The Rise of Digital Game Industry
According to Entertainment Software Association (henceforth, ESA) (2019), 65% of American adults play video game and the average age of gamers is 33 years old. Fifty-four percent of American gamers is male, while forty-six percent is female (ESA, 2019). Sixty-two percent of Millennial gamers (aged between 18 and 34 years old) who are attending college believe video games can be educational, while 68% of them believe playing video game can stimulate mental capacity (ESA, 2019). The video game industry has accumulated $43.4 billion in 2018 from three major categories: contents ($35.8 billion), hardware ($5.1 billion), and accessories and VR ($2.4 billion) (ESA, 2019). Nine out of the top 20 best-selling video games are classified as Mature, such as Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Red Dead Redemption II, Grand Theft Auto V, Far Cry 5, God of War 2018, etc. challenging previous perceptions that digital games are played by teenagers (ESA, 2019). The growing importance that digital games have played in Generation M’s life has lent support to the integration of digital games into the higher education pedagogy.
Rapid growth of the digital game industry have generated enthusiasm among scholars from different disciplines to explore this phenomenon and its impacts in a variety of application contexts (Kang, 2015; Raessens & Goldstein, 2005; Wolf & Perron, 2003). Some emerging areas of digital game research include media effects of digital gameplay, addiction to digital games (Chuang, 2006), adoption behaviors of new game technologies (Chang, Lee, & Kim, 2006), methodological implications in researching digital games (Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, & Taylor, 2012), and educational applications (Adukaite, Zyl, Er, & Cantoni, 2017; de-Marcos, Domínguez, & Saenz-de-Navarrete, 2014; Gee, 2004; Leaning, 2015; Prensky, 2005). This book chapter will particularly focus on the applications of digital games in the higher education context (Adukaite et al., 2017; de-Marcos et al., 2014; Leaning, 2015).