Abstract:

Using games for educational purposes has achieved increasing attention during recent years. The promise of using games for learning is that it keeps players tightly engaged in the learning environment and thus, leading to enhanced learning outcome. Recent developments in game business practices have especially elevated the need for distinguishing between types of players and play styles. In Drachen's player typology, four different styles are identified each with different playing patterns and solutions to specific problems and also a certain level of performance including Veterans, Solvers, Pacifists and Runners. Solvers are excellent at solving puzzles taking their time to solve the puzzles encountered during the play patiently. It is interesting to know how players of the educational games act as a solver under different circumstances. The aim of this study is to investigate how playing at the different part of the day would impact on the patience and meticulousness of the players inspired from the Solver player type in Drachen's study. This paper deals with four different parts of the day including Dawn, Midday, Dusk, and Midnight. Plays' information assorted into four aforementioned parts and then to assess the impact of playing in each part, the inferential statistical tests on the means of each feature in different assortments were done respecting the players' data of a mobile game intending English vocabulary learning. Based on the ANOVA test both features had significant variation among different parts of the day. The results indicate that patience of players during the midnight is more than other parts while players showed more meticulousness in Dawn compared to the rest of day. The results of this paper help researchers profoundly understand the solver character of players toward gamified environments and game-based learning with respect to the time the application or game is used.

Keywords:

Game-based learning, gamification, player types, player mood, educational games.