LINKIT: EXPLORING THE USE OF A SERIOUS EDUCATIONAL GAME FOR RISK COMMUNICATION

ABSTRACT

In today‟s hectic environment, people are facing with risks in a plethora of ways. Researchers and practitioners of risk communication are always looking for effective ways to supply laypeople with the information they need to make informed and independent judgments about different types of risks. Meanwhile, the concept of serious games has gained great popularity in the past decade due to the great success of the digital game market. The work reported here explores if serious games can be used as a new way of conducting risk communication. We have created a serious game titled LinkIT. The design and first experiment experiences of LinkIT are described in detail. The preliminary evaluation suggested that LinkIT did improve players‟ knowledge in a specific context of risk management. Survey results revealed that participants preferred learning from LinkIT to learning from a paper-based material. We have also discovered factors that are correlated with the learning outcome and game experiences, which will also be discussed at length.

Chapter 1

Introduction

People like to be entertained and we have created countless games in our history. In the past decade, with the rapid development of information technologies, digital games have gained great popularity and have become dominant in the game market. In 2008, domestic sales of computer and video games reached $11.7 billion compared to the $10 billion of the domestic motion picture box office sales (Motion Picture Association of America, 2010). According to an annual survey conducted by the Entertainment Software Association, 67% of American households play games and the average time spent on playing digital games by game players is 18 hours per week (Entertainment Software Association, 2010).

Due to the great success of digital games, people in the industry and academia have tried to create digital games for different purposes in addition to providing entertaining experience. Digital games for education and training has been the major focus of these efforts in the past decade.

            At the same time, the area of risk communication is still trying to find new ways to supply laypeople with the information they need to make informed and independent judgments about different kinds of risks. There is no single obvious and simple approach to successfully communicate technical information about risks to the public. Currently, risk communication still heavily relies on traditional paper-based materials such as brochures and posters.

In this work, we developed a serious game titled LinkIT and explored if we can use it as a new way of conducting risk communication. We are particularly interested in the following research questions:

RQ1. Does LinkIT improve players’ knowledge?

RQ2. Is LinkIT more effective than directed self-learning?

RQ3. How do demographic factors, performance in the game, feelings of the game correlate with learning outcomes?

RQ4. Is LinkIT more fun than directed self-learning?

RQ5. How do demographic factors and performance in the game correlate with feelings of the game?

The paper flows as follows: Chapter 2 reviews concepts and literature that are related to this thesis. Chapter 3 introduces the purpose, basic mechanisms, and technical details of the LinkIT game. Chapter 4 introduces our design of the experiment including experiment procedure and data collection methods. Experiment results will be presented in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 concludes this paper with its findings and implications.

LINKIT: EXPLORING THE USE OF A SERIOUS EDUCATIONAL GAME FOR RISK COMMUNICATION

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