Keeping People Playing: The Effects of Domain News Presentation on Player Engagement in Educational Prediction Games

Educational prediction games use the popularity and engagement of fantasy sports as a success model to promote learning in other domains. Fantasy sports motivate players to stay up-to-date with relevant news and explore large statistical data sets, thereby deepening their domain understanding while potentially honing their data analysis skills. We conducted a study of fantasy sports players, and discovered that while some participants performed sophisticated data analysis to support their gameplay, far more relied on news and published commentary. We used results from this study to design a prototype prediction game, Fantasy Climate, which helps players move from intuitions and advice to consuming news and analyzing data by supporting a variety of activities essential to gameplay. Because news is a key component of Fantasy Climate, we evaluated two link-based interfaces to domain-related news, one geospatial and the other organized as a list. The evaluation revealed that news presentation has a strong effect on players' engagement and performance: players using the geospatial interface not only were more engaged in the game; they also made better predictions than players who used the list-based presentation.