This book explores the efficacy of game-based learning to develop university students' skills and competencies. While writing on game-based learning has previously emphasised the use of games developed specifically for educational purposes, this book fills an important gap in the literature by focusing on commercial games such as World of Warcraft and Minecraft. Underpinned by robust empirical evidence, the author demonstrates that the current negative perception of video games is ill-informed, and in fact these games can be important tools to develop graduate skills related to employability. Speaking to very current concerns about the employability of higher education graduates and the skills that university is intended to develop, this book also explores the attitudes to game-based learning as expressed by instructors, students and game developers.
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Graduate Skills and Game-Based Learning by Matthew Barr in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Education & Education General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Respected academic and businessperson, John Seely Brown, has stated that he’d rather hire a high-level World of Warcraft (WoW) player than an MBA from Harvard (Brown 2012). Brown cites the collaborative learning and strategic thinking required to succeed in WoW (Blizzard Entertainment 2004), suggesting that the game-based self-organisation and strategy ideation compare favourably to the corporate world. Indeed, many commercial video games require players to collaborate and communicate if they are to progress; they must also exercise a range of skills and competencies, including adaptability and resourcefulness, to overcome in-game challenges. As it happens, these are the very same skills that employers look for when hiring graduates, the skills that higher education is expected to develop in students.
As discussed in the chapter that follows, Brown is not alone in suggesting video games may offer significant potential for learning; but, to date, the empirical evidence for the efficacy of using games to develop skills in higher education has been slight. Previous work has largely focused on younger learners and has not always embraced the most rigorous of research methods. At the heart of this book, however, is a robust, new experimental study that provides compelling quantitative and qualitative data in support of the idea that games can be used to develop useful graduate skills. Specifically, the study employed a randomised controlled trial design to measure any gains in students’ skills acquisition over a relatively short period of campus-based game play. The results were remarkably convincing, with statistically significant gains in communication skill, resourcefulness, and adaptability observed in the game-playing intervention group. Based on a belief that statistics present only one view of the picture, however, interviews with students involved in the study were carried out, to better understand how and why the games might have helped develop these skills. In addition, new interviews with leading educators and game developers that illuminate the discussion from alternative perspectives are included.
The work described here is situated within the broad context of game-based learning, and thus requires an understanding of the existing research in this area. It also requires an appreciation of the existing pedagogical theory that underpins learning from video games. The remainder of this chapter sets out to provide the necessary context.
The Learning Potential of Video Games
The alleged ill-effects of video games have been the subject of much consternation, from the APA’s inclusion of ‘Internet Gaming Disorder’ in the classification of mental and behavioural disorders as a condition for further study (American Psychiatric Association 2013) to the WHO’s addition of ‘gaming disorder’ to the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (World Health Organization 2019). However, not only are such classifications open to criticism (“Scholars’ Open Letter to the APA Task Force on Violent Media Opposing APA Policy Statements on Violent Media” 2013), there exists a body of literature that suggests video games can be a force for good in peoples’ lives. Authors such as McGonigal (2011) and Johnson (2005) argue vociferously for the beneficial effects of gaming, claiming that good video games provide clues to improving our ‘real’ lives. Aside from the obvious pleasure afforded by gaming, games have been used in a variety of other contexts, for example, to aid rehabilitation of stroke victims (Merians et al. 2011), to increase quality of life in the elderly (Basak et al. 2008), and to help young people cope with their cancer treatment (Lee 2006). Granic et al. (2014) offer an overview of the cognitive, social, and emotional benefits that games have been shown to produce and suggest that games offer untapped potential for mental health care. The learning potential of games has already received considerable attention, as has the design and development of bespoke educational titles, which generally fall under the purview of ‘serious games’. Authors including Gee (2005b), Squire (2003), and Steinkuehler (2004) have been particularly influential in establishing the pedagogical value of video games, and it is on their work that those who follow must build.
However, with some notable exceptions, such as the work of Kurt Squire (2004), Derek Robertson (Robertson and Miller 2009), and Valerie Shute (Shute et al. 2015), the potential to learn from commercially released games—those designed to entertain, rather than educate—has not been fully explored. In addition, much of the existing research has pertained to school-age children using video games in, or alongside, their regular classes. Perhaps this is to be expected: it is widely accepted that humans and other animals learn through play, and structured play forms an important part of primary-level education (Bruce 1987; Moyles 1989). If video games, which many incorrectly assume are played mostly by children, are simply toys with educational potential then it follows that much of the initial work in this area has concerned minors.
Squire (2011, p. 5) suggests that we can learn ‘academic’ content through games, including the in-game terminology, a range of strategies, and “the emergent properties of the game as a system”. That video games can help develop systemic understanding—analysing the game world, as opposed to simply learning facts—is an idea echoed by James Paul Gee (2005b, p. 82), who states that what gamers learn is “empathy for a complex system”. Both Squire and Gee note that the best-designed games typically comprise a series of coinciding or intersecting goals, with short-, medium-, and long-term conclusions. They suggest that this arrangement of goals, which permits the student to progress on a number of fronts simultaneously—even when one goal is seemingly out of reach—has significant advantages for student engagement because those struggling with one task can choose to make headway on another, rather than disengaging altogether. Such overlapping goals are familiar to anyone who has played BioWare’s RPGs (role-playing games), or the later Grand Theft Auto games from Rockstar. However, they are perhaps more difficult to implement in a structured, often didactic, educational environment such as a school or university, where curricula may not offer the flexibility to allow different students to be working on many different problems at the same time.
The remainder of this chapter aims to provide an overview of the educational and learning theory most relevant to games, beginning with a brief discussion of how learning is conceptualised and quantified.
Taxonomies of Learning
One area of learning theory is that concerned with how learning is measured or quantified and, ultimately, assessed. Course objectives and intended learning outcomes are terms familiar to most twenty-first-century educators and such outcomes generally relate directly to the material being taught. More generally applicable taxonomies of learning may, however, be used to describe pedagogical attainment in a wide variety of educational settings. Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom et al. 1956) is perhaps the most prevalent such classification. It comprises three domains: cognitive (related to knowledge), affective (attitudes and values), and psychomotor (skills), and was originally conceived as a means of making assessment more systematic (Draper 2005). The first of these domains—cognitive—is by far the most widely cited in the educational literature, although Bloom did not actually complete his work on the psychomotor domain. Bloom’s affective domain model (Bloom et al. 1956), while less frequently cited and perhaps less readily understood, is also relevant to learning from video games, and is discussed briefly below.
While Bloom’s model of the cognitive domain is concerned primarily with knowledge, the ability to recall or recite knowledge is merely the first level in the hierarchy. From this starting point, the learner may move on to comprehend (make inferences from, or reconstruct) acquired knowledge and ultimately be able to apply it in scenarios other than those in which the material was originally presented. Beyond this point, they begin to analyse and organise information, synthesise and reorganise it and, ultimately, evaluate and critique what they know (Fig. 1.1).
Fig. 1.1
Bloom’s Taxonomy—cognitive domain (adapted from Bloom et al. 1956)
Bloom’s mapping of the affective domain (Bloom et al. 1956) deals with what the authors refer to as ‘values’, or emotional responses and attitudes. It starts at the lowest level, ‘Receiving’, wherein the learner is no more than aware of the issu...
