An Analysis of Gamification and Game-Based Learning as Strategies for Anti-Oppressive Education

Educational institutions have historically been environments where oppression takes place in the forms of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and classism among others (Kumashiro, 2000; Chen-Hayes, 2001; Dedotsi & Paraskevopoulou-Kollia, 2019). Anti-oppressive education is the active rejection of or refusal to participate in forms of oppression that take place in schools, and in turn facilitating strategies for education that works against oppression (Kumashiro, 2000). There are existing theories for how to promote and engage this anti-oppressive education, such as introducing narratives and education about marginalized communities that counter and challenge educators’ preconceived biases about students (Warren, 2023; Kumashiro, 2000), transforming schools into safe and welcoming spaces that provide students with support, advocacy, and resources specific to their identities, and through acknowledgement and embracing of their complex and unique identities (Kumashiro, 2000). Gamification and game-based learning are emerging as new teaching practices in classrooms and have benefits in several areas such as lesson engagement, learning outcomes, classroom environment, accessibility practices, collaboration in the classroom, teaching delivery, learning effectiveness, exploration and risk-taking in a safe environment, and the student’s sense of control, agency, and ownership over their learning process. However, there is a gap in the educational research literature on the use of gamification and game-based learning as potential strategies for combating the various forms of oppression that take place in schools. They have not yet been thoroughly explored for their potential to be beneficial for anti-oppressive education. This study explores how gamification and game-based learning can be tools to promote education that supports students in classrooms, creates excitement around learning, and contributes to an anti-oppressive learning environment through providing education about and for marginalized groups, counter-narratives that combat some educators’ prejudiced beliefs about equity-deserving students, and providing education that has the power to change society through challenging both implicit and explicit social and cultural biases as well as building empathy and a deeper understanding of some of the lived experiences of marginalized communities. This analysis is driven by close readings of two digital games— Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please (2013) and McKinney’s SPENT (2011)—, an in-depth discussion of theories of oppression and anti-oppression, and an analysis of publicly available policy documents from eleven of Ontario’s public school boards, universities, and colleges, including: Waterloo Region District School Board, Toronto District School Board, York District School Board, Thames Valley District School Board, Wilfrid Laurier University, University of Guelph, University of Waterloo, Toronto Metropolitan University, Conestoga College, Mohawk College, and Fanshawe College

Developing and evaluating MindMax: promoting mental wellbeing through an Australian Football League-themed app incorporating applied games (including gamification), psychoeducation, and social connectedness

Gamification is increasingly being used as a behavioural change strategy to increase engagement with apps and technologies for mental health and wellbeing. While there is promising evidence supporting the effectiveness of individual gamification elements, there remains little evidence for its overall effectiveness. Furthermore, a lack of consistency in how ‘gamification’ and related terms (such as ‘applied games’, an umbrella term of which gamification is one type) are used has been observed within and across multiple academic fields. This contributes to the difficulty of studying gamification and decreases its accessibility to people unfamiliar with applied games. Finally, gamification has also been critiqued by both game developers and by academics for its reliance on extrinsic motivators and for the messages that gamified systems may unintentionally convey. In this context, the aims of this thesis were fourfold: 1) to iteratively co-design and develop a gamified app for mental health and wellbeing, 2) to evaluate the eventuating app, 3) to consolidate literature on gamification for mental health and wellbeing, and 4) to synthesise findings into practical guidelines for implementing gamification for mental health and wellbeing. Chapter 2 reports the first study which addresses the first aim of this thesis. Six participatory design workshops were conducted to support the development of MindMax, an Australian Football League (AFL)-themed mobile phone app aimed at AFL fans (particularly male ones) that incorporates applied games, psychoeducation, and social connectedness. Findings from these workshops were independently knowledge translated and fed back to the software development team, resulting in a MindMax prototype. This prototype was further tested with 15 one-on-one user experience testing interviews at three separate time points to iteratively refine MindMax’s design and delivery of its content. The findings of this study suggest that broadly, participants endorsed a customisable user experience with activities requiring active user participation. These specifications were reflected in the continual software updates made to MindMax. Chapters 3 and 4 report the second and third studies which address the second aim of this thesis. As regular content, performance, and aesthetic updates were applied to MindMax (following the model of the wider tech industry), a naturalistic longitudinal trial, described in Chapter 3, was deemed to be the most appropriate systematic evaluation method. In this study, participants (n=313) were given access to MindMax and asked to use it at their leisure, and surveys were sent out at multiple time points to assess their wellbeing, resilience, and help-seeking intentions. Increases in flourishing (60-day only), sense of connection to MindMax, and impersonal help-seeking intentions were observed over 30 and 60 days, suggesting that Internet-based interventions like MindMax can contribute to their users’ social connectedness and encourage their help-seeking. The third study, described in Chapter 4, reports a secondary analysis of data collected for Chapter 3, and further explores participants’ help-seeking intentions and their links to wellbeing, resilience, gender, and age. An explanatory factor analysis was conducted on Day 1 General Help-Seeking Questionnaire (GHSQ) data (n=530), with the best fitting solution resulting in three factors: personal sources, health professionals, and distal sources. In addition to providing more evidence that younger people aged 16–35 categorise apps and technologies for mental health and wellbeing like MindMax alongside other distal social sources such as phone helplines and work or school, our findings also suggest that the best way to target individuals who are least likely to seek help, particularly men, may be through these distal sources as well. Chapter 5 reports the fourth study, which addresses the third aim. In order to consolidate literature on gamification for mental health and wellbeing, this systematic review identified 70 papers that collectively reported on 50 apps and technologies for improving mental health and wellbeing. These papers were coded for gamification element, mental health and wellbeing domain, and researchers’ justification for applying gamification to improving mental health and wellbeing. This study resulted in two major findings: first, that the current application of gamification for mental health and wellbeing does not resemble the heavily critiqued mainstream application that relies on extrinsic motivators; and second, that many authors of the reviewed papers provided little or no justification for why they applied gamification to their mental health and wellbeing interventions. While the former finding is encouraging, the latter suggests that the gamification of mental health and wellbeing is not theory-driven, and is a cause for concern. Finally, to address the final aim of this thesis, all study learnings were synthesised into practical guidelines for implementing gamification for mental health and wellbeing. First, it is important to assess the suitability of implementing gamification into the intervention. Second, this implementation should ideally be integrated at a deeper, systemic level, with the explicitly qualified intention to support users, evidence-based processes, and user engagement with these processes. Third, it is important to assess the acceptability of this gamified intervention throughout its development, involving all relevant stakeholders (particularly representative end user populations). Fourth, it is important to evaluate the impact of this gamified intervention. Fifth, and finally, comprehensive and detailed documentation of this process should be provided at all stages of this process. This thesis contributes to a growing literature on the increasing importance and relevance of Internet-based resources and apps and technologies for mental health and wellbeing, particularly for young people. Given the dominance of games in society and culture across history, and the increasing contemporary prominence of digital games (also known as video games) in particular, gamification is uniquely positioned to have the potential to make large contributions to mental health and wellbeing research. In this context, this thesis contributes a systematically derived operationalisation of gamification, an evaluation of a gamified app for mental health and wellbeing, and best practice guidelines for implementing gamification for mental health and wellbeing, thereby providing frameworks that future implementations of gamified mental health and wellbeing interventions and initiatives may find useful

Leveraging the Proteus Effect to Motivate Emotional Support in a Serious Game for Mental Health

Researchers have explored how online communities can be leveraged for peer support, but general disinterest and a lack of engagement have emerged as substantial barriers to their use in practice. To address this gap, we designed Merlynne using the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and games user research, a serious game that motivates individuals to become peer supporters using the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) techniques, through play. We conducted a mixed-methods, exploratory study to evaluate Merlynne’s design and specifically studied the Proteus Effect, hypothesizing that players using a stereotypically helpful avatar would have higher usage rates and a higher change in helping attitudes scores than players using a stereotypically unhelpful avatar. Merlynne had high engagement evidenced by usage rates and meaningful participant responses, and serious game techniques were used as effective cues for motivation. Emerging themes from thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews were supported with usage data and survey responses. We also found that avatar appearance influenced player-avatar connectedness and engagement through the frequency of empathy expressed in solutions. In reflecting on our findings, we discuss design challenges such as Ludonarrative dissonance, designing for emotional fatigue, and players’ overconfidence, and present design considerations such as using avatars to promote empathy for those seeking to motivate participation in mental health support and the use of serious game techniques to encourage participation in health interventions

Implementing data-driven systems for work and health: The role of incentives in the use of physiolytics

Following the recent success of health wearable devices (smartwatches, activity trackers) for personal and leisure activities, organizations have started to build digital occupational health programs and data-driven health insurance around these systems. In this way, firms or health insurance companies seek to both support a new form of health promotion for their workforce/clients and to take advantage of large amounts of collected data for organizational purposes. Still, the success in the implementation of wearable health devices (also known as physiolytics) in organizational settings is entirely dependent on the individual motivation to adopt and use physiolytics over time (since organizations cannot establish a mandated use). Therefore, organizations often use incentives to encourage individuals to participate in such data-driven programs. Yet, little is known about these mechanisms that serve to align the interests of an organization with the interests of a group of individuals. This is an important challenge because these incentives may blunder the frontiers between what is voluntary and what is not. Against this background, this thesis aims, from a critical realist perspective, to build general knowledge regarding incentives in physiolytics-centered organizational programs. By doing so, individuals may be able to recognize challenges linked to participation in such programs; organizations may create sensible incentives; policymakers may identify new social issues that appear with this form of digitalization in organizations; and, finally, researchers may investigate new practical and social challenges regarding digitalization in organizations. In concrete terms, the first explorative phase of the thesis shows that feedback, gamification features and financial incentives are the most implemented incentives in physiolytics-centered organizational programs. There is also an overrepresentation of financial incentives for data-health plans, indicating that health insurance companies are building their strategy on external motivators. A second, more explanatory phase serves to further explore these types of incentives and specify recommendations by taking a higher perspective than normative views, so that it is possible to create more alternative managerial strategies or develop other policy perspectives. This part principally shows that the most influential incentives on user behavior are the ones that are transparent, that stimulate individual empowerment, and that propose defined benefits. In terms of contributions, this thesis allows individuals to evaluate how their autonomy and integrity is impacted by incentives in such data-driven programs. This thesis also outlines the necessity for organizations to invest time and resources to know their audience. Organizations additionally need to develop several strategies, by mixing incentives or gradually introducing them. Policymakers must ensure that regulations permit the clear consent of participants; guarantee a proportionality of incentives, and involve entities that can guide individuals through data-sharing. Finally, this thesis enables researchers to further investigate how organizations can develop appropriate and desirable environments regarding data-driven technology, so that individuals may enhance their decision-making processes and organizations may succeed in their implementation

Impact of Gamification on Student Engagement in Graduate Medical Studies

Rapid technological advances have created major societal changes, transformed business sectors, and revolutionized enterprises. In contrast, the curricular structure of medical education has remained unchanged for the last 100 years, and, for the most part, medical education has been reluctant to embrace the use of technology. The prevalent pedagogical model is reliant on rote memorization. The conceptual framework that informed this study was the user-centered framework for meaningful gamification. This framework\u27s components are organismic integration theory, situational relevance, situated motivational affordance, and the universal design for learning. This quantitative study focused on key research questions related to identifying whether significant increases occurred over time in cooperative learning, cognitive level, and personal skills \u27the dependent variables\u27 when using a gamified learning method-the independent variable. The validated Student Engagement Survey was used to collect data from second-year medical students in a Southern California medical school, with N = 64. A repeated measures MANOVA with follow-up univariate ANOVAs was used, and statistical results indicated that there were significant differences over time in cooperative learning, cognitive level, and personal skills when using gamified learning methods. This research was conducted over a period of 3 months, divided into 3 Time Periods (TP). For all three variables, significant increases were noticed between TP 1 and TP 2, followed by significant decreases between TP 2 and TP 3. These findings pointed to the fact that more studies are needed to better understand whether certain types of gamification implementations are detrimental to student engagement in medical education, or whether more sound design principles ought to be explored to produce effective gamified learning components that could positively impact student engagement in medical education