How cheating and conation affect game-based learning: A study about player behavior in a learning context

Andersen, Josephine Søgaard ; Bukdahl, Nicholas Egede

4. term

Medialogy, Master

2016

2016-06-09

129 pages

This thesis seeks to investigates how learning outcome and conation is affected when players cheat in video games. Being a cheater in video games is a strong label, one does not want this as part of their self-image, and players go to great lengths to debate their innocence or by abstracting the action. Anonymity can tempt players into cheating, which was tested during this thesis. By implementing a cheat button into a simple quiz style game of the European flags, it was investigated how many times the participants would press the button. At the same time, the participants were asked to name as many of the countries based on their flags as possible before and after playing the game. Using the Levenshtein minimum string distance, the error rate of the inputs was calculated and if they did not exceed the threshold, accepted as a correct answer. Though none of these results showed any statistical significance using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test (n=51), there was a tendency towards an increase in learning outcome, but there was no noticeable difference between the conditions.

conation ; game-based learning ; cheating ; games ; player behavior ; behavior ; learning ; continuation desire ; flow theory ; engagement

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