Making Design Activities Gameful Using a Role-Playing Card Game

This paper presents our attempt at making a master’s level course on Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) gameful. The students were expected to propose design concepts for educational games at the end of the course while collaborating in groups. In our effort to make the design activities gameful, we created a role-playing card game for designing DGBL, which challenged the players to use various learning and design principles. Adopting Holden and colleagues’ (2014) conceptualization of gamefulness, we observed that learners showed a lusory attitude in designing DGBL when playing this card game. In this paper, we discuss our design of the course and the role-playing card game. We also argue that engaging in such a card game supports learners’ gameful learning based on preliminary findings from using the game in the classroom.