Narrative Games for Learning: Testing the Discovery and Narrative Hypotheses

Strong claims are made for the potential educational effectiveness of narrative-based adventure games, but evidence about how to construct effective educational games is needed (Clark, Yates, Early, & Moulton, 2010; O'Neil & Perez, 2008). College students played a computer-based narrative discovery learning game called Crystal Island (Spires et al., 2010), in which they learned about pathogens (in Experiment 1), or one called Cache 17 (Koenig, 2008), in which they learned how electromechanical devices work (in Experiment 2). In media comparison tests, participants who learned by playing the game performed worse than students who learned from a matched slideshow presentation on retention (d = 1.37), transfer (d = 0.57), and difficulty rating (d = 0.93) in Experiment 1 and on posttest score (d = 0.31) and learning time (d = 2.89) in Experiment 2. In value-added tests, taking away the narrative theme concerning a detective story in the Cache 17 game did not significantly affect students' posttest score (d = -0.16) or learning time (d = -0.22) in Experiment 2. Overall, these results provide no evidence that computer-based narrative games offer a superior venue for academic learning under short time spans of under 2 hr. Findings contradict the discovery hypothesis that students learn better when they do hands-on activities in engaging scenarios during learning and the narrative hypothesis that students learn better when games have a strong narrative theme, although there is no evidence concerning longer periods of game play.