Impacts of Forced Serious Game Play on Vulnerable Subgroups

Non-Gamers

Non-gamers are people who have little or no digital gaming experience. Unfamiliarity with gaming in general or with a particular game genre can present barriers to achieving learning goals. When a serious game is assigned for learning, a player must effectively master how to play the game in order to experience the desired learning content. From the perspective of cognitive load, more mental attention devoted to figuring out how to play means less cognitive attention available to devote to learning the intended material (Mayer, 2005a, 2005b; Sweller, in press). Non-gamers need to exert more effort figuring out how to play most games than experienced gamers, making it harder for non-gamers to benefit from serious games. Furthermore, feeling lost and incompetent while trying to play a game introduces negative thoughts that can create performance deficits by diverting cognitive load (Cardinu, Maas, Rosabianca, & Kiesner, 2005; Croizet et al., 2004), resulting in negative consequences for learning (Covington, Omelich, & Schwarzer, 1986; Thomas et al., 2006). For example, when a non-gamer participant in our study (explained in detail later) was asked why she quit early without playing for the assigned 10 minutes, the participant expressed both frustration over learning to play a game, and also negative emotions: “I did not know what to do. I hate playing video/computer games.” This kind of response is obviously undesirable within a learning context.