Content creation challenges and flow experience in educational games: The IT-Emperor case

Students increasingly demand more constructive online courses that not only provide information but also facilitate studying experiences. Educational games offer a viable strategy to this end. In this paper, the experiences of university students (n = 18) playing an educational game, IT-Emperor, which was designed to facilitate flow experience, are studied through questionnaires and interviews. The main purpose of this paper is to study the usefulness of content creation challenges included in IT-Emperor and factors that have an influence on flow experience. Results indicate that half of the participants experienced flow while playing IT-Emperor. This finding is significant because flow tends to have a positive impact on learning. Content creation was reported as the main activity causing flow; bad usability and low gamefulness were cited as obstacles of flow experience. However, because of the small sample size of this study, more research on the topic is recommended.