The digital games market is around 109 billion dollars. In this scenario, games as tools for mental and educational stimulation have been highlighted. They allow the connection between friends, the narrowing of family ties, artistic expression, improvement of aspects related to health, institute mechanisms for business and advertising, as well as constitute opportunities for differentiated training and simulations. Such artifacts are also mediators for building knowledge, as well as developing or exercising skills and attitudes, since they involve the flow state. For this it is necessary to make use of adaptability that in the educational scope allows the personalization of the experience to extend the immersion and fun. The present chapter presents a review to subsidize the expansion of the mapping of games' uses developed by Klopfer, Osterweil, and Salen, as well as to establish their relation with the deliberate practice to institute immersive and meaningful educational proposals.
TopIntroduction
The technological information society is actually marked by convergence, configuring a scenario in which two or more medias are used together to convey content in a fluid way (Jenkins, 2009). Among the available possibilities, the icon of contemporary digital convergence for entertainment is highlighted: digital games. These could be characterized as convergent elements formed by languages and communications medias that are intertwined in a way that produces an “environment of knowledge of culture” (Pereira, 2005).
Therefore, Huzinga (1955) establishes the game as a voluntary cultural product that configures a common locus in which the participants accept the established rules, configuring a “magic circle”, a parallel universe with meaning for the participants of the experience and that distance them from the real world. Schell (2009) complements this concept by stating that human problem-solving ability allows the simplification of external situations to this (belonging to the real world) and the attribution of meaning inside and outside the same.
In addition, the digital game as a convergent cultural element and mediator of the magic circle, according to NewZoo (2017) constitutes a market that in 2017 reached 13 digits: totaling approximately 109 billion dollars, a number that establishes a growth of 56% in five years and projected a market of almost $ 130 billion in 2020. Complementary data provided by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) highlights a relevance of 75% of digital games as tools for mental and educational stimulation (Entertainment Software Association, 2016). The worldwide amount of digital games for learning reached 3.2 billion dollars in 2017 and has a prospect of moving 8.1 billion by 2022 (Adkins, 2017).
The perspective presented establishes games as vehicles for connecting with friends, narrowing family ties, artistic expression, improving aspects related to health, establishing mechanisms for business and advertising, opportunities for training and differentiated simulations, among others.
Another element that complements this characterization of games is its potential as an element of deliberate practice. This term corresponds to activities designed by teachers or coaches with the specific function of improving individual performance by adopting successive repetition and refinement strategies, accompanied by daily monitoring and feedback (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993), differentiating from other activities that indirectly lead to improved performance. The authors, even though that they separate games from the deliberate practice, still have identified activities that satisfy all the requirements such as chess, which allows to extend the use of this concept and apply it to the universe of games and education.
With these assumptions, the goal here is to broaden the mapping of games usage patterns by Klopfer, Osterweil and Salen (2009) and correlate it with the deliberate practice (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996) and ludicity to institute guidelines for immersive and meaningful educational proposals.
In order to address such aspects, the present document is organized as follows: cultural conceptualization and highlighting of the digital game as a major worldwide entertainment phenomenon involves a number of aspects, its broad definition, as well as characteristics and related areas are addressed in section 2, the application architecture and the use of games in the educational context, as well as correlated aspects (immersion, flow, deliberate practice and architecture) constitute the themes of section 3, section 4 consolidates the discussions undertaken and establishes a framework with functions, characteristics and examples of different types of digital games, as well as presents an expansion of the architecture of Klopfer et al. (2009) from deliberate practice. Finally, section 5 highlights the conclusions and future work.