Player Agency and Content Retention in Educational Games

Games are now prevalent enough in the mainstream entertainment culture to be an inevitable inclusion in classrooms seeking to motivate and engage students. This study proposes to investigate how educational games can be developed to be more effective instructional tools by examining the effects of individual game design components on learning outcomes. To that end, the proposed experiment will test an agency supporting game condition against a game condition which diminishes agency to determine what effect, if any, player agency has on the retention of educational content and the play experience in educational games.