Game-based learning as performance: The case of legends of Alkhimia

Abstract

The evaluation of learning outcomes associated with game-based learning is fraught with conflict and confusion. Many serious game developers uncritically use content mastery as the yardstick of learner progress and achievement. Other developers train simple skills in a drill-and-practice fashion in the belief that games are best used to motivate student interest in subject domains that students find boring or tedious to learn. This paper has two parts. The first part is theoretical, and the second part consists of an illustrative case. In the first part, I examine computer and video games as a unique digital medium that supports first-person immersive learning. I interrogate what kind of epistemology is entailed when learning takes place in the first-person. Drawing upon the philosophy of pragmatism, I argue that a powerful and appropriate way to assess game-based learning outcomes using such games is through the construct of performance. This construct is grounded in the literature related to performance theory and performance studies. A performative stance, I argue, is productive for viewing learning through the theoretical lens of being and becoming because game play involves being a person on a developmental trajectory of becoming. Locating learning within a socio-cultural context, I show how the construction of identity has a vital role to play in a performance-oriented theory of learning. In the second part of the paper, I reify the theoretical ideas above via the educational game “Legends of Alkhimia” (LoA). This game has been developed at our research centre. It will be used in two classrooms, in separate schools, in mid-2010. LoA is a multiplayer game that supports up to four concurrent users. The game is designed to support authentic learning of chemistry by 14-year-olds at the lower secondary school level. The underlying pedagogy is one of learning as inquiry, in the spirit of Dewey. Dialogism and the enaction of identity are key elements of the curriculum’s learning design. In the LoA game, students have to solve the mystery of recent strange happenings in the once sleepy town of Alkhimia. In tackling this challenge, students engage in doing chemistry to create effective weapons that can repel marauding monsters that appear out of nowhere, and they work to fulfil missions for the good of various inhabitants of the town. They slowly become acquainted with the legends of Alkhimia and learn that not all is as it appears. By engaging in the learning program, the goal is that students will develop a practical sense with and of chemistry as a professional domain of practice. In so doing, they appropriate the habitus of professional practice and develop the values and dispositions of critical reflexivity and epistemological vigilance. In short, they learn to become chemists.