Toward a Propensity-Oriented Player Typology in Educational Mobile Games

Digital Game-Based Learning

Digital game-based learning is the product of a balance between learning and gaming elements. In the other words, entertaining intrinsic of games has potentials to be coupled with the learning process and improve it. Therefore, two important elements of educational games are entertainment and educational component separating educational games from entertaining games and e-learning applications (Bellotti et al. 2013). Two types of games can be distinguished in educational games: special purpose games which have been developed to promote educational purposes and Commercial-Off-The-Shelf games that have been developed with entertainment objectives, but that are being used in an educational context. Note, however, that this does not mean that special-purpose DGBL games cannot be commercially available (Stewart, 2013).

The design of educational games could have three purposes, they may be designed to promote learning or to develop cognitive skills, or to take the form of simulation allowing learners to practice their skill in a virtual environment (Erhel & Jamet, 2013). Games that are developed with the primary goal of achieving knowledge transfer are typically used in education, in order to teach math (Castellar et al. 2015) or language (Palomo-Duarte et al., 2017), for instance.