Can typical game features have unintended consequences? A study of players’ learning and reactions to challenge and failure in an educational programming game

It is difficult to motivate learners to seek out and persist at challenging learning tasks where failure is likely. However, in game environments, people seem highly motivated to engage with challenges and respond productively to failure. Many typical game features purportedly enhance intrinsic motivation and self‐efficacy, which should improve students’ reactions to challenge and failure, which should in turn enhance learning. An experimental study with early middle school students tested these assumptions by comparing a “Full” version of a typical, commercial programming game to a “Minimal” version of the same game where common game features such as narrative, performance metrics, high‐quality graphics, and sound were removed. In contrast to our hypotheses, players of the Full Game were less likely to choose coding challenges, were less tolerant of coding failures and gained less coding knowledge. Intrinsic motivation and self‐efficacy did not differ between conditions. Correlational analyses showed that failure tolerance and challenge seeking may critically affect learning from educational games. The current study offers an existence proof that some common game features can hinder players' failure tolerance, challenge‐seeking and learning, in certain game contexts. Future research should isolate the effects of individual game features, test generalizability and explore which contextual variables influence the findings.