Game Based Lifelong Learning - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 343

taking tests, learners are put in charge of person-
ally reviewing their own performance in each task,
reflecting on it, and possibly redoing the task to
improve their performance. This reflection and
the critical thought involved in analysing a past
performance, what went wrong, or what may be
improved, is a critical part of the learning process.
In many formal educational scenarios this is sup-
pressed by knowledge emulation, which suggests
that a lifelong learning context is a more fertile
environment for our direction.

just with themselves. Competition between people
can take many forms, the simplest of which is
already realized by the first factor: the ability to
compare your performance to others.
Things start becoming interesting when ac-
tions of a player can influence the performance
of others. This paradigm is common and at the
core of most competitive games. Examples from
a few different styles of games:

• In a first person shooter video game a pos-

sible influence is to destroy other players'
avatars, and thus causing them to lose their
weapons/items they have accumulated, as
well as increasing own score, for example
by picking up items dropped by another
player who got “destroyed”.

4. IDENTIFYING MOTIVATION
DRIVERS: COMPETITION,
COLLABORATION AND INDICATORS

Psychological research has revealed several
factors influencing human performance both
positively and negatively in relation to gaming
(Becker, 2005). These factors are either in line
(positive) or in conflict (negative) with the find-
ings of educational research on motivation theory
(Keller, 1983), experiential learning theory (Kolb,
1984) and instructional theory (Gagné, 1965).
Considering how these approaches complement
each other, we believe that there are only few main
drivers responsible for games being as engaging
as they are, and people are not equally affected
by them.
One of these factors is the ability to see progress
in an obvious and continually available manner.
When users are able to gauge their progress and
realize the effects of their actions with regard to
any type of measurement (usually realized as
“points” in a game) this introduces the first and
most basic form of gaming: the ability to compare
performances . This first factor holds true whether
the person is alone, comparing their performance
to their own previous ones, or in a group and
comparing with others. The moment we, however,
introduce more people into the activity, a myriad
of possibilities appears as many are more easily
motivated in direct competition with others, than

• In a game of competitive Tetris, by elimi-

nating the gaps in a line on the screen, a
player causes a new line of blocks with
random gaps to appear on the other play-
er's screen.

• In a game of soccer, each player is able

to intercept the ball whenever it is passed
around the field, and even to intercept
players of the opposing team and outplay
them for the ball.

This would be the second basic factor: the abil-
ity to affect the performance of others. Now, this
may seem like a factor, which is not too easy to
include in simpler settings, but as we will demon-
strate there are several patterns or ways to achieve
this kind of competition. In scenarios where there
are more players than two, this pattern introduces
another aspect of gaming, which is the opposite of
competition, namely collaboration. While, gener-
ally, the element of competition stays the ultimate
driving force of a game, collaboration between
players can provide so much mutual benefit that
players who choose not to play as part of a team
are greatly disadvantaged. Upon forming teams
in a game, an element of in-team collaboration
is introduced that includes a competitive aspect