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Squire claims that a good game encourages good learning that "enables us to become knowledge producers [which] gives us robust ideas to think with, and propels us toward participation in social practices" (2013). Inspired and intrigued by the possibilities of using game environments as learning spaces, which can lead to social changes (McGonigal, 2011), the instructional designers at the University of British Columbia ventured into the "unknown" and transformed a "traditional" online course on adult education into a role-playing game. This paper explores the notion of gamification in a higher education setting, what it means in terms of instructors' teaching practice, and how it changes student experience. The paper describes how game elements were incorporated into a course. The goals were to 1) engage students by creating a responsive feedback system, and 2) empower students by allowing them to customize the game experience based on their learning style and interest in the topics. The game space designed for the students enabled them to explore and try different things, and also realize that their work mattered. The paper focuses on the process and challenges of "gamifying" academic content and outlines the elements that make the game successful and sustainable. The designers purposefully avoided creating a virtual world or environment similar to an MMORPG, or investing a significant amount of funding and time into creating a space where only experienced gamers would feel comfortable. The new gamified version of the course needed to be low-tech, but enable high-social learning. The goal was to increase student engagement in the course, especially their interaction with one another, without technology getting in the way of their learning. The course was therefore taken out of the structured and formal LMS and transferred into the more flexible and social WordPress environment. The students took on two roles: 1) the role of reporters who were required to write about adult education issues and respond to different tasks set out by their Editor in Chief, and 2) the role of readers who responded to the written articles. Together, they were contributing and building the newspaper "Adult Educator Weekly". The design of the course enabled students to receive timely feedback from their peers, which made the students feel their writing was relevant and purposeful. Based on the students' feedback, the gamification of the course contributed to their increased interest in the topics, engagement with the course, and understanding of the issues from different perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a research study conducted on an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), "Urgent Evoke" that ran for ten weeks in Spring 2010. The purpose of the study was to explore narrative practices of players engaged in ARG and the effects their participation in the game had on real life behaviour. The focus was on opportunities for increasing ethical sensibilities. Six people participated in the study, two from Serbia two from New Zealand, one from Uganda and one from Rwanda. Five stayed in the game for the whole duration (10 weeks). The method of analysis for this study was virtual ethnography, and it included pre- and post-game surveys and interviews, and the analysis of artifacts created during the game. Qualitative data analysis was employed using HyperResearch software. Five data sources were coded: the participants pre-game and exit interviews, blog postings, comments and image and video postings. Some codes were specific to particular data sources, while other codes appear in all data sets. The results show that moral functioning, as analyzed through the Four-component model by Narvaez and Lapsley (2005), depends on the type of interaction between the players and could be directed by game design. They also demonstrated that the focus of moral functioning shifted at different stages of the game, starting from moral judgment with the higher number of instances (at the beginning of the game), going to moral action (during the actual gameplay), and finally to moral sensitivity and motivation (after playing the game). They infer that ARGs could be used for teaching about and achieving social change and personal growth. Using games for education and bringing them into the realm of academic inquiry have many challenges, from turning everything into a game without having a sound pedagogical rationale for the change, to questioning the importance of games as a topic worth studying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying the precise nature of the complexity of games enables a deeper understanding of the play phenomenon. Complexity theory offers a distinct approach to examining the world of games. The key segments in Salen and Zimmerman's (2004) definitions of play and games are theorized through complexity thinking. They are taken as a starting point and provide a framework for theoretical discussion about play elements and their functions. The paper explores how imposed constraints, that is, game rules, influence the freedom of movement of players. It looks at the importance of predictability and its impact on players' motivation and engagement. Open possibilities and the unexpected, especially in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), enable connectedness of components, which, as a result create new quality. Emergence of new properties leads to creation of new conditions, which again open new opportunities, developing an autopoietic loop. The paper also examines the notion of simultaneity of complexity theory and conceptualization of the disappearance of opposed dualities such as real and unreal. Games were for long considered as mere entertainment with no connection to serious activity or work. The explosion of video and computer games in quantity and in the level of skills and competences required from their players, have induced educators to reassess their pedagogic potential. While the future direction of development of games is uncertain, it is clear that play has significant implications for the way we think and work, as individuals and in the collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]