No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Games Social Scientists Play
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to determine how to educate people about complicated social topics or politics?; how to lead them to critical thinking?; and how to convey emotions or life experience they never lived through?
Design/methodology/approach
Project System is a three-day experience for adult participants concerning totalitarian regime, freedom and inequality. The Project System does not give fast and easy answers but leads participants to find them on their own. For 30 hours, participants find themselves within a larp, which is a very intense type of role-playing game based on human interactions. The author has chosen a larp as a medium as one of the most immersive and influential method of game-based learning which can facilitate topics that are normally hard to explain through conventional methods of learning. Participants learn firsthand through their roles, emotions, story and experience.
Findings
Project System was a really strong and important experience for many players that may have partially changed their lives. After more than 500 players walked through it, the author can say that this method is beneficial.
Originality/value
Larp as an educational tool is used all over the world; however, there are still only few professional organizations. Most of them are focused on using larp (or similar role-playing methods) as a tool at elementary or secondary schools. Using larp in andragogy is currently pioneering.
Gamification is often promoted as a user-centred initiative, engaging and motivating the alienated masses. Yet is such rhetoric reinforced by the design of these programmes? By incorporating a diverse suite of theoretical frameworks that accounts for the social, cultural and psychological
effect of design features, this article argues that gamification too often invokes organization-centred design, treating users as zombies: senseless mechanisms urged onwards by a desire for extrinsic rewards. Gamification still often fails to acknowledge the user’s context and innate
psychological needs. This can be accomplished in practice through an incorporation of motivational psychology and a concurrent shift towards user-centred design, accounting for the situatedness of the participant. Further, this article claims that for gamification to reach its full, radical
potential, it must not only transform the way the user is evaluated and rewarded but also the activity the subject is tasked with performing.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.