Theoretical+Foundations

Motivation is central to effective learning, and games have been shown to be particularly good motivation tools. Through helping individuals define intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, games are able to help individual continue their engagement with a challenge until the individual has developed a mastery of the strategies to overcome a challenge (Kapp, 2012). In other words, games can be used to help students stay engaged with a learning experience because of the “activity for its own sake, for the enjoyment it provides, the learning it permits, or the feeling of accomplishment it evokes,” (Kapp, 2012, p. 52). They also set up rewards that the individual desires because the rewards allow them to progress in the game.

These motivational factors apply to all types of games, but research shows that video games are particularly strong tools for learning. One way that they do this is through creating interest in a subject matter of a game that can translate to the world outside of the game (Gee, 2003).

Research shows that learning any subject is more difficult when what is being learned lacks pertinence to the individual’s current circumstances, which occurs often, and can be seen in more traditional pedagogy through every student who ever asked their teacher, “when am I ever going to use this?” Videogames give individuals information “just in time” or “on-demand,” not outside of the context where they can utilize what they have learned (Gee, 2003, pg. 2).

Good videogames challenge individuals, but make their goals achievable with the resources in their control at the time they are presented with the challenge (Gee, 2003). This balance between boredom over a lack of challenge, and anxiety over too much of a challenge, is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines as “Flow,” which research has shown to be particularly valuable to learning (Rossin, Ro, Klein, and Guo, 2009).

In his experiential learning model, Kolb (1984) describes a cycle of learning in which individuals both prehend new information through either concrete experience or abstract conceptualization, and transform new information through active experimentation or reflective observation. The outcome of this learning cycle is that the individual makes meaning from the experience of new information.

Video games utilize this model by giving the user the ability to convert what they have learned into productive action almost immediately (Gee, 2003). Furthermore, video games initially present users with simple situations that create a world of general rules that can be applied to more complex and challenging scenarios later. In this way, video games are “models for the production of expertise,” meaning they present users with one challenge, for which they master a set of strategies to overcome, and when these skills have become routine for the user to employ, they add a new dimension to the challenge which forces the user to rethink their strategy (Gee, 2003, p3). This cycle of revising learned skills to tackle new challenges is central to Kolb’s understanding of the experiential learning model.