A tool for comprehending games from the designer’s perspective as well as the player’s point-of-view by analyzing how mechanics (game components, rules) create a dynamic system that results in player aesthetics, or emotional sensations.
Published in Chapter:
The Quest for Learning: Promoting Engagement and Disciplinary Literacy Through Game-Based Quests
Anastasia Lynn Betts (University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA), Nika Fabienke (Age of Learning, Inc., USA), and
Matthew Farber (University of Northern Colorado, USA)
Copyright: © 2021
|Pages: 28
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-4721-2.ch010
Abstract
A focus on disciplinary literacy may hold promise for increasing student engagement and achievement. This chapter focuses on the use of the “quest” (a mechanic common in video games) as a means to increase learner agency, engagement, and motivation. Quests may further be beneficial in developing the disciplinary literacy of students, due to their highly contextualized interactive narratives that allow for student role-playing, and the development of problem-solving skills and discipline-specific habits of mind (e.g., What does it mean to work, think, and communicate like a historian, mathematician, or scientists?). A variety of tools for implementing quest-based learning are examined, as well as ways in which the quest mechanic is being used in the design of instructional sequences in the digital app Adventure Academy, an educational massively multiplayer online (MMO) video game, in order to develop disciplinary literacy.