Challenging Games or Digital Textbooks? Content analysis of message structure and learning principles in serious games

Previous studies on game-based learning have proposed many factors that make video games good learning tools. This study uses content analysis to assess whether these theories are applied to the designs of web-based games for learning. The samples for this study are 90 pro-environmental video games randomly sample from the internet. Results from this study showed that despite the assumptions that video games are different from textbook in presenting knowledge not as fact, but as interactive problems to solve. This study found that a majority (47.13%) of the games presented their educational messages in a mixture of facts and open-ended problems. The games also incorporated different degrees of learning principles suggested by previous studies into their design. This study argues that we might be able to predict the learning potential of a serious game by measuring the way intended messages are structured in game instructions.