UniCraft: Exploring the impact of asynchronous multiplayer game elements in gamification

This paper describes the development and evaluation of UniCraft: a gamified mobile app designed to increase the engagement of undergraduate students with the content and delivery of their course. Gamification projects rely on extrinsic motivators to encourage participants to engage, such as compulsory participation or real-world rewards. UniCraft incorporates an asynchronous multiplayer battle game that uses constructive competition to motivate students, without using motivational levers that may reduce intrinsic motivation. The novel battle game employed by UniCraft employs Player vs Environment (Shafer, 2012) and Player Matching (Jennings, 2014) to ensure students work together in similarly ranked small groups as a team against a shared enemy. A study was undertaken which examined students' long-term engagement with UniCraft within the context of a 12-week long undergraduate programming course. The app was initially provided with the battle feature disabled, so that the effect on motivation and engagement could be studied when it was introduced during the intervention. Detailed interaction data recorded by the app was augmented by semi-structured interviews in order to provide a richer perspective on its effect at an individual and group level. The interaction data revealed convincing evidence for the increased motivational power of the battle feature, and this was supported by the interview data. Although no direct negative effects of competition were observed, interviews revealed that cheating was prevalent and this could in turn have unintended negative side-effects on motivation. Full results are presented and case studies are described for three of the participants, giving an insight into the different styles of interaction and motivation experienced by students in this study

Ethical Perceptions and Actions in Gaming

The present study explored how individuals perceive actions in gaming that contain ethical components, whether they have ever engaged in those behaviors and how judgments of ethical actions in gaming relate to participant personality. Participants completed a 16-item survey, which measured their perception of the ethics of gaming behaviors, such as buying a hack or lying to another player. Participants were also asked to indicate for each item whether or not they had ever engaged in that behavior. Results indicated that participants were able to judge the ethical level of different gaming behaviors with lying to other players and unauthorized access to servers being rated as most unethical. Furthermore, self-reports of engagement in unethical activities were fairly low. When ethical rating and action scores were correlated with personality characteristics using the Cattell 16PF1, the only correlation to reach significance showed that participants higher in rule consciousness rated the ethical gaming questions as more unethical overall than their less rule-conscious peers. Given the extent and popularity of gaming in today’s world, it is important to understand how individuals perceive the gaming culture. One aspect of this culture that merits further examination is ethical behavior in gaming

The Principles of Esports Engagement: A Universal Code of Conduct

Section I of this article provides a brief background of esports and the ESA. Section II states the four principles of esports engagement announced by the ESA. Section III applies these four principles by reviewing specific problems that have plagued the video game and esports industries, such as toxicity (especially towards women and other minorities), swatting, cheating, and other malicious behavior. This article concludes by discussing implementation of a universal code of conduct in esports based on the principles of esports engagement

Digital impact, crossover technologies and gambling practices

At this juncture it is instructive to review the convergent media forms as a starting point for a wider debate about the pervasiveness of games technologies and gambling practices. In particular, to focus upon convergences between gambling and gaming and while highlighting the advantages, to examine some of the potential concerns that may arise. It is notable that gaming is becoming a powerful and popular media form, to the extent that some games are being considered as interfaces to a wide range of digital and multimedia content

Using Gamification to Enhance Self-directed, Open Learning in Higher Education

This paper reviews the literature on games based learning in the fields of psychology, education and video games, with a focus on the disparity of opinion regarding intrinsic motivation. Work in the field of education has shown that a state of optimal learning (flow) can be encouraged and sustained using a variety of reward based techniques. In contrast, psychological studies have shown that intrinsic motivation is inhibited by external reward techniques. The author’s experience as a professional game developer is that there are large commercial benefits and efficacy in a range of reward-based game mechanics. By identifying game design features that could cross over into education this paper will outline a range of techniques that could be implemented using a mobile device platform for use in the classroom within a higher education setting. An experiment is proposed to investigate the impact of this approach to games based learning and a software design is presented to support the experiment’s aims. A meta-game is described that links into normal student activities, gamifying them to enhance the student experience. Keywords: Game-Based Learning, motivation, mobile, gamification, software desig

Games for a new climate: experiencing the complexity of future risks

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Center Task Force Reports, a publication series that began publishing in 2009 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.This report is a product of the Pardee Center Task Force on Games for a New Climate, which met at Pardee House at Boston University in March 2012. The 12-member Task Force was convened on behalf of the Pardee Center by Visiting Research Fellow Pablo Suarez in collaboration with the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre to “explore the potential of participatory, game-based processes for accelerating learning, fostering dialogue, and promoting action through real-world decisions affecting the longer-range future, with an emphasis on humanitarian and development work, particularly involving climate risk management.” Compiled and edited by Janot Mendler de Suarez, Pablo Suarez and Carina Bachofen, the report includes contributions from all of the Task Force members and provides a detailed exploration of the current and potential ways in which games can be used to help a variety of stakeholders – including subsistence farmers, humanitarian workers, scientists, policymakers, and donors – to both understand and experience the difficulty and risks involved related to decision-making in a complex and uncertain future. The dozen Task Force experts who contributed to the report represent academic institutions, humanitarian organization, other non-governmental organizations, and game design firms with backgrounds ranging from climate modeling and anthropology to community-level disaster management and national and global policymaking as well as game design.Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centr