Recent research has begun exploring games as a medium for reflection due to their affordances as interactive systems of challenge. However, little effort has been put into (1) synthesizing insights across studies and disciplines and (2) translating the academic work on reflective play into practical takeaways for game developers. This article takes the first steps toward summarizing existing work on reflective play and translating insights for practical implementation by identifying key game elements present in games that evoke reflection. We divide these elements into five approaches: Disruptions, Slowdowns, Questioning, Revisiting, and Enhancers. Finally, we provide an actionable supplement for practicing game developers to apply these concepts to their games.

Games can be a powerful medium for encouraging reflection. Game designers can elect to include reflective elements within games otherwise designed for the mass-market. In order to better understand how mass-market games encourage players to reflect and which game elements were successful or unsuccessful in aiding reflection, we conducted an online survey. This survey was exploratory in nature and asked participants about their feelings towards games that had attempted to include deeper messages as part of gameplay. Inductive thematic analysis on the 139 responses led to identification of elements players valued within games and the creation of four themes underlying the player experience. Beyond the themes, a key takeaway was that games encourage reflection when they provide a space for players to project and explore their own experiences and philosophies, or when games enable implicit conversation between the player and the designer on the message of the game.

Citizen science projects that rely on human computation can attempt to solicit volunteers or use paid microwork platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. To better understand these approaches, this paper analyzes crowdsourced image label data sourced from an environmental justice project looking at wetland loss off the coast of Louisiana. This retrospective analysis identifies key differences between the two populations: while Mechanical Turk workers are accessible, cost-efficient, and rate more images than volunteers (on average), their labels are of lower quality, whereas volunteers can achieve high accuracy with comparably few votes. Volunteer organizations can also interface with the educational or outreach goals of an organization in ways that the limited context of microwork prevents.

Science is increasingly being achieved through citizen science (CitSci) — research conducted in part by non-professional scientists. In order to increase recruitment and retention, CitSci is sometimes gamified. Yet, research suggests that being a game does not alone make CitSci more enticing; rather, retention is dependent on the player’s experience. One recent trend in gaming is Augmented Reality (AR), as demonstrated by games like Pokémon Go. In this work, we examine the potential benefits of applying AR to CitSci gaming. We conducted a user study where we invited participants to play two citizen science adaptations (browser and AR) of the traditional game of Memory. We identified four major themes through thematic analysis. We conclude that AR is a leisurely toy: while the browser interface is better suited to rapid, accessible, productive play, AR is better suited to reflective, one-time, unstructured experiences. Our findings reveal potential towards future work on exploring AR in contexts such as museums and classrooms.