Engagement Strategies in a Peer-Quizzing Game: Investigating Student Interactions and Powergaming

This study examines powergaming, the practice of excessively exploiting a game's mechanics for advantage, within ToQ, a peer-quizzing game used with first-year programming students. Three experimental groups were compared, with Group 2, which had access to a question bank, displaying the highest activity levels, particularly in question creation at 45.31 percent. Contrary to the authors' expectations, this powergaming did not prove harmful; instead, it appeared to enrich the game's resources and sustain engagement among participants.

The central finding is that in-game activity and academic achievement were not aligned. Group 2 recorded the most activity but only average grades, while the control Group 3, with considerably lower activity, achieved the highest final grades at 81.46 percent, compared with 74.82 percent for Group 1 and 75.38 percent for Group 2. Group 3 also used a balanced mix of question types, whereas Group 1's heavy reliance on multiple-choice questions coincided with the lowest average grades. Correlations between activity and performance were weak to moderate, ranging roughly from 0.02 to 0.29, and group size alone did not predict activity levels.

The authors conclude that the quality and type of engagement may matter more than sheer quantity. They also observe that powergamers, despite their excessive activity, may have contributed beneficially by generating questions that others could use. These conclusions are tempered by small sample sizes of roughly 40 to 47 students per group, which limit the strength of any generalization. The study's scope is confined to a single peer-quizzing platform and one cohort of introductory programming students, and its grounding draws on game-based learning literature from roughly 2014 to 2024.