Misinformation is one society's most pressing issues, spreading division and chaos across the globe. Videogames have become one of the more promising mediums for misinformation interventions, teaching players common falsehood indicators and helping them develop their discernment abilities. This thesis details the design, playtesting, and…

Educational video games often engage students intuitively with visuals with quick, responsive actions to immerse students in authentic disciplinary practice. In contrast, typical formal learning environments engage students in conscious reflection with visual representations to understand underlying disciplinary concepts. Research has examined how…

This investigation narrates how digital game playing while integrating augmented reality can help enhance higher-order thinking. Digital game playing, when referring to games played on computers, game consoles, or handhelds, can be considered a powerful learning tool in education. The central problem of this investigation lies in the fact that…

This dissertation examines the possibilities and anxieties that attend a notion haunting Western thought since at least Kant--that reality itself is a revisable construct, a kind of collective game with social and physical rules that simultaneously delimit and solicit radical interactivity. Investigating experiments in the gamification of reality…

The playground is a space where play is encouraged and happens most freely. Online communities can be imagined as playgrounds. In addition to face-to-face playgrounds, these "online playgrounds" mediate the embodied experience, but in a different way. In the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), to better understand play, I shift…

Streaming is an emerging practice of videogame culture, where a player broadcasts a live capture of their game-play to an audience. Every day Twitch.tv, the most popular streaming platform, features thousands of streams broadcast to millions of viewers. Streams are detailed multimedia artifacts, and their study allows us to understand how the…

As society shifts towards spending more time online for business and leisure, examining human behavior in virtual environments is crucial. To better understand the role that games play in our society, I analyze social experience in World of Warcraft (WoW), one of the longest running massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMO). Since its…

With the emergence of more narrative-focused video games, this study attempted to better understand how college students construct meaning through these interactive experiences as a means of understanding social and cultural differences and perspectives. This study explored how playing narrative-focused video games may interconnect with college…

Educators, administrators, and researchers continue to search for a solution to return play to kindergarten classrooms while encouraging the use of technology to meet federal education standards. A review of the literature showed a gap in strategies for implementing play, findings were lacking on video games with digital badges in education, and…

This research investigates the responses of three individuals engaging with the Super Mario World (SMW) platform videogame glitches, and how they learned to solve the problem without formal help. This investigation was chosen because it explores connections between media literacy, critical thinking, and play in adults in the context of responding…

This study examines the differences in play behaviors demonstrated by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) when they engage in play with typically developing (TD) peers. Pairs of elementary school students, ages eight to 11, engaged in play in three settings: typical school recess, facilitated play led by adults, and kinetic technology…

In the broadest scope, the purpose of this research is to expose the range and complexity of how educational games support learning. In a more narrowed scope, the purpose is to develop a method to help identify the qualities of educational video games that support learning. This is accomplished by analyzing the design of the game and the…

Video games have become an integral part of the day to day lives of many people across gender, race, and age in the United States. They have become particularly important in the college student population, with nearly two thirds of all college students playing on a regular basis (Lee, 2003). While much of the scholarly research in this area…

"Igniting GameZombie TV" utilizes an accessible, energetic, postmodern style to recall how Spencer Striker founded GameZombie TV at Indiana University in the fall of 2006, built the project into an award-winning game media studio, and then expanded the initiative to the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 2009. Through grit and a…

This study explored media usage among adolescents and its relations to academic performance and aggressive behavior from a qualitative research perspective. This study represents the first of its kind by utilizing a phenomenological methodology to gain insights about lived experiences of adolescents' media use relative to their academic…