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Board games such as Monopoly and Scrabble enjoy a great deal of popularity among players of all ages. The objective of this study was to identify the characteristics of board games that impact significantly on players' appreciation.

A review of the literature and a qualitative study with players and board game professionals resulted in the identification of seven explanatory factors. A survey was conducted among 169 adult players selected using an area sampling method.

The survey results revealed that the most important factor in explaining players' appreciation of a board game was the extent to which the game was able to make them fantasize and live uncommon experiences. The second factor in importance was the entertainment that is associated with playing a game. Some unexpected differences were found between male and female players. Whereas the surprise elements of a game had a positive impact on men's appreciation, they were not significant among women. In turn, the rhythm of the game had a positive effect on women's appreciation whereas it did not impact on men's appreciation.

Players' perceptions were limited to board games with which they were familiar.

The results of this research offer some insights for the design and marketing of new board games. They indicate that the success of a new board game depends on the game's capacity to make players live a unique play experience and interact with other players. They also suggest that marketing communication should be adapted to the segments of male and female board game players.

This research brings useful knowledge about the factors that make consumers enjoy a board game.

This article focuses on group work with children using a board game format. Combining the principles of group work and board games helps to engage and motivate children and adolescents to address and work through their difficulties. Lifegames are a series of six therapeutic board games developed for group work with children and adolescents who encounter adversity in their life as a consequence of bereavement, family break up, poor relationships, bullying, chronic illness or obesity. The games facilitate the understanding and disclosure of the complex feelings experienced by children and young people when they are confronted with traumatic life events. The games encourage and assist the participants to obtain and maintain behavioural change. Lifegames are a means to assist professionals in their group work with children and adolescents.

The purpose of this study is to test the effectiveness of an educational board game for increasing knowledge, positive attitudes‐beliefs, and self‐efficacy for dengue prevention in a sample of Philippine school children and adolescents. Effective board games are more advantageous than lectures because they are adaptable, inexpensive and foster learning independently of teachers or lecturers. Also tested were relationships between perceived fun by students playing the game and outcomes.

A school‐based pre‐test/post‐test experimentally controlled design was employed in a Filipino primary and secondary school population.

The lecture was more effective in increasing knowledge. But neither was more effective than the other in increasing positive attitudes‐beliefs and self‐efficacy. Both modes produced specifically significant increases in knowledge and self‐efficacy; only the lecture produced significant increases in attitudes‐beliefs. Also, there was a significant relationship between fun and self‐efficacy in the game group at the reduced regression model level but not in the presence of all study variables.

No long term outcomes or behavioral change outcomes were measured. However, an educational game may increase knowledge and self‐efficacy about the dengue fever without the assistance of a teacher or other pre‐game instructional aids. In addition, the board game technique is flexible and easily adapted to other community or school health issues.

This was the first experimentally controlled study on the use of a game with the topic of dengue. The study on the use of a game was the first to demonstrate a significant increase in self‐efficacy as a result of the play of a board game. Original instruments measured self‐efficacy related to dengue control and also the variable of fun.

This paper seeks to focus on the design and testing of a web‐based online board game for teaching undergraduate students information literacy skills and concepts.

Project team members with expertise in game play, creative writing, programming, library research, graphic design and information seeking developed a web‐based board game in which students used digital library resources to answer substantive questions on a scholarly topic. The project team hosted game play in a class of 75 undergraduate students. The instructor offered an extra‐credit incentive to boost participation resulting in 49 students on 13 teams playing the game. Post‐game focus group interviews revealed problematic features and redesign priorities.

A total of six teams were successful meeting the criteria for the instructor's grade incentive achieving a 53.1 percent accuracy rate on their answers to substantive questions about the black death; 35.7 percent was the accuracy rate for the seven unsuccessful teams. Discussed in detail are needed improvements to problematic game features such as offline tasks, feedback, challenge functionality, and the game's black death theme.

Information literacy games test what players already know. Because this project's successful teams answered substantive questions about the black death at accuracy rates 20 points higher than the estimated probability of guessing, students did the research during game play which demonstrates that games have merit for teaching students information literacy skills and concepts.

Most authors see the origins of Management Games in ancient board games such as checkers and chess, played on squared boards. Games such as these have, of course, been with us for a long time with the distant origins of chess traced back to the 6th century BC.

Pervasive mobile games (PMG) expand the game context into the real world, spatially, temporally and socially. The most prominent example to date is Pokémon Go (PGo), which in the first 12 months of its launch achieved over 800 million downloads and huge revenues for Pokémon, its majority owner Nintendo, and its developer Niantic. Like many mobile apps and innovative services, PGo's revenue structure requires continual usage (through in-app purchases and sponsorships) as it is free to download. Thus, as many players discontinued after initial adoption, substantial drops in Nintendo's share price occurred alongside the damage to brand equity. Such a case highlights the need to extend scholarship beyond traditional ‘adoption’ and begin to truly illustrate and explain the consumer behaviour phenomenon of ‘discontinuance’, particularly in the emerging and lucrative domain of PMGs.

Like many emerging marketing channels before it, large-scale discontinuance of PGo occurred and still remains unexplained in the academic literature. Herein, we address this shortcoming through a consumer case study methodology analysing a variety of data sources pertaining to PGo in Australia.

The development of the P2D_PMG model provides a new conceptual framework to illustrate the distinct forms discontinuance manifests in, for the first time. Scholarly rigour of the P2D_PMGs is achieved through validating and extending Soliman and Rinta-Kahila's (2020) framework for ‘discontinuance’ through its five forms. These forms are revealed as access and on-boarding (rejection), disconfirmation and hedonic adaptation (regressive discontinuance), technological, social, third parties, and personal issues (quitting), re-occurrences of hedonic adaptation (temporary), and alternatives and iterations (replacement).

Conceptual contributions are made in developing a model to explain what drives PMG discontinuance and when it occurs. This is particularly crucial for products with revenue structures built on continual usage, instead of initial adoption. In deriving data from actual players and aggregate user behaviour over an extended time period, the innovative case study methodology validates new discontinuance research in a manner other methods cannot. Managerial implications highlight the importance of CX, alpha/beta testing, promotion and research, gameplay design and collaboration/community engagement.

This paper aims to explore how making tabletop board games elicited adolescents’ design thinking during their participation in a summer game design camp at their local library.

This study leverages qualitative approaches to coding transcripts of participants’ talk. This study uses the design thinking framework from the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University as provisional codes to identify and make sense of participants’ verbalized design activity.

This study found that the making context of designing tabletop board games elicited a high frequency of design talk in participants, evidenced by both quantitative and qualitative reports of the data. Additionally, participants in large measure obviated constraints on their design activity imposed by linear conceptions of the design thinking model this study introduces, instead of moving fluidly across design modes. Finally, participants’ prior experiences in both life and in regard to games significantly influenced their design study.

This study highlights the unique affordances of making-centric approaches to designing tabletop games in particular, such as participants’ quick and sustained engagement in the study of design. This study also highlights the need for conceptions of design thinking specific to designing games.

The purpose of this study is to examine the use of game-based learning for approximations of practice within a critical, project-based (CPB) clinical experience for preservice teachers (PSTs). Within the clinical experience, secondary English Language Arts PSTs practiced modeling argumentative thinking through playing a board game, Race to the White House, with ninth-grade students.

Data collection took place at a public high school in the mid-Atlantic region of the USA. A variety of data was collected including written reflections by PSTs about their experiences leading the game play, audio recordings of the small group game play and a transcript of a whole-class 30-min post-game discussion with the PSTs and classroom teacher. To analyze the data, patterns of discourse were identified.

The game-based learning activity provided an accessible structure for PSTs to model their own argumentative thinking, presented opportunities for PSTs to elicit and interpret students’ thinking to support students’ practice in constructing an argument and created a playful context for PSTs to encourage students to produce arguments and critique the argumentation work of others.

Game-based learning within CPB clinical experiences has the potential to bring students, PSTs, inservice teachers and teacher educators together to experiment with how to help PSTs practice engaging with students in different ways than a traditional teacher-to-student dynamic.

Game design and game play within CPB clinical experiences has the potential to bring students, PSTs, inservice teachers and teacher educators together to experiment with how to make teaching and learning a more social and collaborative process.

The purpose of this paper is to develop some baseline data about games in libraries in North America. The term games is taken broadly in this piece to mean all types of games from card and board games to video games. The focus is primarily on public libraries, but there is some discussion of school and academic libraries as well.

There were two surveys done. The first was a phone survey of 400 public libraries, selected at random. The second survey was a Web‐based convenience sample of libraries of different types. In both studies, we asked questions about the support of gaming in the library, the types of gaming programs run in the library, and the goals and outcomes of those gaming programs.

Around 78 per cent of public libraries support gaming of some type. About 40 per cent run formal gaming programs, and about 20 per cent circulate games. The larger the library, the more likely they are to support gaming. The primary goals of gaming in libraries are to attract the underserved, attract current library patrons, and to create a space for social interactions between members of the community.

The first study is a random sample and therefore is a statistically significant representation of the population. The second study, being a Web‐based convenience sample, is not statistically representative of a population.

This type of baseline data is not available. Understanding how libraries are supporting games is valuable to researchers in asking appropriate questions. In addition, it helps libraries considering adding games to their services to learn how other libraries are doing it.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the impact a games-based curriculum can have on library and information science (LIS) curriculum.

This is a worked example, using a case study and iterative design approach. Each iteration of this course and the reports are from the respective opinions of the instructors.

The authors found that once students looked past games as being pleasant distractions and were able to see them as both context-rich and well-designed learning environments, they were conducive in bringing games to libraries to spur interest-driven learning. Some students tackled analog and digital game design, while others would play historical games and tie those back to available books, and still others used board and video games to bring parents and their children together through play. While these findings do not dictate that this would work in all situations, presenting games and play as an inclusive practice that spans topics and interests was successful.

This research focuses on an LIS course and its development. Research and best practices in this course better inform future designs on how to take games-based design and interest-driven learning into broader areas to use games to spur interest and learning. The authors do not claim that our individual approaches to this class are the best methods in any course using games-based learning. Yet instructors in other fields can take what the authors learned, and the different approaches used to teaching games-based learning, and augment based on the authors’ experiences.

This worked example demonstrates that a games-based curriculum can help generate interest in informal learning spaces, such as in libraries.

The value of this paper is to emphasize the impact that games and games research can have on other disciplines. Games-based and interest-driven learning are broad enough that their usefulness in other fields is worth consideration. Libraries have been commonly looked at as “old” spaces to acquire knowledge. Combining “old” and “new” technologies to serve a more technologically savvy demographic not only helps the field of games-based learning, but also helps those in LIS how to better service a new generation of learners in collaborative relationships.