Abstract— Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in the use of video games for education because of the high level of engagement of players. This article blends research on game engagement from the media flow perspective with current pedagogical theory to advance 2 core design principles for a model educational game design: model matching and layering.
This research examines relationships regarding moral foundations and moral decisions in the Mass Effect video game series. The findings suggest that moral foundation predicts what type of moral decisions a player will make during play. This research reports an online survey (N=138) that asked participants the salience of their moral foundations, along with the moral path, either traditionally heroic (paragon) or traditionally antiheroic (renegade), they chose in their first time playing through the Mass Effect series. The results indicate that moral foundations predict the extent to which game path players choose, but only with regard to the harm/care moral foundation. These findings are discussed in light of game design and the potential for game designers to use morality as a game mechanic beyond the harm foundation and into realms of more nuanced moral situations in game narratives.
The primary aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive review and elaboration of model matching and its theoretical propositions. Model matching explains and predicts individuals' outcomes related to gameplay by focusing on the interrelationships among games' systems of mechanics, relevant situations external to the game, and players' mental models. Formalizing model matching theory in this way provides researchers a unified explanation for game-based learning, game performance, and related gameplay outcomes while also providing a theory-based direction for advancing the study of games more broadly. The propositions explicated in this article are intended to serve as the primary tenets of model matching theory. Considerations for how these propositions may be tested in future games studies research are discussed.
Dating back to work done in Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research in the 1940s, media uses and gratifications (U&G) research represents one of the oldest and largest continuous programs of research in the field of communication. The tradition represents hundreds of research projects since the 1940s examining the reasons why people use mass media including → Radio, → Television, film (→ Cinema), print media, and the → Internet. U&G has consistently been one of the most frequently published mass communication theoretical perspectives in communication journals over the past 50 years. The product of this massive research effort has been a large set of taxonomies of media use motives; research linking those motives to antecedent variables (e.g., social factors, personality) and media use, along with some consequences (effects) of that use; and an extensive theoretical discussion and critique. Many scholars hold that U&G represents a research perspective that is separate from the → Media Effects tradition (→ Communication as a Field and Discipline; Exposure to Communication Content; Media Effects, History of).
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