The Game Design “Game”: Engaging in Gameful Learning Through Goal-Driven Design Discourse

In this paper, we present how a card game influenced a design discourse and learning of graduate students. In a graduate course on digital game-based learning at a Canadian university, students were asked to propose design concepts for educational games at the end of the course while collaborating in groups. In order to make the design process more gameful, we created a role-playing card game, which challenged the players to use various learning and design principles. The purpose of this design-based research was to examine how the card game play may facilitate the participants’ deeper design discourse in a gameful manner. With ethnographic data, we illustrate how the content and rules of the role-playing card game supported students’ goal-driven design discourse and their engagement in gameful learning.