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The Effects of Badges and Avatar Identification on Play and Making in Educational Games

Published: 21 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

In our study (N=2189), we divided participants into 6 badge conditions: 1) Role model badges (e.g., Einstein), 2) Personal interest badges (e.g., Movies), 3) Achievement badges (e.g., "Code King"), 4) Choice, 5) Choice with badges always visible, and 6) No badges. Participants played a CS programming game, then used an editor to create their own level. Badges promoted avatar identification (personal interest, role model), player experience (achievement, role model), intrinsic motivation (achievement, role model), and self-efficacy (role model) during both the game and the editor. Independent of badges, avatar identification promoted player experience, intrinsic motivation, and self-efficacy. Additionally, avatar identification promoted greater overall time spent in both the game and the editor, and led to significantly higher overall quality of the completed game levels (as rated by 3 independent externally trained QA testers). Our study has implications for the design of badge systems and sheds new light on the effects of avatar identification on play and making.

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References

[1]
Samuel Abramovich, Christian Schunn, and Ross Mitsuo Higashi. 2013. Are badges useful in education?: It depends upon the type of badge and expertise of learner. Educational Technology Research and Development 61, 2 (2013), 217--232.nd Mike Zhengyu Yao. 2013. Gaming motivations, avatar-self identification and symptoms of online game addiction. Asian Journal of Communication 23, 5 (2013), 555--573.
[2]
Gabriel Zicherman and Christopher Cunningham. 2011. Gamification by design. Sebastobol, CA: O'Reilly Media (2011).

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  1. The Effects of Badges and Avatar Identification on Play and Making in Educational Games

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2018
    8489 pages
    ISBN:9781450356206
    DOI:10.1145/3173574
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 21 April 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. avatar
    2. avatar identification
    3. badges
    4. educational games
    5. level creation
    6. making
    7. virtual identity

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    CHI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 666 of 2,590 submissions, 26%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    • (2024)"Are we all in the same boat?" Customizable and Evolving Avatars to Improve Worker Engagement and Foster a Sense of Community in Online Crowd WorkProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642429(1-26)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)DungeonMaker: Embedding Tangible Creation and Destruction in Hybrid Board Games through Personal Fabrication TechnologyProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642243(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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    • (2024)Exploring how gender-anonymous voice avatars influence women’s performance in online computing group workInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103146181(103146)Online publication date: Jan-2024
    • (2024)Effect of External Characteristics of a Virtual Human Being During the Use of a Computer-Assisted Therapy ToolHuman-Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-60428-7_1(3-21)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
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    • (2023)A Matter of Perspective: Designing Immersive Character Transitions for Virtual Reality GamesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36110237:CHI PLAY(73-103)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
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