Measuring Gameplay Affordances of User-Generated Content in an Educational Game

Level creation is a creative game-play exercise that resembles problem-posing, and has shown to be engaging and helpful for players to learn about the game’s core mechanic. However, in user-authoring environments, users often create levels without considering the game’s objective, or with entirely different objectives in mind, resulting in levels which fail to afford the core gameplay mechanic. This poses a bigger threat to educational games, because the core gameplay is aligned with the learning objectives. Therefore, such levels fail to provide any opportunity for players to practice the skills the game is designed to teach. To address this problem, we designed and compared three versions of level creators in a programming game — BOTS. These level creators differ in their unit of construction — terrain-block, program and Pattern-block. We measured levels’ gameplay affordances as their relevance to the core game mechanic and learning objective: correct use of programming concepts such as loops, functions and subroutines, and used a zeroinflation model alongside expert tagging of created levels to analyze the differences between the three different editors. The results show that a simple-to-use building-block editor can guarantee levels that contain some affordances, but an editor designed to use the same core mechanic as gameplay results in the best-quality levels overall.