Agency

The “Agency” of a game does not always reference some cloak-and-dagger intelligence organization (like Marvel’s S.H.I.E.L.D.) (Marvel, n.d.) especially when trying to explain the research goals behind game-based learning. Here, agency is the act of controlling your own actions within the context of the game (Moore, 2016). This free will (Bell, n.d.) allows the player to move within the environment of the game and, if the game allows it, to explore and do tasks in any order, perhaps even opting to not complete some tasks if they are not explicitly required to progress through the game.

This unpredictable and non-linear progression through the activities of the game could lead to a problem in normalizing the data generated during the learning process. While this open agency encourages engagement by the learner/player, it can complicate the game learning analytics (GLA) if not properly prepared for. This design for agency (Reardon et al., 2022) in a game is what creates the gamification process as opposed to passively having the student be guided by the instructor.

Engagement

Agency begats engagement and engagement begats interaction and investment by the learner. This investment leads to deeper ingestion of the material and allows for the student to take ownership of and be accountable for the results of their experience. The game engine then enables game personalization which feeds back into the agency and continues the cycle all while generating personalized GLA data for the student.

Growth

The agency of the game promotes engagement and recurring engagement with the game action provides for iterative and repeatable effort to persevere until the game is won by appealing to the competitive nature of the student. The repetition then effectively creates growth of the student’s abilities and cognitive engagement and growth. This growth then provides opportunities to further explore options and experiences on new levels of play, each potentially bringing deeper levels of understanding and learning. This competitive growth then becomes a sense of accomplishment with the student instead of being just another day at school.

Social Networking

Humans are social creatures. The explosion of “social media” has tapped that vein successfully, but the merits of that tap are not what this discussion is about per se. The social networking and connections that humans have is a natural conduit for sharing knowledge as well as for encouragement. It also provides a context where the competitive nature can be leveraged. When students connect outside of the classroom, if the engagement level of the learning game is sufficient, then discussion will occur and when it does, then the reinforcement of the topics introduced in the game are revisited and explored even deeper than during the game. This social engagement could also be driven by the gamification where the successes one enjoys in the game are not kept to oneself, but are shared with others and can be, the competitive student, motivation to reengage with the game (ahem… learning system) and attempt to perform at a higher level, or remain engaged until they do.

Impressions

The combination of gamification, learning, and social networking as a holistic approach is intriguing because that should be obvious, but in thinking about my own experiences as a student and as a teacher in the classroom that isn’t the way things are typically done. That residual learning that takes place after you leave your desk isn’t accounted for in conventional instruction. Instead, once the book is closed or the classroom lights are turned off, then “learning stops” by traditional education standards. However, the reality is that “schooling” may have stopped, but education happens everywhere all the time. I’m glad to see that it may be possible to start leveraging that to our advantage as educators.

Newsflash

Understanding the term “agency” was the first thing I had to look up in my Funk & Wagnalls before reading this selection (Reardon et al., 2022) for comprehension. The term was always a synonym for organization or company for me in the past. Realizing that the deeper alternate use of the term was typically used as a “sense of agency” in the psychology and sociology sciences and was a cornerstone in understanding and analyzing what is going on when observing gameplay, the rest of the article started to make more sense. I found it funny that something as “simple” as a word like agency, which I thought I knew what it meant would pivot in such a different way as make everything else pivot to a new point-of-view. I guess that is the agency, the engagement, the growth, and (by way of this blog post) the social connection all rolled up into one. No X-box needed.  

References

Bell, K. (n.d.). Definition of Agency. Retrieved from Open Education Sociology Dictionary: https://sociologydictionary.org/agency/

Marvel. (n.d.). S.H.I.E.L.D. Retrieved from Marvel: https://www.marvel.com/teams-and-groups/s-h-i-e-l-d

Moore, J. W. (2016, August 29). What Is the Sense of Agency and Why Does it Matter? Frontiers in Psychology, 7(1272). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01272

Reardon, E., Kumar, V., & Revelle, G. (2022). Game Learning Analytics. In C. Lang, G. Siemens, A. F. Wise, D. Gašević, & A. Merceron (Eds.), Handbook of Learning Analytics (Second ed., pp. 152-162). Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR). https://doi.org/10.18608/hla22