The Teaching Efficacy of the Protégé Effect in Gamified Education

Researchers and designers have considered how gamification can make education more effective. In this paper, the role of player-character relationships is considered. Designers can use various factors to get users attached to their character, including the feeling of responsibility. In this paper, we investigate whether feeling responsible for one’s in-game character improved the efficacy of a gamified educational experience. An educational, gamified story called Humanatees was designed to incite the protégé effect to see if participants learned more when they felt responsible for their character. The results suggest that participants in the experimental condition achieved significantly higher learning gains, providing evidence for the protégé effect. However, how this effect is established is more complex than feeling responsible. Future work should shed more light on the dynamics behind the protégé effect.