A Preliminary Study of Integrating an Action Role-Playing Game into an Ancient Prose

The purpose of this research is to build a role-playing game system based on ancient prose to help students increase the understanding of ancient prose through the exploration of the game tasks. Apart from other role-playing games, we put more emphasis on the enhancement of learning interests and integration of different game elements into our system, inclusive of an avatar system, whack-a-mole game, scrabble game, simulation game and so on. In the portion of content design of our game, we designed game elements based on conducting expert interviews in the fields of digital learning and teaching in Chinese and comparisons of different versions of Chinese textbooks. This research divided the system design into two stages: (1) system planning, and (2) system construction. In the first stage, we collected 56 questionnaires from junior high school students to investigate the degree and acceptance of learning ancient prose. In addition, we regarded preferences toward games from students as our design principles. In the stage of system construction, we invited the same students to test our game prototype in order to revise our game system. Moreover, we investigated the interests towards ancient prose from them through evaluation to improve the mechanism of our game. To sum up, this research aims to enhance the knowledge’s and learning motivation of ancient prose in the situation of self-directed learning through our system.