Considerations of Game Dynamics and Mechanics in College Students' Use of Mobile Games for Learning

Introduction

The use of digital games in education has become popular in recent years, and their forms of use keep expanding based on the cognitive benefits that they potentially provide to students (Whitton, 2014). With this development, it is useful for educators and policymakers to determine the varied ways that students interact with and are motivated by the use of games as a learning tool, which can vary depending upon age, gender and social class (Gros, 2007).

One of the advantages of current digital games is that many have a massive reach due to their being increasingly available and accessible via mobile devices and henceforth mobile game apps. A large body of literature has already advocated that when used for digital games-based learning, games have interesting dynamics and mechanics that pertain to effective learning environments including but certainly not limited to elements of urgency, complexity, learning by trial-and-error, and scoring points (Furió et al., 2015). Despite recognizing these benefits, it is important to understand that the appropriate use of games within the learning environment involves access to the correct equipment and the appropriate technical training of the educators (Whitton, 2012), suggesting that games are not always suitable or affordable for all educational settings (Godwin-Jones, 2014).

Regardless of these constraints, it is vital to remember that students who have access or ownership to mobile devices consequently have access to a wide variety of educational games, including the multiplayer games most commonly played by students both as a casual social part-time activity and as a competitive sport (eSport). With these mobile games becoming increasingly ubiquitous, there is a growing branch of education research that is dedicated to investigating the role of games in education under the research areas of educational games, digital gamification, and digital games-based learning. In tandem with these developing research trends, this research article presents a preliminary study that has been conducted with the objective of unravelling students’ perceptions, including preferences and aversions, towards various game mechanics and game dynamics based on students’ use of games for casual and entertainment purposes, and in turn for educational purposes.

This study on identifying students’ dispositions toward the use of mobile games for education is related to a larger on-going research project dedicated to profiling students based on their varied dispositions towards learning and learning with technologies in general (Omarali, 2016; 2017a; 2017b; Omarali and Motteram, 2017), and most recently to the development of a framework called REVAMP to leverage the knowledge gain from identifying students’ dispositions to create learning ecosystems – including games-based learning – that are engaging, virtual-ready, adaptive, multimodal, and personalized (Omarali, 2021). An on-going development in the virtual-ready front is the re-embodiment of the term ‘metaverse’, that had been mentioned in preceding literature (Kemp and Livingstone, 2006; Dionisio, Burns III and Gilbert, 2013; among others) including in the research on learning using virtual worlds (Schafer, 2016; Nevelsteen, 2018; among others); an area of research that is evocative of the mass multiplayer online (MMO) and social media games accessible via mobile devices.