How games work: A case study of role-playing games as instructional documentation

In recent years, scholars have discussed the cultural, social, and rhetorical significance of video games as artifacts worthy of further study—and perhaps more importantly have formed an academic basis for legitimizing the field of studying games. What these studies lack, however, is an understanding of how to apply such knowledge. That is, we know that games are valuable modes of rhetorical, social, and cultural inquiry; what we do not know is exactly how and why they function the way that they do. Additional studies have emphasized not just the theoretical importance of games but also the application of learning with games. Exploratory studies on community building, participatory culture, and formations of self, gender, and identity, have further strengthened the argument of the powerful pedagogical possibilities of games and virtual worlds. And further research has gone in the opposite direction, by exploring ways of gamifying the classroom as a means of subverting traditional methods of assessment and learning. However, none of these studies discuss why what they’re proposing actually works from an angle of instructional design. That is, theoretically we know that games and game-based learning can be effective; what we do not know is exactly how it is accomplished.

Therefore, in this dissertation study I uncovered and explored the specific instructional approaches that games use to engage and teach their players. The goal of this research was to go beyond the theoretical understandings of gaming as rhetorical, social, and cultural experience and instead identify a practical, applications-based approach to understanding games as instructional design artifacts. Through in-depth case study research, I ultimately unearthed a set of heuristics that can be used in future studies about games and learning, as well as a set of best practices in instructional design—filtered through the lens of role-playing games (RPGs)—that can potentially be used in several different ways, including how to study video games as instructional documentation and how to construct a higher education classroom as a game.

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