Time as a Heuristic in Serious Games for Education
Răzvan Rughiniș
Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest,
Splaiul Independenței 313, 060042 Bucharest, Romania
Keywords: Serious Games, Educational Games, Time, Timescapes, Time Work, Time Frames.
Abstract: The article proposes a conceptual framework for studying the organization of time in educational games. A
time-focused analysis can productively examine time frames and time work in a serious game, in order to
understand its timescapes of learning, and its politics of time. Games may be designed to accommodate
strategies of play of variable time intensity, to assist players’ time work, to support dynamics of learning, to
encourage knowledge of history and foresight, and to illustrate various economies of time.
1 INTRODUCTION
This paper is written at the convergence of two
topics of growing relevance. On the one hand, new
communication technologies lead to transformations
in temporal experiences – especially to feelings of
time acceleration and scarcity (Wajcman, 2008);
they also make possible new tools for measuring and
monitoring time, planning and coordinating
activities. On the second hand, there is an increasing
understanding and use of digital games as learning
experience (Prensky, 2001); (Gee, 2003). Digital
games are sophisticated constructions that require
time to play, make time go by faster, create new
time lines, include instruments for tracking and
allocating time, and, all in all, allow for a rich array
of “time work” activities (Flaherty, 2003). We focus
on the time of gameplay in educational settings: how
can it be productively analyzed? How can it be
designed to support learning?
Time is a rare topic in studies of educational
games, particularly in engineering, because they
often involve simple play strategies, do not require
player coordination, and their play time (duration,
timing, synchronization etc.) is regulated as a
classroom activity (see for example J.M.D. Hill et
al., 2003; Eagle and Barnes, 2008; Maragos and
Grigoriadou, 2007; Leong et al., n.d.). Still, games
with more complex strategies require time design
and management. This applies to games that last
longer, for voluntary games that invite players’
attention outside classroom hours, as well as for
learning based on social gaming, in which players’
synchronization and the constitution of longer-term
communities are crucial objectives (see Hicks, 2010;
Yoon et al., 2011; Whitson and Dormann, 2011). As
students and instructors gradually become more
sophisticated game players, complex design, with
rigorous time organization, becomes an increasingly
available option, possibly even required for learning
impact.
We argue that time is a useful heuristic in
designing and evaluating digital games for
education. We propose a conceptual framework to
guide the inquiry. We discuss “timescapes”, “time
work” and “time frames” as useful analytical tools to
study temporal arrangements and the politics of time
in any project. We then examine the heuristic
productivity of a time-focused lens in the study of
educational games, and we formulate several
orienting questions.
2 CONCEPTS AND QUESTIONS
IN THE STUDY OF TIME
ORGANIZATION
What are the merits of a “temporal gaze” (Adam,
2000), an analytical perspective focused on time?
Looking at several analyses that put to work
empirical evidence to theorize time, such as Adam
(1990, 2000), Levine (2003), Roth et al. (2008), Too
and Harvey (2009), and Mercer (2008), we can see
that such a focus address two main concerns:
1) On the one hand, it supports an examination of
the “timescape” (Adam, 2000; Too and Harvey,
580
RughiniÈ
´
Z R..
Time as a Heuristic in Serious Games for Education.
DOI: 10.5220/0004388605800585
In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 580-585
ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
2009) in which a phenomenon takes place. If
landscapes include all elements of context that
inform actions, timescapes make explicit the
dimension of time. We can thus observe how some
actors take into account (or ignore) possible
“temporal horizons” (Hitlin and Elder, 2007) (for
example: the near past, the distant future); how
activities produce resources for one another through
synchronization - or fail to do so, sometimes as a
matter of segregation by design (Groves et al.,
2011); how reflecting on the past shapes the
evolution of a social practice. If we become alert to
the timescape of a social activity, we can then
proceed to extend it beyond taken-for-granted time
borders. For example, we can pay attention to its
histories, pre-histories or preparatory stages (Levine,
2003); (Adam, 2000); (Mercer, 2008), or to its post-
events and various futures.
2) On the second hand, a focus on time makes us
aware of the politics of time: how does a certain
time organization becomes ‘normal’ and thus
normative? Who are the winners and who are the
losers of a particular time ordering? What happens
when several forms of time organization conflict
(Roth et al., 2008)? By looking into the temporal
structure of an activity, we can also see how a
process defined by specific temporal horizons and
resources creates results that are later used as a-
temporal facts (Levine, 2003); (Adam, 2000). By
noticing the regular, ‘normal’ organization of time
we can then ‘play with time’: we can re-do it in a
surprising setup, in order to unravel unseen social
arrangements, or just ‘for fun’ - as in digital games
that include intricate time lines (Zagal and Mateas,
2010).
For example, educational games are vulnerable
to problems introduced by divergent gaming styles.
Students who dedicate long hours of play, with a
power gaming orientation, become game elites –
while more casual players are disadvantaged and
discouraged to play. The management of time is
crucial in order to balance different objectives of
educational games – such as to engage players, to
offer a level playing field, and to maintain
convergence with course objectives. Game designers
may introduce incentives to orient play strategies;
still, results depend on players’ contextual ways of
dealing with technological affordances and
limitations.
When looking at how designers and players
configure gaming experiences, another useful
concept is time work, which Flaherty (2003) defines
as “efforts to control or manipulate duration,
frequency, sequence, timing, and allocation” of time
for a given activity. This concept is useful for
directing our attention towards people’s agency in
making time, in changing the timescapes that in turn
contextualize their actions.
2.1 Time in Games
Time is an important concern for game designers
(Tychsen and Hitchens, 2008). Gaming experiences
are shaped by many calibrations of duration, rhythm,
speed, synchronization, and players’ degree of
control of game world time. In the field of video
game research, there is a consistent thread of
reflection concerning temporal organization (Zagal
and Mateas, 2010); (Juul, 2004); (Tychsen and
Hitchens, 2008). Of all conceptual distinctions, we
have found Zagal’s and Mateas’ (2010)
classification of “time frames” to be most useful for
our research, because it facilitates the study of the
relationships between a game and its social
environment.
While Adam refers to rather broad time frames,
such as natural, cosmic (seasons, days etc),
embodied (cycles of reproduction or of cell renewal)
and cultural (calendar time, clock time), Zagal and
Mateas define time frames as any “set of events,
along with the temporality induced by the
relationships between events” (idem, p. 848). The
analyst is in charge of deciding the relevant events
that constitute a time frame. The authors
differentiate four frames that they propose as being
“commonly relevant” for video game analysis (p.
852). Real world time includes events from the
player’s body and her physical world surroundings.
Gameworld time refers to events that occur in the
game world, which may be initated by the players or
not. Both real world and gameworld time can be
productively analyzed in terms of cycles, durations,
countdowns, and triggers (idem); relationships
between the two frames shape the gaming
experience. Coordination time includes events of
player coordination, such as organizing rounds and
turns. Fictive time is the set of references that link
various game events to culturally-defined labels,
derived from historical or fictional stories.
The advantage of this conceptualization is that
other frames can be developed to include subsets of
events that are relevant for a given analysis. Zagal
and Mateas illustrate this by introducing the
interface frame as the “set of events that take place
in the game’s user interface” (idem, p. 860). We can
see that the interface frame groups events included
in gameworld time; still, it is a heuristically
powerful concept because it helps us observe what
TimeasaHeuristicinSeriousGamesforEducation
581
particular moments of gameplay are emphasized,
and how players’ actions are sensorially formulated
and published, with consequences on players’
decision context and feedback, reputations, and their
resulting motivation to engage with the game.
From this perspective, we see that time work can
include not only the control of the temporal
properties (duration, frequency etc.) within a given
time frame, but also the management of multiple
time frames (inter-relating them, pushing them to the
fore or background of decision-making), and the
creation of novel time frames through which to
experience or to observe time.
For example, designers of serious games may
introduce metagaming time frames, by creating
social events in which game and gameplay are
discussed and reflected upon. Such events – focus
group meetings, peer content generation, social
gatherings involving players and designers, social
web technologies (Trăușan-Matu et al., 2009) –
would constitute a distinctive time frame, producing
and organizing learning through reflexive gaming.
Another way of using time frames in order to
adjust serious games to learning contexts consists in
the configuration of the interface frame. In order to
encourage a variety of play styles, a game may be
internally diversified, through a looser focus on total
game scores, and a more prominent role for diverse
achievements. Players’ status in the gameworld is
dependent on their opportunities for self-
presentation. An interface that brings to the fore the
total game score, in which game progress is
measured by quantitative changes in one’s overall
rank, stimulates competition, but may discourage
participation at the margins of the ranking. An
interface that captures and displays temporary
successes, through achievements or other mentions,
without melting them into a unified metric, may
afford a more diverse player engagement, tolerant
with uneven rhythms of gaming.
2.2 Time as a Heuristic in the Study
of Educational Games
Challenges for the organization of time in games are
to a large extent game-specific; there are, still, some
issues of common relevance, concerning player
engagement. Games that are used in learning
projects pose additional, specific challenges. Some
derive from managing learning as a temporal
process; others refer to the timescape of the subject
matter. An overview of these three layers of
challenges is presented in Table 1; we discuss each
of them below.
2.2.1 Game Time and Player Engagement
Firstly, a shared objective of games consists in
motivating and enabling potential players to make
time for actual game play: that is, motivating
newcomers to enter the game at later times, and
motivating a diversity of older players to keep on
playing. We use Yee’s classification of three
motivational drives in gameplay, namely
achievement, social life, and immersion (Yee, 2006),
to discuss specific challenges:
• As regards achievement, a difficulty consists in
loosening the strong coupling of game performance
to time consumption (Steinkuehler, 2006). This
uncoupling can be pursued by introducing multiple
(qualitative) types of accomplishments,
corresponding to different (quantitative) levels of
time investment. It can also be realized by using
various time metrics (duration, speed, coordination,
prediction etc.) to define performance.
• As regards social life, common challenges in the
organization of game time include: 1. supporting in-
game socializing by synchronous, joint play; 2.
supporting asynchronous interaction between
players; 3. the creation of rich characters that display
their in-game biographies and reputations.
• As regards immersion, it is also dependent on the
temporality of game play. A game can facilitate
engagement by: 1) a fictive time frame that supports
the vividness of the game world and characters
(Zagal and Mateas, 2010); 2) balancing the speed of
game events and players’ skills to maintain the flow
of play (Chen, 2007); 3) managing “dead time”
(including waiting, or character grind time) (Juul,
2004), (Van Meurs, 2011); players may also deal
with dead time through rule-bending (Consalvo,
2009) that affects other players’ motivation.
Secondly, games may also provide means to
assist players in their time work, including the effort
of converting real world time into play time. Games
may support players by a variety of options and
tools: the possibility of achieving noteworthy results
in short lapses of engagement, accessibility on
mobile devices, tools for monitoring time indicators
during play (speed, duration, countdown etc.), tools
for monitoring the gameworld while not playing,
reminders, and so on.
Thirdly, game designers may consider engaging
players in the evaluation of the game and the
construction of future editions, thus articulating the
game history with players’ biographies.
CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
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Table 1: A time-focused perspective on educational games.
Topics Game timescapes Game politics of time
All games
1.Time in
games
1. Motivating players: uncoupling
achievement from time consumption;
supporting socialization and in-game
biographies; creating a gameworld
with a distinctive experience of time;
2. Supporting players’ time work;
3. Engaging players in the game
evolution;
1. What sort of time work is required to
become part of the game elite? Who are
the ‘top players’?
2. What sort of time work is required to
participate in the game evolution? Who
participates?
Educational games
2.Time in the
process of
learning
1. Influencing the quantity of time,
for game and non-game learning;
2. Influencing the quality of time, for
game and non-game learning;
3. Shaping the time allocation and
sequence of learning activities:
exploration, study, practice,
repetition, out-of-the-box
connections, meta-communication;
1. What values are embedded in the game
and non-game activities of learning?
2. How does the game modify the
relationships in the learning project
(between students, and between
instructors and students)?
3. How is the game elite related to the
elite of non-game learning activities?
What powers accrue to each status?
3.Time in the
learned-about
world
1. Learning histories;
2. Learning various economies of
time.
1. What note-worthy events and persons
are highlighted to narrate a history?
2. What selected economies of time are
introduced?
2.2.2 Time in the Process of Learning
Learning unfolds in time, and it is about topics that
take place in time. If we think of learning as a
process of mastering a novel symbolic (and material)
world, then we can distinguish the time created by
this process itself, and the time included as a
dimension of the world under study. We can then
ask two questions:
On the one hand, how does play time influence
the time of the process of learning (in play and non-
play activities)? On the second hand, how does the
game influence the time of the learned-about world?
As regards the first question, there are at least
four ways in which games are relevant:
1. Play time changes the quantity of learning time,
by displacing other activities. Given that games are
usually associated with leisure, an educational game
can be used to push learning activities in time zones
which would otherwise not be formally available,
such as holidays or night hours;
2. Play time changes the quality of learning time, in
both play and non-play activities. Gameplay has the
potential to re-define non-game activities in the
learning project, for example by making them seem
rather boring, or, alternatively, by giving them
new meaning, by association with game-created
information or social networks;
3. Play time changes the time allocation and
sequence of various learning activities, such as
exploration, study, repetition, practice, out-of-the-
box thinking (for example, with metaphors and
analogies), meta-communication and learning about
learning (Bateson, 1972);
4. Last but not least, the game introduces a
different economy of time: time investment in the
game leads to other benefits than in the non-game
activities. Educational games may cultivate players’
understanding of time economies, by design. Games
also have distinctive criteria for performance, and
creates their own elite, which is related to the
game’s time politics (as a rule, players that spend
more time in the game tend to obtain higher scores).
Since in educational games fairness is an important
concern, designers often attend to time organization
in order to level the playing field.
2.2.3 Time in the Learned-about World
The game may introduce histories of the subject-
matter as a topic of learning. These histories can
furnish the game’s fictive time, or they can be
present through various game elements: characters,
quizzes or riddles, side-line stories etc. The game
may also familiarize students with multiple
economies of time existent in the studied domain:
the times of scientific research, of company-based
TimeasaHeuristicinSeriousGamesforEducation
583
production, of open source development, of possibly
related fields such as medicine, the military, politics
etc.
2.2.4 An Illustration: World of USO
This article was written as a reflection on the serious
game “World of USO” (WoUSO), developed since
2007 in the Computer Science Department of
University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest to
accompany a course on Using Operating Systems
(USO). The game is presented in detail in Rughiniș
(2012); for the purpose of this article we should note
that it serves as an accompanying activity for the
USO course, aiming to stimulate student sociability
around CS topics, and to foster a playful orientation
in technical work and learning. WoUSO is an open
source project, in which students and former players
are invited to participate; each academic year the
game lasts throughout the first semester, until the
course ends. The game is complex, including several
activities; its main components are: Question of the
Day (QotD), a daily quiz question from the course
curriculum; Weekly Quests, sets of riddles on
general technical and CS culture topics, with a
whimsical outlook; daily Duels in which students
challenge one another and compete by answering
sets of 5 quiz questions from the course curriculum,
in 5-minute asynchronous sessions; Spells used to
modify actions and outcomes for oneself and for
one’s opponents (increasing or decreasing rewards,
hiding real scores, paralyzing actions etc.). Each
game activity generates points that accumulate in the
players final score; at the end of the semester, the
Top 10 players are declared the winners, and the
first player receives the WoUSO cup.
We have noticed that time organization in
WoUSO had unexpected effects. Although each
activity opens a different temporality (rhythm,
schedule, duration etc.), by cumulating all points in
an overall score the score-display interface frame
became dominant. This frame was defined by the
linear time of score growth, mainly through duels.
Players who, for some reasons, did not play duels for
a while fell rapidly behind in rank, and felt
discouraged to re-enter the game: the linear time of
score-display dominated the cyclic temporalities of
the Weekly Quests, which invited players for a new
adventure every week. Virtually all players but the
top 20 ones, with approximation, who played
competitively in order to win, were actually
dissuaded in later weeks to convert realworld time
into gameworld time. The game elite was finally
determined through willingness to persistently invest
considerable time in duels, all along the semester;
time allocation was central in WoUSO politics.
Moreover, since game difficulty increased along the
semester, and so did the difficulty of course-related
work, this led to time work conflicts between the
“student” and the “player” roles, further encouraging
“power players”. Since, as a rule, game winners
became members of the development team for the
next semester edition, the game development
timescape inadvertently privileged, in design
options, the “power player” style of time work.
In order to encourage a broader and more diverse
student participation throughout the game, in the
2012 edition developers have changed the game
interface to display more prominently distinctive
scores for Weekly Quests and Duels, and have also
introduced achievements to reward diverse time
work strategies, such as persistence in playing, early
or late hours of play. Since duels have continued to
dominate the game and to structure players’ time
work in this semester too, planned new
developments for the next edition, in the Fall of
2013, include: the classification of players into
named levels (‘leagues’) to encourage players in the
lower ranks to engage one another in duels; a Grand
Challenge in which all players participate through
random duels; changes in scoring to raise the
importance of the Weekly Quest.
We have also consolidated the metagame time
frame by introducing a face-to-face mid-term
encounter between players (students) and developers
(former players and faculty), which has encouraged
collegiality and has led to useful insights into actual
gameplay and possible improvements.
3 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we argue that time is a useful analytical
lens in examining educational games, and we
propose a conceptual framework to guide inquiries.
By analyzing the organization of time frames in a
game, and its support for players’ time work, we can
pursue two directions of investigation:
• The study of timescapes: the ensemble of time
structures and practices that inform decision-making
and social action;
• The study of the politics of time: how certain
time arrangements become normal, how they
support specific definitions of performance, and
create reputations and elites.
The study of time in an educational game profits
from its examination on three layers: 1) time and
player engagement, 2) the organization of time in the
CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
584
process or learning, and 3) the time organization of
the subject matter.
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