Competition vs. Collaboration in Game-Based Learning

Game /gām/ (noun) A form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Can Competition and Collaboration Coexist in a Multiplayer Learning Game?

COMPETITION

Games are, by definition, competitive, whether you’re competing against yourself, other players, the game itself, or some combination of these.

Competition in game-based learning (GBL) is beneficial because:

• Competition motivates players, leading to higher engagement levels
• Competition encourages teammates to motivate each other
• Losing a game can lead to greater learning as long as it leads to more reflection and critical thinking instead of disillusionment
• Players can learn good sportsmanship skills from winning and losing.

However, in today’s educational world, competition might not be good for students because:

• Competition can increase hostility between students
• Competition weakens the intrinsic motivation to learn the educational content because of the focus on winning
• Losing can lead to lower self-esteem.

To learn more about using competition in education, please read this excellent online resource.

COLLABORATION

On the other hand, collaboration is considered a good skill for students to learn.

Some of the benefits of collaboration include:

• Teaches teamwork and other social skills
• Gives a greater sense of purpose by being part of something bigger
• Provides motivation to help your group succeed
• Prepares students for real-life collaborative work.

In multiplayer games, such as World of Warcraft, collaboration is essential to succeed in various game tasks.  New social games, such as The Sims Social, highlight collaboration among players as essential game features.  Even in a single player game, collaboration is beneficial when another person is watching and giving advice about, say, how to catapult the next angry bird.

However, too much emphasis on collaboration could possibly detract from the fun of the game (see example below).

COMPETITION AND COLLABORATION IN A MULTIPLAYER LEARNING GAME

Most of the time, you would design a game to have enough competition to motivate but not so much to detract from learning collaborative skills.  If you put too much emphasis on competition, the focus goes on winning and not on helping others.  On the other hand, if you put too much emphasis on collaboration, you run the risk of turning a fun, motivating game into a boring group school assignment.

For example, say there is a three-person team robotics game where each team has an hour to make its robot do something.  If the emphasis is on competition (winning), it’s likely that one person does everything and no collaboration takes place.  But, if the main emphasis is on collaboration, such as having the rules state that every person must be assigned to one of three tasks, then the game may start to feel like more of a group work assignment than a competitive game.

Ideally though, you should strive to design games that use competition to improve collaborative skills:

• In basketball players, the desire to win forces players to collaborate better to play as a team
• In charades, in order to win, partners have to learn to collaborate better to understand each person’s non-verbal communication patterns
• In the videogame Rockband, competition spurs on better collaboration in order to get a higher score.

So, when you are designing or evaluating a multiplayer learning game, make sure you take some time to reflect on the balance and interdependency of the competitive and collaborative elements in the game.  These elements could very well be the key to the game’s ability to engage AND educate its players.