Abstract
Digital games can be used as a pedagogical tool for media policy matters. As a medium, digital games have characteristics that hold potential for achieving typical pedagogical goals such as knowledge acquisition, attitude and behavior change and other perceptual or physiological outcomes. In that context, they are referred to as ‘serious games’. In this chapter, we outline why digital games are complex media and how their implementation for pedagogical purposes in the context of media policy has to be done with careful consideration of both theoretical foundations, methodological and practical issues. We provide a critical evaluation of the challenges and opportunities of serious games, as well as some ethical and ideological concerns. Besides setting a broad rationale for the use of serious games in the context of media policy and how they can be used as a method to ‘teach’ media policy matters, we provide practical guidance for their development and implementation. We illustrate the theoretical, methodological and practical considerations with two concrete cases related to media policy: (1) a serious game to promote positive bystander behavior in the context of cyberbullying and (2) the use of games for journalism education.
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Further Reading
Aayeshah, W. (2012). Playing with news digital games in journalism education. Asia Pacific Media Educator, 22(1), 29–41.
Charsky, D. (2010). From edutainment to serious games: A change in the use of game characteristics. Games and Culture, 5(2), 177–198.
DeSmet, A., Van Cleemput, K., Bastiaensens, S., Poels, K., Vandebosch, H., Malliet, S., … De Bourdeaudhuij, I. (2016). Bridging behavior science and gaming theory: Using the Intervention Mapping Protocol to design a serious game against cyberbullying. Computers in Human Behavior, 56, 337–351.
Flanagan, M., & Nissenbaum, H. (2014). Values at play in digital games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Neys, J., & Jansz, J. (2010). Political internet games: Engaging an audience. European Journal of Communication, 25(3), 227–241.
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Poels, K. (2019). Developing Pedagogical Materials on Media Policy. In: Van den Bulck, H., Puppis, M., Donders, K., Van Audenhove, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Methods for Media Policy Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16065-4_37
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