All fun and games

What do users understand better: a manual printed on paper or online training with game elements? This is a rather difficult question to answer but – thanks to a recent master thesis – the effort of answering it has been taken care of.

Text by Anna-Lotte Wienstroer

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All fun and games

The fun element of games can be used to make the learning process more playful. This is because the declining "half-life" of knowledge makes it difficult to keep yourself up to date. Developing new, more flexible forms of teaching and learning that people use by choice and with pleasure is therefore one of today’s challenges. In my master thesis, I dealt with how playful elements can increase the understanding of technical information, when making the fun factor of games part of our private and professional lives. In other words: gamification in technical documentation.

Gamification means using game mechanics and game elements in a non-playful environment. In classic computer games, a playful landscape is created far from the reality: The player can get immersed and play in this game landscape. Gamification, on the other hand, means playing in reality. Here, game mechanics and game ...