Intrinsic fantasy: motivation and affect in educational games

The concept of intrinsic fantasy has been considered central to the aim of usefully applying the positive affect of computer games to learning. Games with intrinsic fantasy are defined as having “an integral and continuing relationship with the instructional content being presented”, and are claimed as “more interesting and more educational” than extrinsic fantasy games [1]. Studies of children making educational games have shown they usually create extrinsic games for curriculum learning content. In this study, children were encouraged to create non-curriculum games, more easily distanced from the extrinsic preconceptions of formal schooling. Forty, 7-11 year olds took part in this study (17 boys and 23 girls), designing and making their own games at an after-school club. Despite non-curriculum learning content, no more intrinsic games were created than in previous studies. The children failed to create their own pedagogical models for non-curriculum content and did not see the educational value of intrinsic fantasy games. The implications for transfer and learning in intrinsic games are discussed whilst the definition of intrinsic fantasy itself is questioned. It is argued that the integral relationship of fantasy is unlikely to be the most critical means of improving the educational effectiveness of digital games. Pioneering work by Malone and Lepper in the 80s used computer games as a platform for studying intrinsic motivations for learning. This work produced a taxonomy identifying four categories of individual motivations responsible for the positive affect created by computer games: challenge, fantasy, curiosity and control [1-7]. The theory behind the taxonomy suggests that the motivational effect of a challenge depends on engaging a player’s self-esteem using personally meaningful goals with uncertain outcomes. Uncertainty can be achieved through variable difficulty levels, multiple level goals, hidden information and randomness. It also proposes that it is the emotional appeal of fantasy and the sensory and cognitive components of curiosity that provide their motivational effect in digital games. It further suggests that cognitive curiosity is aroused when learners discover that their knowledge is incomplete, inconsistent, or unparsimonious. The motivational effect of control is attributed to empowerment and self-determination, suggesting that it is affected by the range of choices offered by a game, the extent to which outcomes are dependant on the responses of the player, and the inherent power of these responses. In addition it proposes that the perceived level of control is more important to motivation than the actual level of control. Whilst these theories did not focus on what makes games educational, they made a significant theoretical claim by attributing educational benefits produced by the positive affect of fantasy to the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic fantasy. Based on a number of empirical studies it was proposed that, “in general, [intrinsic] fantasies are both more interesting and more educational than [extrinsic] fantasies” [7]. An educational game with intrinsic fantasy is defined as one in which “the skill being learned and the fantasy depend on each other” and “there is an integral and continuing relationship between the fantasy context and the instructional content being presented” [7, p. 240]. Conversely an educational game with extrinsic fantasy is defined as “one in which the fantasy depends on the skill being learned but not vice versa”. To illustrate this we could contrast the extrinsic fantasy of ‘hanging a man’ in a game of computer hangman, with the intrinsic fantasy of ‘darts and dartboard’ in a game of computer darts. The fantasy context of hangman is usually applied to a spelling exercise, guessing missing letters in a word, but could just as easily be applied to a mathematics exercise, guessing missing numbers in a sum. However in the fantasy context of darts, using mathematics is intrinsic to the strategy of reducing a score to zero without a remainder and cannot be removed without fundamentally changing the game. Two previous studies of educational games made by children found that children rarely attempt to create educational computer games with intrinsic fantasies [8, 9]. This would seem to suggest that children do not naturally attempt to harness the motivational potential of computer games in the most effective way. The explanations offered for this included the extra difficulty in creating intrinsic games, a design tension between game and educational content, and the prevalence of extrinsic question and answer models in ‘edutainment’ and teaching practice in schools. However, these studies concentrated mainly on learning content from the traditional school curriculum such as fractions. In the current study children were encouraged to create computer games that taught noncurriculum learning content that might be distanced from the extrinsic teaching methods used in school. They were also provided with concrete examples of games containing both intrinsic and extrinsic fantasy as models for completing the exercise. In this way we hoped to gain a deeper understanding of children’s attitudes and preferences for intrinsic and extrinsic fantasy and how the positive affect of computer games might be more effectively applied in creating educational digital games.