Koos de Beer and Theo Bothma Designing gameful experiences using alternate reality games Paper at BOBCATSSS 2017

1. Koos de Beer
Theo JD Bothma
Department of Information Science
Designing gameful experiences
using ARGs
BOBCATSSS 2017
Tampere, Finland
25-27 January 2017

2. Overview
• Introduction
• Purpose
• Background
– Gamification and education
– Understanding ARGs
• Gameful design using ARGs
• Conclusion

3. Introduction
• Alternate reality games
– Multiple types of media
– Immersive
– Narrative driven
– Community of players
– Collectively solve puzzle and construct the
narrative
• Gamification is the use of game elements in a
non-game context

4. Purpose
• The purpose of the paper
– Elaborate on gamification in education
– Challenges in education that gamification attempts to
solve
– Game phenomena that work in gamification in education
– ARGs: Background, characteristics and the nature of ARGs
– To answer:
How can game elements unique to ARGs be used in
gameful design?

5. Background
• Gamification
• “Gameful design is designing for gamefulness
by making use of game design elements”
• To make a system or a process more game-like

6. Gamification and education
• Gamification in education can:
– Engage students effectively
– Increase retention
– Motivate students for the course, the content and
the usage of course-related systems
What game elements are used in gamification?

7. Game elements used in gamification of
education
• Important: Integrate the elements into the
course/system
• Points, badges and leader boards
• Quests/challenges
• Award badges for different activities thus
rewarding certain behaviour – group challenges,
series of challenges, individual challenges
• Customisation from participation
• Narrative or stories
• Game elements that facilitate social engagement

8. The reasoning behind specific game elements
• Intrinsic sense of satisfaction
• “Freedom with regards to expression of
content”
• Compare and contrast performance with
others
• Promote specific behaviour

9. Crafting game-like experiences with game
elements
• Use the elements to engender:
– Competition
– Collaboration
– Community formation
– Player agency/Control

10. Gamification and gameful design
• Instead of just borrowing game elements
• Use game design to craft game-like
experiences
• Develop the course and content from the
ground up to be more game-like

11. Background – Understanding ARGs
Components Sub components
Narrative
Game action
Community
interaction
Narrative
Community
Game action
?
Narrative hook
R
Narrative reward
N
Narrative piece
System with player Player with system Player with player External interaction
Lead in mechanism
P
Puzzle Link

12. Gameful design using ARGs
• Narrative
– Invest the user in the narrative
– Link the narrative to the challenges/course content
• Game actions
– The game-like actions can reward players with narrative
– Challenges and game-like actions are linked
• Collaboration
– The result of a “chunked narrative” and collaborative game actions
(puzzles, challenges etc.)
– Spreading the challenges, students can pick which “challenge group”
to join
– Reconstructing the narrative, which is linked to the course content
– Making sense of the narrative is making sense of the course content

13. Conclusion
• Design courses to be more game-like,
specifically more ARG-like
• Manifest the characteristics in ARGs in
education through gameful design
• Moving forward?

14. Thank you!
Questions / comments?
Koos.debeer@up.ac.za
Theo.Bothma@up.ac.za