The mobile gaming phenomenon "Pokémon Go" is one of the first successful mainstream games to feature augmented reality (AR) components, giving players the feeling of hunting Pokémon in real-life settings. "Pokémon Go" offers players access to "Pokélayer," a game layer laid on top of the real world, combining GPS and…

War videogames raise a lot of controversy in the educational field and are by far the most played videogames worldwide. This study explores the factors that encouraged gamers to choose war videogames with a sample of 387 Call of Duty players. The motivational factors were pinpointed using a non-experimental descriptive exploratory study through an…

A Hypercontextualized Game (HCG) is a locally designed game that supports its players in gathering context-specific information and in-depth understanding and knowledge regarding the context of a site. LIEKSAMYST, an exciting mobile application, with which visitors can play various games based on stories, was originally developed for the open-air…

Millions of children and adults devote much of their leisure time to playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Most observers commonly categorize computer games as a play activity, but this article asks whether MMORPGs contain activities that might not be play. The author examines the phenomenon of online gaming and…

Social interactions within virtual communities are often described solely as being online experiences. Such descriptions are limited, for they fail to reference life external to the screen. The terms "virtual" and "real" have a negative connotation for many people and can even be interpreted to mean that something is "false" or "inauthentic."…

In this paper we explore students' engagement in a new media enhanced problem-based learning (PBL) environment and investigate the characteristics of these environments that facilitate learning. We investigated both student experiences using a new media enhanced PBL environment and the specific elements students found most supportive of their…

"World of Warcraft" is an online computer game with over nine million players, many of them technically-minded young males. A proportion of these young males engage in spontaneous creative writing about their game adventures. They enjoy highly formulaic genres, such as the epic poem, with its complex technical requirements. This has…

Videogames challenge our notions of identity, creativity, and moral value, and provide a powerful new avenue for teaching and learning. This book is a rich and provocative guide to the role of interactive media in cultural learning. It searches for specific ways to interpret videogames in the context of human experience and in the field of…

This paper describes the forms of knowledge used by players of fantasy sports, games where players create ideal sports teams and compete to accumulate points based on professional athletes' statistical performances. Messages from a discussion forum associated with a popular fantasy basketball game were analyzed to understand how players described…