Theme 5: Design Research

Prototypes have undoubtedly a very important role in research since they are supposed to work and look like the final commercial product while they simultaneously rather often are made of simpler and cheaper materials. Basically you are able to do user studies broadly to the same extent with an operational prototype which probably facilitate the financial encumbrance later on. Ongoing research is still very expensive for a lot of companies even with several prototypes involved in the process. Imagine a world without prototypes. Evaluations and user studies would then be made just on the final product where a lot of economical efforts already have taken place. That scenario would more or less prevent any research to be utilized because of the uncertainness of the result in the evaluation. Therefore is it important to emphasize a proof of the concept prototype and recommend that it always should be used within the research as early as possible to minimize the unnecessary efforts. 

Since I´m very interested in football I want to make room for this vibration, ball-synchronized prototype mentioned in the study. First of all you understand early that this study is comparatively archaic when it´s mentioned that it´s unlikely that users are willing to stream entire games on phones. Nowadays that´s not the case, therefore the reliability may be queried. Besides I want to question the persistently ball focusing technology of the prototype, since it seems like a lot of significant events where the ball is not involved during a game are missing, like bookings or offsides. 

I chose the study “Exploring the behavioral patterns of learners in an educational massively multiple online role-playing game (MMORPG)” from the journal “Computers & Education” with an impact factor of 2,621. The study is about an evaluation of the design of an educational MMORPG where the purpose is to understand the characteristics and the limitations of online games as instructional tools. 

1.      A MMORPG called Talking Island was used within the study. The purpose of the game is to teach English vocabulary and conversational skills to elementary school students. A lot of theories were used to utilize different learning strategies:

-  Situated learning theory: Gamers were provided with realistic settings and scenarios by means of daily problem-solving quests, for instance through shopping.

-  The mastery-learning model: Flash cards with voice-recognition were used in situated learning quests to practice pronunciation in a repetitive way.

-  Online problem-solving and collaborative learning: Allowed gamers to team-up within group quests and tradings.

2.      A long term observation empirical study was conducted during 335 days for gamers who played Talking Island and different behaviors were coded. Some quantitative analysis methods were used to explore gamer’s behavioral patterns as well.

- Frequency analysis: The frequencies of different categories like teaming-up, trading and chatting were measured to gather long term detailed distribution of behavior-codes. 
 - Lag sequential analysis: Common in digital learning and was used to find correlations between certain behaviors.
- Cluster-analysis: Utilized to compare different results between high participation gamers and low participation gamers.

                         
"Fig. 2. Behavior transition diagram for all the students (n = 100). (FT: Fight, PT: Pets, TL: Tools/Items, TK: Talk, GP: Group-work, TR: Trading, LF: Learning in fighting, LT: Learning in tasks, OT: Others)."

50 males and 50 females were randomly selected from 983 registered players which obviously make the study more reliable. However all the players had an Asian background so the selection was rather biased. In addition the methods lacked some analysis of cognition and social interaction since too much focus was put on behaviors.

3.      The results were comparatively easy to follow with detailed tables and well explained variables. I´m not sure if it´s common within design research or just extraordinary in this particular case, but generally speaking the results are quite often hard to fully understand in terms of limited explanations.