“Nope, I just don’t like to play games. For me, playing game is kind of wasting time.”
Said one of the young people that I met at Al-Qomariyah, an orphanage based in Bandung, Indonesia. That answer is a typical answer when I ask the kids whether they would like to play game or not. Then soon after we introduce our game, Dawn of Civilization, the kids glued their eyes to it. At the end of my observation, the same girl who complained, in the beginning, said: “Oh, I can pronounce ‘strategy’ correctly now.”
Our educational game app, Dawn of Civilization (DOC), contains various activities and learning contents that are systematically integrated to lead student’s intrinsic motivation. The gaming environment enables the students to enhance the learning experience which is usually unable to be obtained in a non-gaming learning environment.
As what Kapp (2012) proposed for the concept of game, “a system in which players engage in an abstract challenge, define by rules, interactivity, and feedback, that results in quantifiable outcome often eliciting an emotional reaction.” Building on the definition above, there are some elements of what constitutes an educational game:
- System. It is concern as a space in a game where each part of the system will be integrated with other parts.
- Players. A person who interacts with game content and trigger a cause of the changing game environment.
- Abstract. Game often mimics the reality but it is not precisely duplicate the reality.
- Challenge. Games provide a certain level of difficulty. It should be not under the players’ ability so the player will not easily be boring, but it’s shouldn’t be extremely hard that the player cannot be deal with it.
- Rules. It is a construction of the game including to define the winning state and also the losing state.
- Interactivity. Player interacts with the system, content that presented or with another player instead.
- Feedback. An instant, direct and clear feedback usually provided for the players.
- Quantifiable outcome. Score, level, or winning state define clearly certain outcome for the player.
- Emotional reaction. Involve emotional victorious winning state or a little dose frustration of defeated state. Exhilarating, anger, and sadness can be part of game too because a game is not only human interaction but also intertwined with various emotional event.