– Prompt –
- What’s your understanding of the relationship between gameplay and learning.
- Gameplay examples.
- Find a book or article talking about video games, which can support your understanding.
– Response –
Generally speaking, although learning is almost never the initial purpose of designing and developing games of various types, gameplay by nature provokes experiences of learning problem-solving, in other words, handling challenges, as is defined in class. Similar to any other type of creation, games (essentially game designers) introduce to players predetermined contexts and stories — regardless of authenticity and significance — as well as game-specific purposes, including but not limited to beating enemies, breaking records, or even just gain experiences. Both are the major components of gameplay, i.e., the mechanism of the game, and through such gameplay, players often experience processes of learning, ranging from adapting game-specific rules to practicing real-life skills: instant reactions, decision-making, etc.
Good gameplay facilitates learning, which in return motivates players to further explore the game and gain sense of joy or accomplishment. Because “gameplay is about interaction design”, players often acquire active learning experiences and knowledge through interaction with games if they have good gameplay design. Puzzles games represented by “Baba is You” would serve as good examples here. Designing over 200 levels in a general pace of adding difficulties and complexities, the game encourages players to manipulate physical objects assigned with specific rules in order to explore surprising interactions. As the gameplay design well fits players’ learning pace of getting familiar with different elements, every time passing one level, players gradually learn the game rules better and become trained to explore further possibilities of future unknown rules. Similar processes exist in adventure games, where players learn tricks and experiences through past failures that altogether contribute to eventual success.
Moreover, such learning process is tailored to various players thanks to the individualities of players and flexibilities of gameplay design. As Azita Iliya Abdul Jabbar and Patrick Felicia indicated in Gameplay Engagement and Learning in Game-Based Learning: A Systematic Review, learning is considered as “a personal process” because gameplay experiences have no specific rules and largely rely on players’ “individual differences”. Those differences and flexibility further lead to diversities of users’ appetites for game genres and experiences, thus further complicate the learning process in a general sense.
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