Serious games are increasingly used by business educators to improve learning outcomes. Student enjoyment is a major factor in these outcomes, for the learning effectiveness of serious games depends in large part on the enjoyment that students experience when playing them. The literature on serious games has shown that there is a link between performance and enjoyment: students who perform well when they play serious games derive greater enjoyment from them. However, the way to help students perform better remains unclear. This chapter examines a mediation model for the relationship between computer game experience, computer game self-efficacy, student enjoyment in learning contexts with computer games, and the improvement of the gaming performance of students. The findings point to four ways for educators to help students develop computer game experience and computer game self-efficacy and improve their learning outcomes.
TopIntroduction
To teach topics related to decision-making more effectively, business educators make extensive use of serious games such as ERPsim and Cyber Attack. These games can help students improve their understanding of decision-making in various areas, including ERP systems and IT project management (Thériault et al., 2021).
Prior research has shown that the learning effectiveness of serious games depends on the enjoyment that students experience while playing them (Breuer & Bente, 2010; Prensky, 2007) and that this enjoyment can be increased by helping students perform better (Thériault et al., 2021). In other words, when students perform well in the game, this leads to greater enjoyment and ultimately to better learning outcomes.
Unfortunately, not all students perform well when playing serious games (Thériault et al., 2021). Given that greater enjoyment is associated with better learning outcomes, this is pedagogically problematic. Ideally, all students should perform well when they play serious games, but they should also enjoy playing them and learn as much as possible about decision-making topics at the same time (Zohari et al., 2023).
Despite the importance of performance for perceived enjoyment and associated learning outcomes when students play serious games, business educators still have difficulty finding ways to help students perform better when they play these games (Thériault et al., 2021).
To address this issue, the present investigation responds to the following research question:
RQ: Given that increased enjoyment and learning are associated with better gaming performance, how can business educators help students improve their performance when they play serious games?
By answering this question, the present investigation contributes to the business education literature. In particular, it highlights one of the causes of higher student performance at serious games and the downstream impact of this performance on student enjoyment. This contributes to the business education literature on serious games in three main ways. First, researchers have been calling for some time for an in-depth examination of the factors that lead to enjoyment and ultimately to better learning outcomes when students play serious games (Prensky, 2007). In particular, researchers have stressed the need to identify the underlying influential mechanisms that are responsible for generating student enjoyment. However, they have not yet discovered these mechanisms (Thériault et al., 2021; Zohari et al., 2023). Second, their research has focused on the consequences of student enjoyment for learning outcomes rather than on how to achieve enjoyment in the first place. More work is required to improve understanding of how to help students enjoy playing serious games. Third, although gaming performance has been identified as a key factor for enjoyment, it remains unclear how to help students improve their performance in the game (Thériault et al., 2021). Therefore, it is necessary to expand the work of business education researchers by investigating how student performance in the game and ultimately student enjoyment with the game can be enhanced. In the process of explaining this enhancement, the present investigation also improves understanding of the role that the computer game experience of students plays in the nomological network of gaming performance and enjoyment.
Since the present investigation seeks to shed light on the mechanisms that lead to performance in the game and to student enjoyment, it will be necessary to use mediation concepts and mediation analysis. Mediation concepts and analysis help identify the specific mechanisms underlying gaming performance and enjoyment because they enable researchers to examine the process by which these outcomes can be achieved (Hayes, 2022; Montoya & Hayes, 2017).