Digital Educational Games and DGBL
This section distinguishes between educational or serious games, entertainment games, and gamification in order to explain the authors’ stance on the position of digital educational games, as despite their similarities, these terms are not interchangeable. Digital games, also called video games or computer games, are played on a computer, game console, smartphone, or tablet (Fadda et al., 2022). Educational games combine learning with gameplay (Hussein et al., 2022). To distinguish them from entertainment games, in the gaming industry educational games are referred to as serious games. Serious games often use graphical simulations of reality to meet learning or training goals for a specific stakeholder or user group (Martens & Muller, 2016). However, serious games may also be designed for purposes other than education, such as behaviour change or therapy. Thus, two terms came to existence: applied games and educational games. Because the applied game does not necessarily teach (e.g., applied games may be used for healthcare), we will use the term digital educational game for games used in an educational context where the intention is to learn rather than to have fun. The term gamification describes the utilization of game design elements in non-game contexts (Deterding et al., 2011). Gamification is often limited to points, badges, levels, and leader boards. Some scholars view gamification more broadly. For instance, Chou (2019) identifies eight core drives—epic meaning, accomplishment, empowerment, ownership, social influence, scarcity, unpredictability, and avoidance—that can be found in various games. These drives may inspire the gamification of other activities. This paper examines the use of digital educational games as opposed to the use of gamification. DGBL is seen as a student-centred approach in which educational goals and content are incorporated into games to encourage students to learn and advance their knowledge and skills by providing an engaging learning environment.