CodePlay: A Tabletop Role-Playing Game System used in Teaching Game Programming Using Content Gamification

The goal of this paper is to provide a role-playing game system that combines gamification, role-playing teaching techniques and tabletop RPGs to be used in teaching, in an effort to increase student involvement. The main theory behind it is Content Gamification (which focuses on making a module’s content more fun), and tabletop role-playing games combined with rules from the “Betrayal at the house on the hill” board game. The framework itself is called “Code-Playing Technique” and it directly combines physical role-play and learning programming. This is a learning technique designed for use in Software Engineering and Game Programming curricula. With the “Code-Playing Technique”, students may express themselves through coding instead of via words or natural language. As such, during role-playing a character in a virtual setting, anything that the player does and anything that happens to that character must be expressed through programming and scripting from within a game engine. While this paper explores the CodePlay framework itself, the complementary paper “The Blackthorn Manor: A Case Study in Teaching Software Engineering for Computer Games Courses using CodePlay Framework” applies it in a university module.