Emerging practice with games-based learning - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 67

Through playful experimentation, psychologists highlight how play can support
and encourage learning. Developmental psychologists believe that play (including
playing games, digital and non-digital) can be best understood in terms of drives for
exploration, curiosity and manipulation. Even from birth, babies show a preference
for novel and complex stimuli. Play is engaged in by children for enjoyment, rather
than a conscious decision to find out how things work, because play is intrinsically
satisfying and fun.
Piaget (1951) argued that play enables a child to practise developing skills and
abilities in a relaxed and carefree manner. In this way, Piaget regarded play as an
adaptive activity where children could consolidate newly acquired competences and
facilitate the development of cognitive and social skills. Piaget (1963) believed games
had important implications for children's emerging social and intellectual capabili-
ties - especially boys, according to Hromek and Roffey (2009), and a function of
games was to practise working with rules and to develop self-discipline, which under-
pins society and social order. Mead (1934) argued similarly with respect to learning
about morality and that role-playing games enabled the development of empathy in
children. Play is understood to aid the socio-emotional, moral and cognitive develop-
ment of children, predominantly through rules and roles. Shaffer (2006) argues that
children generate simulations of environments they want to understand in relation
to rules and roles to better appreciate those environments and understand conse-
quences. Spring-Keller (2010) goes on to observe that every kind of play consists of
rules, even open-ended games without specific goals. Consequently, for both Shaffer
(2006) and Spring-Keller (2010), the definition of a game can be reduced to two sin-
gular aspects: rules and roles. This can be applied to computer games, many of which
are role-play simulations. For example, SimCity is an urban planning game in which
players take on the role of major and contains numerous rules; whereas the World of
Warcraft is such a complex massive multiplayer online (MMO) game that, even after
50 hours, a player will not fully understand all the rules (Spring-Keller 2010).
Other psychologists examine the playing of games from the perspective of
arousal theories (Arkes and Garske 1977) and argue that we have an inherent ten-
dency to seek 'optimum' levels of stimulation or activity. The motivation to explore
the unfamiliar is because it increases arousal. However, the notion of 'optimum' level
refers to the fact that, if the new experience is too different and unfamiliar, it will lead
to too much arousal and over-stimulation, resulting in anxiety and tension. On the
other hand, if the experience is too familiar, little arousal will occur and the under-
stimulation will lead to boredom (Berlyne 1960). What games trigger is the curiosity
to explore new, novel and complex environments, which can be explained by arousal
theories.
Motivation - games are fun: understanding positive emotions in learning
Educational psychologists Hromek and Roffey (2009) argue that playing games and
having fun are crucial to development and highly motivating for children. Children's
games provide opportunities for hypothesis testing, problem-solving and 'formation
of thought constructs that reflect the shared cognitive themes related to cultural