nrik v He d a apa l sk Ma A SERIOUS GAME PROTOTYPE BASED ON STUDY TRAINING EMOTION REGULATION TO HELP COLLEGE STUDENTS REDUCE ACADEMIC PROCRASTINATION Take ‘Cat Clinic’ as a case Master Degree Project in Informatics One year Level 22.5 ECTS Spring term 2021 Siyuan Wang Supervisor: Per Backlund Examiner: Mikael Johannesson Abstract Academic procrastination is a common phenomenon among contemporary college students. This behavior seriously affected the graduation, physical and mental of college students. Playing games is a kind of procrastination behavior, which refers to short-term happiness through games and avoiding the pain caused by academic writing. The purpose of this article is to help students pay attention to using idle games to regulate emotions to reduce the frequency of academic writing procrastination. In terms of game design, the game type chosen is idle games. The study used the method of emotion regulation skill trend chart to divide the procrastinators into two groups for the experiment. The conclusion is that serious games based on learning emotion regulation can help procrastinators to improve their emotion regulation skills and reduce the frequency of procrastination to a certain extent. Keywords: serious game; academic procrastination；emotion regulation; idle game Table of Contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 2 Background ........................................................................................................ 2 2.1 Academic procrastination ........................................................................................ 2 2.2 Idle games and serious games ............................................................................... 2 2.3 Emotion regulation .................................................................................................. 6 3 Problem .............................................................................................................. 8 3.1 Limitations .............................................................................................................. 9 3.2 Ethical considerations ........................................................................................... 10 4 Method .............................................................................................................. 11 4.1 Overall research process ...................................................................................... 11 4.2 Experiment procedure ........................................................................................... 11 4.3 Interview guide ...................................................................................................... 12 4.4 Participants ........................................................................................................... 13 4.5 Measures .............................................................................................................. 13 5 Detailed description of the game ................................................................... 15 6 Results .............................................................................................................. 19 6.1 LPG group ............................................................................................................ 20 6.1.1 Emotion regulation skill trend map ...................................................................................... 20 6.1.2 Self-support skills ................................................................................................................ 22 6.1.3 LPG's method of planning academic writing tasks in game prototype ............................... 25 6.1.4 LPG's usefulness perception in in game prototype ............................................................. 27 6.2 MPG group ............................................................................................................ 28 6.2.1 Emotion regulation skill trend map ...................................................................................... 28 6.2.2 Self support skills ................................................................................................................ 31 6.2.3 MPG's method of planning academic writing tasks in game prototype .............................. 34 6.2.4 MPG's usefulness perception in game prototype ............................................................... 36 6.3 Comparison between groups MPG/LPG ................................................................ 38 6.3.1 ER skills............................................................................................................................... 38 6.3.2 Self-support skill .................................................................................................................. 38 6.3.3 Method of planning academic writing tasks in game prototype .......................................... 39 6.3.4 Usefulness perception in game prototype........................................................................... 39 7 Discussion ....................................................................................................... 40 7.1 Research questions’ answers ............................................................................... 40 7.2 Limatations ........................................................................................................... 41 8 Conclusions ..................................................................................................... 43 8.1 Summary .............................................................................................................. 43 8.2 Future Work .......................................................................................................... 43 References .............................................................................................................. 44 1 Introduction Academic procrastination and gaming, seem to be two opposite concepts. In other words, evading academic writing through games can be a way of procrastination. Since games can bring happiness, how to improve academic procrastination through games has become an interesting topic. The research and discussion in this thesis aim to study procrastinator emotion regulation with the help of a game to improve academic writing. The aim is to explore the possibility of using emotion regulation to remedy the symptoms of college students’ academic procrastination. According to Schouwenburg (1995), 70% of colleges have academic procrastination. Many people, especially those with severe procrastination, feel very powerless about this. For students, serious academic delays will greatly affect their graduation. Solomon & Rothblum (1984) found in a survey that most college students’ aversion to tasks is the main factor leading to academic procrastination, while a small number of students may also procrastinate due to depression, fear of failure, the pursuit of perfection, poor confidence, and cognitive problems. Academic delays may be caused by complicated factors. According to a meta-analysis of many studies, the main reason is procrastination caused by the failure of emotion regulation (Sirois & Pychyl, 2013). Eckert, Ebert, Lehr, et al. (2016, pp.10-18) state that “Emotion regulation plays a critical role for understanding the self-regulatory failure of procrastination. Individuals postpone or avoid aversive task in order to gain short-term positive affect at the cost of long-term goals”. Therefore, for procrastinators, emotion regulation is the primary solution to overcome academic procrastination. Among the current serious games, there is no game aimed at reducing procrastination in the strict sense. Although some games involve focused time, such as Forest, a game designed to keep people focused, this software does not target procrastination (Harrison, 2016). And these games basically revolve around idle games. According to Alharthi et al. (2018), idle games are unique in motivating long-term motivation and promoting desired behaviors. Therefore, the idle game type may be a reliable choice for developing serious game prototypes to reduce academic procrastination of college students through emotional regulation. Based on the meta-analysis by Berking & Znoj (2008) , fear of failure and aversion to the task are the main psychological factors that lead to the failure of emotion factors. In order to explore the potential of training procrastinators’ emotion regulation on academic tasks in serious games. This thesis takes its starting point in the emotion regulation ability of procrastinators, and developed a serious game based on learning emotion regulation to help researchers explore the potential of serious games in reducing students’ procrastination on academic tasks. 1 2 Background 2.1 Academic procrastination Academic procrastination has been seen as an impediment to academic success because it decreases the quality and quantity of learning while increasing the severity of stress and negative outcomes in students’ lives (Hen & Goroshit ， 2014 ， p.1). There are many predisposing factors for academic procrastination, including deficits, tendency to boredom, low self-esteem, individual values, learning routines, fear of failure, perfectionism, and locus of control (Hen & Goroshit ， 2014). These very complicated psychological factors are summarized as two independent reasons in the homogeneity analysis of Solomon & Rothblum (1984):