Learning through play at the intersection of problem-solving, epistemic (un)certainty, and emotion

Although play is often viewed as a buffer against failure, fostering a safe place to explore, our nascent work in this paper argues that play is an activity teeming with emotional and epistemic complexity. Using multi-modal data and drawing from the epistemic cognition (EC), emotion, and problem-solving literature, we are developing a coding scheme to explore how people learn in a puzzle video game. Preliminary findings revealed a significant negative relationship between reported confidence and time spent on a level (r = -.52, p < .001). Furthermore, after coding a small subset of the data, co-occurring patterns emerged among players’ problem-solving moves, epistemic stance, and emotional valence. The initial results of the study demonstrate its potential for enhancing the field’s understanding of what it is like to learn from playing a video game, specifically by conducting a fine-grained process analysis and exploring connections between different research literatures.