Leaderboards within educational videogames: The impact of difficulty, effort and gameplay

Although many of the existing educational videogames rely on leaderboard mechanisms, dedicated research on their effectiveness or how they should be implemented is missing. In this study, competitive effort, perceived difficulty and connected gameplay which are revealed to be core concepts of leaderboards, are manipulated to examine how leaderboards and competitive gameplay has to be designed to facilitate learning. Students had to play an educational videogame where players need to collect and retrieve information chunks about the function of power plants. They were randomly assigned to one cell of a 2 (low vs. high difficulty) x 2 (with or without penalties) between-subjects design. Data on retention knowledge, detail knowledge, learning efficiencies and goal orientations were collected. Results show that players with penalties scored higher on retention tests than players without penalties, whereas detail knowledge is enhanced by a low difficulty in contrast to a high difficulty. In addition, students with penalties learned and recalled the presented knowledge more efficient. An explorative analysis of goal orientations revealed influences of individual dispositions on affective responses and positive correlations with performance goals. The high dependence of learning outcomes on individual traits and gameplay characteristics demonstrates the need for more detailed research.