ENG 225 Rhetoric and Gaming

Connolly, Thomas. (2011). An alternate reality game or language learning: ARGuing for multilingual motivation. Computers Education, 57 (1) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131511000261 The purpose of this study was to evaluate the usage of ARG games in relation to learning a foreign language. The study that was created was implemented as a project within the European Commission Comenius project to be used in secondary schools across Europe. The purpose of the study was to implement cooperation and learning within the school environment as well as to support the use of ARGs in teaching and show different learning tactics. The general outcome of the “experiment” was calculated using pre- and post- questionnaires to gauge student feedback on the project. According to the article student feedback was fairly positive toward the use of the ARG and seemed to motivate the students in a way that had not been done before. Many students in the ending survey stated that the...

Tateno, M., Skokauskas, N., Kato, T. A., Teo, A. R., & Guerrero, A. P. (2016, December 30). New game software (Pokémon Go) may help youth with severe social withdrawal, hikikomori. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5573581/ This scientific journal written by the combined efforts of Tateno, Skokauskas, Kato, Teo, and Guerrero, explains how hikikomori, or severe social withdrawal, is connected to the popular augmented reality game, Pokémon Go. In Japan, 230,000 people are reportedly categorized as hikikomori (Koyama et al., 2010). This extreme social withdrawal epidemic could be fixed with something as simple as leaving your room for a couple hours to go catch some Pokémon. Although there is no for sure way to tell how many Pokémon Go players in Japan are hikikomori, the prime minister of Japan vouched for the game as helping people deal with their withdrawal problem. They also suggest setting up PokeStops at hikikomori support centers to increase the ch...

Wagner-Greene, V. (2017, January). Pokémon GO: Healthy or Harmful? Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1853308592?pq-origsite=summon Wagner-Greene et al. conduct and discuss research on whether the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go is beneficial or detrimental to society. In their research they found that 27% of Pokémon Go players had driving as their preferred mode of travel while playing the game, 32% preferred to walk, and 43% chose to play the game while biking. A whopping 38% of players said that they would sacrifice their sleep to play the game (Wagner-Greene et al. 2017). In addition to these findings, participants in the study “were asked how many days per week they engaged in 30 or more minutes of physical activity before downloading Pokémon GO and then after starting to play it” (Wagner-Greene et al. 2017). At the start of the study, only 31% of the participants fit the activity requirements while at the end the amount increased to 75% of participa...