Office Madness: Investigating the impact of a game using a real life job and programming scenario on player experience and perceived short-term learning

Abstract

Serious games, or more specifically educational games, are considered to be suitable to motivate and engage users in learning through playing. Serious games take advantage of successful game mechanics used in entertainment games in order to engage players in learning cognitively demanding subjects, such as computer programming. Several games for computer programming have been developed and their majority utilizes a role-playing or puzzle game scenario. In this article, a new game for learning the C++ programming language targeted to young adults is presented. The distinctive feature of the proposed game, called Office Madness, is the use of a real life job and programming game scenario. Office Madness was designed taking into account both educational games for programming and entertainment games, as well as the EFM design model. The main goal of the study presented is to investigate the impact of a game using a real life job and programming scenario on player experience and short-term learning. One hundred and seventy-four final-year students of an Informatics Department play-tested the game and provided feedback through an online questionnaire based on the MEEGA+ model. The results show that the use of a real life scenario had a positive impact on player experience and short-term learning.