Composing Narrative-Based Gameful Learning Processes: A Skill Atom Approach

Gamification incorporates game elements to make mundane activities more engaging. It has seen success in education, even more so when enhanced by gameful design. Among the elements of gameful design is narrative, which offers many benefits, such as contextualizing the learning process. However, there is currently a lack of guidelines on integrating narrative into a gameful learning process. This paper proposed a framework for narrative-based gameful learning processes, which connects a learning process' scenario and skill atoms to a narrative's plot and space. We validated the framework by implementing it to compose a narrative-based gameful course on game design, which we delivered through ClassCraft. We conducted a six-step process to compose the course, which resulted in a narrative graph with branchings for learning and narrative purposes. Ten Informatics students participated in the course, filled a questionnaire, and participated in a discussion. The questionnaire's results validate the course's effectiveness, and the discussion gathers insightful suggestions and critiques. Our analysis of the participants' game designs also proves the narrative's contextualization effect. We close this paper by discussing our results' limitations and directions for future studies.