Democracy 3 lets play series#

While these instances are not necessarily related, there is opportunity to explore the use of video games' popularity to increase political participation.

Alongside this decline, video game popularity has meteorically risen among the same demographic, resulting in video games becoming increasingly more integrated within modern society.

Political participation in the United Kingdom among young voters (aged 18-24) has steadily declined over the past two decades. Overall, the paper contributes to the greater effort to bridge the gap between entertainment game design and educational game design, thereby facilitating the creation of games that are both motivational and educational. Based on the results of these studies, the present paper derives seven recommendations for the design of games on complex societal problems that can be used for educational purposes in geography education. Our research focused on different aspects such as the games' realism, complexity, geographical topics, facilitation of decision-making, and principles of political education, utilizing 18 game analyses and 8 qualitative interviews with game designers of these games.

Democracy 3 lets play series#

With this in mind, we conducted a series of studies on commercially successful and critically acclaimed simulation and strategy games such as Cities: Skylines, Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, and Tropico 6 referring to the topics of climate change, urban planning, migration, and/or resource management-from the perspective of geography education. We thus assume that educational game design can learn from entertainment games, i.e., must look at them in order to improve educational games when it comes to their allure, their simulation/moderation of complexity, and their enabling of meaningful choices. From the perspective of learning theory, this is insofar problematic as successful processes of learning require player motivation, great agency, and a wellbalanced level of complexity, which correspondents and adapts to players' knowledge and skills (Gee, 2007). Many educational games have been criticized for their lack of enticement to players, which is attributed, among other factors, to a low degree of complexity and a limited amount of choices, when compared to entertainment games (Sanford et al., 2015). An educational application of the games must, therefore, entail a critical reflection of players’ limited choices inside a necessarily biased system. This article also highlights the games’ shortcomings, from an educational perspective, as players’ decisions are restricted by the numbers of choices they can make within the game, and certain choices are rewarded more than others. Based on a comparative qualitative analysis of 17 games-organized into categories derived from a conceptual model of decision-making design-this article illustrates two ways in which these games may be useful in supporting the learning of dynamic decision-making in educational practice: (1) Players must take over the role of a decider and solve situations in which players must pursue different conflicting goals by making a continuous series of decisions on a variety of actions and measures (2) three of the features of the games are considered to structure players’ practice of decision-making and foster processes of learning through the curation of possible decisions, the offering of lucid feedback and the modification of time. This paper examines how digital strategy and management games that have been initially designed for entertainment can facilitate the practice of dynamic decision-making.