Emerging practice with games-based learning - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 69

to initiate action plans and to develop strong perseverance. This demonstrates how
resilience can be developed in young people through gaming. Through experiencing
the frustration of losing, players learn to tolerate negative emotions and know they
can recover and try again.
This links to self-determination theory, which Ghergulescu and Muntean
(2010) cite as a more recent approach to human motivation and personality from
Ryan and Deci (2000). This refers to 'the energy, the persistence, and the direction
that a person is taking in his/her activities' (Ghergulescu and Muntean 2010: 72),
because, when motivated, a person performs. However, motivation is not a singu-
lar construct, but a combination of more complex constructs, and it is important
to distinguish between different types of motivation: amotivation, extrinsic and
intrinsic.
'Amotivation' refers to the inability to act, which results from not feeling com-
petent (internal beliefs of self-efficacy), while 'extrinsic motivation' refers to being
motivated by factors outside of one's self; rewards, money, grades, which provide
satisfaction that is not given by the activity itself. Most important for understand-
ing gaming, playing and deep learning is intrinsic motivation, which originates
internally, from inside the individual; the satisfaction, enjoyment and pleasure
of doing a particular activity: 'it reflects the human tendency to seek out novelty
and challenges, to exercise capabilities, to explore and to learn' (Ghergulescu and
Muntean 2010: 73), which takes us back to Piaget's (1951) theories of play and how
our drives and curiosity to discover learning and operate at a cognitive, affective
and behavioural level and provides a holistic account of learning.
According to Ghergulescu and Muntean (2010), the three key factors that
enhance self-motivation (and thereby alleviate amotivation), are the need for com-
petence, relatedness and autonomy, which arguably can be understood as the key
elements of games in terms of mastery (competence), purpose (relatedness) and
decision-making (autonomy).
The playful interactive element of gaming allows for games to be adapted to
players' individual levels of skill. Gaming provides
a great deal of control, involves active decision making and provides con-
tinuous feedback that lets them know how well they are doing. Players can
see the consequences of their actions - often immediately - and learn from
them without having to fear any serious real-world consequences. The main
motivation for players lies in reaching a goal.
(Struppert 2010: 382)
Pedagogies in schools that recognize the importance of play have long been
favoured by early-years practitioners. Children in foundation stage settings (before
formal schooling and the national curriculum in the UK) predominantly learn
through play, yet this methodology and resultant joy of learning is generally lost
after the early years (Spring-Keller 2010). The question then is, can the joy of learning
through play be extended beyond the pre-school years? Can gaming help re-engage
playful learning through educational digital games?