The document discusses a career-focused game designed to raise awareness of employability skills in students. It describes the learning goals and experimental design, which varied levels of autonomy, competence, and relatedness support between player groups based on self-determination theory. Early findings from gameplay data showed mixed results and no clear influence of the design variations on engagement or knowledge/attitude changes as hypothesized. A focus group will further examine player perceptions of autonomy, competence, and relatedness support in the game and how mechanics influenced these factors.

1. Career Quest
Behind the Curtain

2. De-Brief
• Purpose of game
• Learning goals and implementation
• Experiment design and implementation

3. Affect & SGs
• e-Bug == Cognitive focus + Affective instinct
• i.e. “I’ll design it to be fun”
• The fun of those games is derived from stealing
things from games.
• Platform mechanics
• Story / comedy
• scores etc

4. Affect and e-Bug
• Why is the e-Bug game “fun” for 9-11 year olds?
• Why is ANY game fun?
• Why is anyTHING fun?

5. SPAM / ARC
• DM spoke of the (S)PAM model of motivation
(Daniel Pink).
• Does anyone remember what it is?
• DM spoke of the ARC model of motivation (Deci &
Ryan).
• Does anyone remember what it is?

6. Intrinsic Motivation
• Autonomy (a feeling of having freedom, that your
choices matter and you can express change)
• Relatedness (a feeling of connection to people, that
you & what your doing matters to your peers)
• Competence (a feeling that you are good at
something or are getting better at something)

7. Support for ARC
• How much people feel supported in Autonomy,
Relatedness and Competence predicts their
subjective enjoyment of a task and the extent to
which they identify with the task.
• People who identify as intrinsically motivated
perform better and learn / remember more.

8. ARC & Learning
• Grolnick & Ryan 1987
• 3 groups of children at school
• nondirected (asked to read a passage and
report how interesting.)
• directed (no mention of test but told instructor
interested in how much they learn)
• directed and told about grades

9. ARC & Learning
• The first two of these groups attempt to give
autonomy (not DIRECTING behaviour)
• All students tested.
• Students who were directed performed better on
rote memorisation than first group.
• grades group (least autonomous) evidenced
greatest deterioration of memorised facts after a
week)
• grades group also had poorer conceptual
learning of material than other groups.

10. ARC & Learning
• Similar findings repeatedly found.
• Generalisable finding is that when people are “self
determined” in a learning task, they are more
engaged, pay more attention, want to learn more
and retain / understand better as a result.
• Sounds like an important finding to me!

11. Games
• Is SPAM / ARC why we like games?
• Some think so. I’m starting to (ish).
• Lots of (fake) Autonomy.
• Relatedness is weaker (multiplayer excepted)
• “balance” + great, timely feedback ==
Competence

12. ARC in Games
• Rigby & Przybylski 2006 found:
• that satisfying ARC related to:
• intrinsic motivation for play
• immersion in the game
• +ve short term wellbeing in the player
• mastery of controls essential but not sufficient

13. ARC in Games
• Rigby & Ryan 2006 found:
• “between-games differences in psychological
need satisfaction related to popular appeal”
• Two games very similar in content but judged
differently by metacritic.
• The ‘good’ game supported ARC better than the
‘bad’ game.

14. ARC & Games
• Przybylski, Ryan and Rigby 2009 found:
• Core appeal of violent games was based on
ARC satisfaction
• ARC predicted enjoyment, immersion and future
play. Violent interests / tendencies predicted
preference for future play - but NOT enjoyment.
• Przybylski 2009 found that post-play aggression
was not linked to violent content, but rather to low
ARC support - e.g. frustration from poor mastery

15. Hypotheses
• Enjoyment of a Serious Game is predicted by
perceived ARC support
• As self reported by players
• As objectively measured
• Knowledge & Attitude change will be correlated to
ARC support
• Certain game design strategies will support ARC
better than others

16. Careers Service
• Students don’t really think about employability until
after graduation.
• Students think “get my degree then worry about it”
• Students think they have no skills outwith their
degree and that their P/T work doesn’t matter
• Asked if we could design a game to try to tackle
these.

17. Learning Design
• The “Fortnightly Planner” is to raise awareness of
what is required to manage one’s employability.
• The “Dilemmas” were to make students think about
employability skills outside of their degree.
• The “Daily Item” was intended to encourage not just
“playing the game” but taking the content of the
game into your real world.

18. Hypotheses
• Enjoyment of a Serious Game is predicted by
perceived ARC support
• As self reported by players
• As objectively measured
• Knowledge & Attitude change will be correlated to
ARC support
• Certain game design strategies will support ARC
better than others

19. Experiment Design
• We want see if ARC support correlates to
subjective engagement, objective engagement, and
K&A change.
• The different “versions” of the game are intended to
answer the third hypothesis.

20. Autonomy Support
• High:
• Empowering Language
• More agency by type / quantity
• Medium:
• Neutral language
• Medium agency by type / quantity
• Low:
• Controlling language
• Low agency by type / quantity

21. Competence
• Vary
• Detail of feedback
• Language that suggests improvement / is
neutral / or suggests poor performance
• Information in advance for how their choices will
affect their attainment varying to no information

22. Relatedness
• High group received detailed, personal feedback at
the start of each week.
• Low group had an avatar we hoped they wouldn’t
relate to (if also in low Autonomy group)

23. Demo

24. Early findings
• K&A wise, I know of some changes to behaviour
via the “daily task”
• 12 students signed up for vacancies (1 got a
game design job ?!?!?!?!)
• At least one student did the “twitter” daily task.
• 6 students got the token from CS - they now know
where it is!

25. Early Findings
• Of the NINE “High A, High C” students, only ONE
chose to answer their own solution to dilemmas.
• struck me as a bit weird!
• People did not behave as I would have predicted
SOLELY by their (random) groups
• one of the most frequent users was a “low
everything” user.

26. Results
• Of course, for all but last of the hypotheses it’s
“perceived” ARC support that matters.
• One objective measure of engagement was daily
option submissions.

27. Daily Engagement
• Excluding the HACKER who had 77....
• Very crudely, adding AC support values (0,1,2) and
calling it SDT:
4 = 23 / 7 = 3.3
3 = 7 / 4 = 1.7
2 = 18 / 12 = 1.5
1 = 12 / 4 = 3
0 = 33 / 10 = 3.3
• I can see no sign of design’s influence
• I suspect personality had larger impact than my
design

28. This afternoon
• Focus group questions
• Please think about the game.
• Think about whether you felt supported in ARC
• Whether the game mechanics influenced this
• What you liked /disliked, what you would change
etc.