Games that Make Curious: An Exploratory Survey into Digital Games that Invoke Curiosity

Abstract

Curiosity is an important aspect of life, but studying it is challenging without reliable stimuli. Digital games provide an ideal stimulus to investigate the circumstances that trigger curiosity and how it is expressed. A survey was conducted with the goal of assessing what game titles and game genres should be analysed to further the study of curiosity. To consider different types of curiosity, we included the Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale (5DC) questionnaire. The survey was completed by 113 participants, and resulted in 301 game suggestions that warrant further analysis. Exploration, social simulation, and collecting tasks within games were found to rank high in triggering curiosity. We further found that social curiosity in individuals correlates with having curiosity triggered by social simulations.

A Multi-Method Analysis of Engineering Student Curiosity

“…The authors argue that each factor has relationships with personality, emotional, and well-being measures, and used these results to define 4 distinct types of curious people (i.e., the Fascinated, the Problem-solvers, the Empathizers, and the Avoiders). Although developed within the field of psychology, the 5DCS has been adapted and used across many fields including Behavioral Sciences [21], Social Psychology, Computer Science [22], Mathematics Education [23] and Engineering Education [24]. In fact, researchers at our institution have previously used the 5DCS in the FYEP standard sequence to show that students' Social Curiosity increased significantly following EML infusion into the design-build course [15], demonstrating that the 5DCS can detect measurable changes in OSU's FYEP and provide data to better understand how curricular changes impact students' curiosity.…”