Impact of metacognition and age group on contemporary video game interface and gameplay design

Abstract

Metacognition is about “learning about learning” [1]. However, this theory is far more complicated. This allows people to take charge of their own learning. It involves awareness of how they learn, and evaluation of their learning needs, generating strategies to meet these needs and then implementing the strategies. The theory of metacognition can be identified as humans’ survival instinct. Metacognition also thinks about one’s thinking process such as study skills, memory capabilities, and the ability to monitor learning [2], [3]. Metacognition refers to higher-order thinking which involves active control over the cognitive processes engaged in learning. This concept needs to be explicitly taught along with content instruction. Metacognitive knowledge is about our cognitive processes and our understanding of how to regulate those processes to maximize learning. From ancient times humans have developed their metacognitive skills as a survival factor. For the survival in a video game, players need to follow instructions to get an idea about the gameplay [4]. But most of the time people are likely to skip the instructions without going through them even for the first time. This scenario is noticeable in mobile gameplay. This research has done to identify the factors which affect this dilemma. Metacognition level of a person and age are the variables that were considered for this experiment in order to address the following hypotheses; The more metacognitive skills people have, the more they will find it easy to play never-before-played games. Age range affects performance when it comes to playing the never-before-played games without direct instructions. At the end of this experiment, the first hypothesis became correct while the second one wasn’t. Therefore, people were more likely to ignore direct instructions and go through gameplay successfully when they had a higher metacognitive level, and the age group didn’t seem to affect this factor.