Intentional Playing and Unintentional Learning

Intentional Playing and Unintentional Learning Rebecca Ferriday (Digital Education Specialist and PhD student, Cardiff University) I’m carrying out research around the unintended consequences higher education students experience when they play a specific genre of video game: The OpenWorld Role Playing Game (OWRPG), and how these unanticipated events impact (positively or negatively) on their studies. “But what on earth prompted you to do this?” you may ask.  That’s a very good question.  At the tail-end of the pandemic, I was working from home and had endured another long day filled with Teams meetings. The final meeting of the day was…difficult, and I logged out and switched off my laptop feeling frustrated, angry and not a little defeated. A go-to method of releasing negative emotions, for me, is to switch on my Xbox and lay waste to hordes of digital enemies in order to calm down, so I decided to play a game called Assassin’s Creed Origins, an OWRPG set in Ancient Egypt, hoping to recalibrate my mood through play. You’ll be delighted to hear that this worked. A few weeks later while taking part in an online quiz, I realised that I knew the answer to a question about Ancient Egyptian history purely because I had randomly engaged in a discussion with a non-player character in Assassin’s Creed Origins about, of all things, pregnancy testing.  (Women who suspected they may be pregnant urinated daily into two separate bags; one filled with wheat and the other with barley. If either sprouted, the woman was considered pregnant. The bag that sprouted indicated whether the baby was a girl or a boy.) The more I considered this, the more I realised I had learned several other unrelated facts and concepts through playing OWRPGs. Intrigued as to whether other gamers had also learned anything unintentionally, I applied to be a PhD student, and 3 years of research later, here I am, excited to share just one of the unintended consequences the data revealed! Existing research around the potential for video games to improve students’ skills development does exist but focuses solely on the acquisition of language. While lexical acquisition was evidenced in the interviews I carried out with my research participants, it was revealed that a further 33 individual skills had been learned, practiced, and honed through play. This certainly adds weight to my argument that incidental learning takes place when playing OWRPGs, and that this form of knowledge acquisition is a powerful method for retaining knowledge via deep learning.  A useful lens through which to evaluate the impact of incidental learning via OWRPGs is Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an educational framework that guides the creation of flexible learning environments, aims to remove barriers to learning, and in doing so, accommodate diverse learner needs from the outset. The framework seeks to provide multiple options for how students can engage with, represent, and express what they know, thereby offering inclusive and accessible learning experiences for all, and is built on three principles: Multiple Means of Engagement to provide various ways for students to be interested, motivated, and connected to the material, Multiple Means of Representation to offer different ways for students to access and process information, and Multiple Means of Action and Expression, to give learners diverse ways to demonstrate their knowledge and skills. Further context can be found by linking incidental learning to a number of semiotic domains; that is, structured contexts that uses multiple modalities such as language, images, symbols, or actions to create and convey meaning, lending knowledge and skills acquisition credence over and above simply being ‘happy accidents’, or that any ‘unexpected learning’ that has taken place is of little or no importance. In my presentation I’ll be looking at UDL and these semiotic domains and how they map to the breadth of skills my research participants have learned through incidental learning while playing a range of OWRPGs. I will also be demonstrating how these skills can be categorised as being academic, personal, and employability skills, and how they are important for 21st century university students as they enter an uncertain world and even more uncertain workplaces in the future.