Designing Alternate Reality Games for effective learning: a methodology for implementing multimodal persistent gaming in university education

ABSTRACT

The Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is a relatively new form of gaming. Offering puzzles across a variety of media, ARGs require players to navigate digital and real worlds, form social connections, and demonstrate a wide variety of skills. This paper presents an Action Research approach to the use of ARGs in tertiary education contexts. Through two iterations of an Action Research cycle, the research identifies benefits in student engagement, attendance, attention to detail and connection with course materials. Through learning from the first cycle, a puzzle schema was developed for implementation in the second cycle. The first cycle also identified the need for a strong narrative structure for the game, and drew attention to a tension in the tradition of ontological ambiguity in ARGs: the ‘this is not a game’ fiction and the interpenetration of imaginary and real-world elements. Discarding this tradition in the second iteration, the research found significant advantages and no clear deficits in the clarification about the activity as a game. The research reaffirms the power of ARGs as a pedagogical tool, and offers a model of ARG implementation specifically designed for tertiary teaching environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Alternate reality
• game
• higher education
• pedagogy
• digital
• action research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rowan Tulloch

Rowan Tulloch is a lecturer in digital media and video gaming in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Literature, and Language at Macquarie University, Australia. His research looks at the technological and cultural logics embedded within practices of interactivity and play: from the neoliberal rhetoric of choice and agency in video gaming, to the surveillance architectures of gamification. He seeks to understand the relationship between play and power, and explore the systems that shape our leisure practices and preferences.

Helen Wolfenden

Helen Wolfenden is a lecturer in radio and podcasting at Macquarie University. Helen has spent much of her professional life as a radio broadcaster (presenter, producer, manager and researcher) with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Helen’s research interests include radio presenters’ on-air identity, the evolving form of audiobooks and radio practice as research methodology. More broadly, Helen is interested in the intersect of professional and academic knowledge and their usefulness to each other. Helen publishes both traditional and non-traditional research outputs.

Howard Sercombe

Howard Sercombe is a sociologist and practitioner, working in criminology and youth studies. He is interested in the operationalisation of multiple epistemologies, the development of youth discourse (including neuroscience discourses of adolescence), and processes of professionalization. Howard is currently Honorary Professor of Education at the University of Glasgow and teaches criminology at the University of New South Wales.