'Conceptualizing Identity in Youth Media Arts Organizations: a comparative case study' examines just such culturally relevant youth organizations-in this case, focused not on games per se but on film making. In it, Erica Halverson and colleagues conduct a comparative case study of Constance Steinkuehler 'multi-voiced' format that highlights the interdisciplinary nature of this novel event, specifically, and GLS more generally. As chair of the GLS conference and guest editor of this special issue, it is my sincere hope that this growing community and concomitant body of research continues to both broaden and deepen conversations about digital media, online culture and community, and learning defined in its broadest sense. We welcome new voices and perspectives and encourage you to attend our next CONSTANCE STEINKUEHLER is an assistant professor in the Educational Communication and Technology program in the Curriculum and Instruction Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Her research is on cognition, learning, and literacy in MMO games. Current interests include 'pop cosmopolitanism' in online worlds and the intellectual practices that underwrite such a disposition, including informal scientific reasoning, collaborative problem solving, media literacy (as production, not just consumption), computational literacy, and the social learning mechanisms that support the development of such expertise (e.g. reciprocal apprenticeship, collective intelligence).

2011

The progressive spread of interpersonal communication devices and their evolution into more and more versatile, pervasive, ubiquitous and user-friendly systems contribute to the contemporary process of creating new systems of languages and social behaviours. Today, we witness the constant progress and emergence of an interactive language that is strongly focused on visual and experiential culture. In particular, the technological context characterizing the contemporaneity and the youth’s daily life are strongly interwoven, leading new generations - the digital natives - to develop from an early age an entrenched ability to interact with the communication tools. Referring to the analysis of contemporary scholars (Castells, Jenkins, Flusser) we can affirm that the technological revolution is leading to a new people-to-technology relationship; therefore, there is an urgent need to revisit the traditional epistemological paradigms of dissemination and learning of information. The socio-technological transformation strongly influences our attitude to experience space, time, contents as a way to know and learn. The experience concept assumes an important role for the Communication Design field, which is now enriching itself through the relationship with other disciplines. In this scenario, the connection with Game Studies assumes a great importance and many scholars (Salen & Zimmerman; Montola; Juul) consider the gameplay experience as a crucial point. In this paper we observe how the Communication Design might embrace the Game Design paradigms and methods, aiming supporting to support the learning of contents, attitudes and best practices. We emphasize the meaning of “learning”, reading it as a process aiming to develop abilities and knowledge; we also refer to any activities that lead to define, obtain and consolidate awareness, whether instrumental, social, behavioral, mental (Koster). In the thousand-year-old study of the learning process, we are now in a phase wherein the learn by doing paradigm becomes more and more important (Castells; Prensky) and acquires new tools and methodologies. We propose to consider the game and its prominent role in the coeval panorama: its contemporary typologies and state of the art demonstrate its aptitude to act as an interdisciplinary tool. The game is able to involve users in immersive experiences, stimulate the reflection and act on attitudes and habits. It is also important to deem the role of the play activity as a communication and learning mean. People learn by playing thanks to game’s motivational system, that can actually improve cognitive capacity and the ability to abstract, learn and act with awareness (Salen; Juul; Flanagan). We propose QRiosity, a pervasive game we designed and performed with the Around Play and Interaction Design Research Group, based on the interaction among space, mobile technologies, people and knowledge. It leads players to interactively explore an environment, that is able to react to their actions. It explores the idea of space as a storyteller focusing on the benefit coming from the act of experiencing space and contents through a ludic intervention. QRiosity is an applied playfulness system that induces players to be in a state of psychological flow (Csikszentmihalyi): it is an actual example of the aptitude of people to learn through a ludic process that increases the cognitive process of learning by experiencing.

E-Learning, 2009

Each year, the Games, Learning and Society (GLS) program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosts a conference to facilitate conversation about digital literacy learning in the spaces of popular culture, fandom, and interactive media-like games. Each year, we bring academics, designers, educators, and media fans together to share thoughts and findings on how digital media, commercial and otherwise, can enhance learning, culture, and education. The event has been a surprising success in many ways, and we now boast an acceptance rate (13-30%) more stringent than some peer-reviewed academic journals and a waiting list for entry each year. In response, we have not only expanded our capacity for participants each year but also increased our audience through special issues in journals central to our community such as E-Learning. This special issue represents one of our attempts to connect important research themes represented at GLS to broader conversations about the nature and quality of learning through digital media more broadly. Although the title GLS specifies 'games', our interests are better conceptualized as 'learning through interaction' in more comprehensive terms. The community and field has expanded over the past five years to include research and design in areas well beyond video games alone to include popular culture and fandom communities, digital/visual cultures, and interactive design more generally. In truth, we are going for less of a 'community of practice' (Lave & Wenger, 1991) than a 'fish-scale model of omniscience' (Campbell, 1969). And while there is no single common theory or research paradigm or context of study every community member adheres to or takes interest in (i.e. there is no 'hive mind'), there is enough overlap at the edges of each of our individual, narrow specialties to enable collective comprehensiveness in the face of our diversity (i.e. but there is 'collective intelligence' [Levy, 1999]). The articles included in this special issue represent the model; while there are identifiable common threads across many of the articles (e.g. commercial entertainment software, informal learning, design, discourse analysis, literacy broadly defined), no single theme dominates. Rather, different articles cluster around different commonalities. In the first article, '"Get Some Secured Credit Cards Homey": hip hop discourse, financial literacy and the design of digital media learning environments', DeVane presents a discourse analysis of hip hop forum discussions that highlights the characteristics of the online context which enable the space to function as a 'borderland Discourse' (Gee, 1999) bridging two seemingly disparate content areas: hip hop music (associated with urban youth culture and resistance) and personal finance (aligned with more traditional educational goals). In it, he argues for the usefulness of design heuristics, culled from studies of naturalistic contexts such as these, in the design of culturally relevant pedagogies for intentional learning environments such as those found in youth organizations. 'Conceptualizing Identity in Youth Media Arts Organizations: a comparative case study' examines just such culturally relevant youth organizations-in this case, focused not on games per se but on film making. In it, Erica Halverson and colleagues conduct a comparative case study of Constance Steinkuehler 'multi-voiced' format that highlights the interdisciplinary nature of this novel event, specifically, and GLS more generally. As chair of the GLS conference and guest editor of this special issue, it is my sincere hope that this growing community and concomitant body of research continues to both broaden and deepen conversations about digital media, online culture and community, and learning defined in its broadest sense. We welcome new voices and perspectives and encourage you to attend our next CONSTANCE STEINKUEHLER is an assistant professor in the Educational Communication and Technology program in the Curriculum and Instruction Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Her research is on cognition, learning, and literacy in MMO games. Current interests include 'pop cosmopolitanism' in online worlds and the intellectual practices that underwrite such a disposition, including informal scientific reasoning, collaborative problem solving, media literacy (as production, not just consumption), computational literacy, and the social learning mechanisms that support the development of such expertise (e.g. reciprocal apprenticeship, collective intelligence).