著者
石田 喜美 名城 邦孝 関 敦央 宮崎 雅幸 寺島 哲平
出版者
日本認知科学会
雑誌
認知科学=Cognitive studies : bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society (ISSN:13417924)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.25, no.4, pp.375-391, 2018-12

In recent years, we have witnessed cases of “gamification” in various social fields,such as education, social welfare, and even ecological problem solving. Within the background of such cases, there seems to be a need for change in the reality of our daily lives. In fact, we can see some cases of gamification occurring in our actual lives. According to Suits (2005), to play game is to engage in “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” In daily life, obstacles exist as things to avoid, but in a game context, such obstacles are necessary for our pleasure. Thus, using the method of gamification and introducing the game context, we can change the meaning of various obstacles, and construct alternative meaning to our reality. In this article, we focus on the process in which our reality is reconstructed through the conversation after playing a game-based educational program. Describing how they design their interactions and construct their realities, we aim at finding how games affect our realities. This field of research is RPG-based, and focuses on a user-education program implemented in an academic library, called “Libardry,” which is a combination of the word “library” and the title of a popular game, “Wizardry.” The program consists of two parts: an RPG-based education program and a group discussion (Flick,2002). The participants were six university students, two females and four males. We focused on conversations in a group discussion and analyzed them to determine how the participants, staff members, and students, elicit meaning from difficulties when accessing library resources as artifacts. As a result, we determined how participants change their meaning collaboratively. In their conversations, they stated that difficulties are “unnecessary obstacles to overcome”for pleasure. Game context not only visualizes the existence of artifacts from the viewpoint of “pleasure,” it also opens up the field of meaning negotiation for people in various fields.