The Language Campus: Role-Play in an eLearning Environment

This paper looks at how multiplayer role-play games (games that have a social environment allowing players to communicate) are adept at fostering this type of learning experience and, based on previous studies by the author and others, discusses why role-play games are the most suitable digital game genre for Game Based Learning (GBL).

The article describes specific areas that should be considered when designing a role-play scenario to be used within a digital game and shares the experience of creating and subsequently testing these theories using a single-player example game. The resulting platform, the Language Campus, is used to exemplify a best practice model of GBL that incorporates role-play scenarios within a collaborative, social e-learning environment.