Sage Publications

Chronotypology: A Comparative Method for Analyzing Game Time

Chronotypology offers a robust analytical framework for examining the complex temporal structures, or heterochronia, inherent in digital games.

OASISTAN: An Intercultural Role-Playing Simulation Game to Recognize Cultural Dimensions

OASISTAN is a no-tech, physical role-playing simulation designed to give engineering Master's students a firsthand, often frustrating experience of culture shock grounded in cultural dimensions theory.

• OASISTAN is a no-technology role-playing simulation designed in 1999 in which mixed student teams negotiate oil exploration and production in a fictional Caspian Sea country under a fictional WTO trade-agreement scenario, with Western, Oasistani, Russian, Brazilian, Chinese, and NGO roles.
• Cultural differences are embedded through an indicative ordinal scoring of twelve dimensions from Maleki and de Jong's framework (such as individualism, power distance, and gender egalitarianism) plus role-specific behavioral instructions.
• Players identified ten of the twelve cultural dimensions during gameplay, while uncertainty avoidance and collaborativeness were rarely or never observed.

Framing Gaming: The Effects of Media Frames on Perceptions of Game(r)s

Media framing plays a critical role in shaping public attitudes toward video games and the gaming community.

• News media narratives focusing on risks rather than opportunities drive negative public sentiment and increase support for gaming censorship and restrictive policies.
• Nongamers are significantly more susceptible to media framing than individuals with established personal gaming habits, who use their experience as a buffer against negative narratives.
• A robust third-person effect persists where individuals view others—specifically children and adolescents—as more vulnerable to gaming harms than themselves, regardless of media framing.

Putting Theory-Oriented Evaluation Into Practice: A Logic Model Approach for Evaluating SIMGAME

Traditional outcome-focused evaluations of educational gaming simulations often fail to capture the underlying mechanisms that drive learning, treating the simulation as a black box.

• Input and process variables—specifically prior knowledge, teacher motivation, and perceived simulation appropriateness—accounted for 56% of the variance in cognitive learning outcomes for SIMGAME participants.
• The application of a logic model framework to SIMGAME, involving 468 students and 37 teachers, resulted in statistically significant improvements in content knowledge with an effect size of 0.46.
• Theory-oriented logic models provide a more robust evaluation framework than traditional outcome-focused methods by mapping the causal relationships between game features, learner characteristics, and environmental factors.