The experience of gameplay that leads to student learning outcomes (SLOs) is co-determined by the player’s goals and intentions for play, and the affordances of a game serve as parameters for engagement as established by the game designers. Gameplay experiences are not always the experiences intended by the designers or those using the game instructionally since players can use game elements in unexpected and/or unintended ways (e.g., modding, hacking, trolling), some of which may have instructional value.
Published in Chapter:
Stories, Games, and Learning through Play: The Affordances of Game Narrative for Education
Stephen T. Slota (University of Connecticut, USA) and Michael F. Young (University of Connecticut, USA)
Copyright: © 2017
|Pages: 26
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0513-6.ch014
Abstract
Stories are the mechanism through which humans construct reality and make sense of the world around them. Yet, literature on the effects of narrative in game-based and other learning environments is quite variable, and the relevance of narrative to the learning sciences is not well-researched. Identifying precisely how narrative intertwines with human experience of the lived-in world requires the application of a situated cognition framework to understand user-content-context interactions as dynamic and co-determined. This chapter uses examples drawn from a narrative-structured, game-based learning program to accomplish that goal, discussing in-context, on-the-fly dialogic interactions between narrative “producers” and “recipients.” While there is still much to learn, the leveraging of narrative to help recipients grapple with complex social, cultural, and intellectual issues may be one of the most important—and overlooked—means of inducing game-to-real world transfer.