The implementation of Learning Principles in God of War An auto-ethnography on how entertainment and education can be combined

The development of the God of War game series and the changes that were applied to innovate it are a good example of how the medium of video games has progressed over recent years. While the quality of games was initially judged based on the level of enjoyment it provided players with, games nowadays tend to be reviewed in a similar fashion to other older media like film and theatre; as potential works of art. How fun a game is to play is still an important aspect to video game reviews, but it cannot be understated how more complex aspects like camera work, world building and narrative themes like fatherhood and family are increasingly present within video games. While the medium of games is continuing to mature, discussions about the medium’s educational value have started to arise. In recent years, numerous “educational games” have been developed, but these could not accomplish their educational goals as they missed the aspect of games that makes them so valuable for education in the first place. As these games were “academized”, they made sense from an educational perspective, but lost their appeal from a gameplay perspective. To make sure that educational games like these can be used effectively in the classroom, they need to regain this appeal, effectively motivating students to play these games like they would play commercial games. For this reason, this research is focused on identifying how learning principles are embedded and implemented in the commercial, narrative-based game God of War, which released early in 2018. While focusing on the game’s mechanics, narrative and world-building, an attempt will be made to provide a holistic view of how commercial games can educate, despite of their emphasis on amusement. This would effectively answer the question of what educational games can learn from commercial games. The research question can be formulated as followed: “How are learning principles implemented/embedded in the content of the game God of War (PS4)?” To answer this research question, an auto-ethnography is conducted to collect a data set that is based on the researcher’s own experiences of the game. Afterwards, a thematic analysis is performed to analyse the collected data. This research is mainly based upon a theoretic framework built by combining J.P. Gee’s definitions of learning principles, Henry Jenkins’ conceptualisation of environmental storytelling and Adrienne Shaw’s framework of game affordances. As a result of the thematic analysis, five different main themes were identified. These include the presentation of tutorials through visual and textual prompts, how Atreus, Mimir or other NPC’s can teach the player about the game world and its inhabitants through the usage of embedded narratives and encyclopaedic impulses, how Kratos can function as a teacher through the learning principle of identification, how Atreus or other NPC’s can guide the player through the game world and finally how the player can be stimulated to learn instinctively in specific scenarios through the learning principles of customization, co-design, adding expertise through repeated cycles and system thinking. Even more importantly, the presentation of these learning principles was always clear and consistent, and only changed based on the narrative state of the game. This resulted in the main conclusion; learning principles should be presented consistently through a limited amount of ways and they should always be rooted in the game’s narrative.