gaming and learning

a new paper published on gaming habits and education:

Mozelius, P., Westin, T., Wiklund, M., & Norbert, L. (2016). Gaming habits, study habits and compulsive gaming among digital gaming natives. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308947959_Gaming_habits_study_habits_and_compulsive_gaming_among_digital_gaming_natives

The aim of the study is to analyse and discuss digital native gamers’ gaming habits and how excessive gaming might have disturbed school studies or social activities.

Casual gamers often spend a lot of time gaming, but not with the long uninterrupted gaming sessions that characterise hardcore gamers. Casual gamers mainly play casual games and are quite reluctant to hardcore games and complex rule sets. Hardcore gamers like complex games and long game sessions, but they play all kind of games.

practically all students’ defend their gaming and claim that it has given them a richer life with several positive experiences worth the risk of addiction and displacement. One student wrote in the essay that: “Generally, gaming is a fantastic possibility to escape daily routines for a while to be immersed, to discover and to learn. At the same time this can lead to less pleasant states like compulsive gaming or addiction.”

 Future studies

This study tried to explore if excessive gaming might have disturbed school studies or social activities. An interesting idea discussed among the authors is to the flip perspective and get a dialog with the digital native gamers that find school to disturb their gaming activities.

De Liu’s papers on gaming and gamification

Welcome De 🙂

I have written a commentary piece on the reflection of gamification research: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18792695/papers/Gamification.pdf. So I am right at home reading Plamen’s piece on gamification and education.

I am collaborating on a project that creates a prototype gamified e-learning website – where we add gaming elements that aim to create challenge, curiosity, and fantasy – Malone’s taxonomy. But it is still in initial testing stage that I don’t have anything written up yet. I have done a study earlier just on games with a focus on competition (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18792695/papers/games.pdf). I don’t know if these are of interests to your blog, if yes, please let me know.

best,

De

Associate Professor
Information and Decision Sciences
3-163 Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota
Office: 612-626-4480

deliu@umn.edu