









































216  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

Eat, Play, Love
Re-figuring Media Literacy Instruction as Play
Chris Rosser, Theological Librarian, Oklahoma Christian University 
Heath Rosser, Student, Oklahoma Christian University

ABSTRACT Gameful design empowers curators and creators= for (in)forma-
tive instruction. For re-visioning and reinvigorating course building, gameful 
design offers a next-level move for transformative learning by creating (in)
formational spaces where desire drives students to explore, overcome chal-
lenges, and earn rewards. Our own approach incorporates five elements: 
structure, story, aesthetic, play, and desire. This session introduces two ex-
emplar courses that demonstrate robust philosophical, pedagogical, and 
playful thinking electrifying (in)formation via gameful design, emphasizing 
the value of non-required, desire-driven learning. 

MOVE 1: THE GAME WE’RE PLAYING

Friends, both virtual and visceral, we are grateful for this opportu-
nity to share this presentation entitled Eat, Play, Love: Re-figuring 
Media Literacy Instruction as Play. My name is Chris Rosser, Theo-
logical Librarian at Oklahoma Christian University; presenting with 
me today is my son Heath Rosser, student at OC who began working 
with me as a library intern several years ago in high school. Part of 
Heath’s work as intern was to help think about curricular and co-
curricular design and to develop instructional delivery aspects for 
several courses. Heath has been able to participate in gameful course 
design both behind the scenes as a developer in several courses and 
as a player (or student) in Eat, Play, Love, the media literacy course 
that is the focus of this presentation.

I’ve been very grateful to Heath for the ideas and creativity he’s 
shared along the way—it’s very helpful to have a student on hand 
to beta test what may seem like odd or out-of-the-box strategies for 
course design and delivery. For over seven years now, I’ve worked to 
understand and implement gameful design in all my courses, includ-
ing courses whose heart is information and media literacy instruc-



LISTEN AND LEARN SESSIONS  217

tion, and I’ve presented at the Atla Annual Conference for several 
years on aspects of gameful design and its application within theo-
logical librarianship. Gameful design offers a means for converging 
curricular and co-curricular learning, and I believe this convergence 
is the future of education.   

Last year, I presented an ethical orientation to our media-rich, 
info-saturated society, claiming that media discernment (rather than 
media literacy) offers an important way forward. The heart of last 
year’s message was this: “Among players who live, move, and have 
our being in a media-rich, info-saturated system, media discernment 
refers to a disposition of heart and requisite skills for critically at-
tending to self and to other in love so that info consumption nour-
ishes well-being” (Rosser 2022, 183). Now, we hope to demonstrate 
how this ethic was not only delivered but also profoundly actualized 
within and through a gamified course. Proof of concept has been 
achieved, and we’d love to share the results.

We invite all participants to see yourselves as players—after all, 
participants at a conference and students in a classroom are just 
roles we adopt within the play-full worlds we already inhabit. We 
invite you into the storied worlds of these gamified courses with the 
hope that our explanation will become for you a meaningful and 
transformative experience. Among this learning community, we 
hope to share how gameful design actualizes (in)formation through 
encounter, how gameful design facilitates whole-person learning—
mind, heart, body, spirit. Let’s begin by offering our point and pur-
pose so that the end will be clear from the beginning: 

Point
Gameful design empowers curators and creators for (in)formative 
instruction. 

Purpose
To offer participants two exemplar courses that demonstrate ro-
bust philosophical, pedagogical, and playful thinking electrifying 
(in)formation via gameful design, so that together we might discern 
the pedagogical value of non-required, desire-driven learning and 
generate ideas for gamifying instruction.

Our game today involves three moves: What, Why, and How. We 
want to first talk about what gameful design is and why gamifica-
tion is a transformative mode for engaging students; but the bulk of 



218  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

this presentation will be a conversation about how to create desire-
driven spaces so that participant-heroes might also gain ideas for 
gameful application in your own contexts. So, if you’re ready, play-
ers, let’s play.

MOVE 2: WHAT WE’RE PLAYING AT

We begin not with what gamification is but rather who and what 
we are as theological librarians and those associated with the Atla 
community. Several years ago, Atla rebranded as “Collectors and 
Connectors in Religion and Theology,” and I really appreciate these 
markers of shared identity. To collectors and connectors, we also 
add curators of information; and these three markers—connectors, 
collectors, curators—are charged with the needed energies for elec-
trifying gameful design. 

We are connectors because we know that encounter with differ-
ence is the heart of learning and of love. We facilitate third-space 
encounters by which students come face to face with new informa-
tion and unexpected others. We serve at the intersections, within the 
interconnected matrix of diverse voices and perspectives, and the 
connections we foster are the mode and medium of love and learn-
ing: self face-to-face with other, since learning and love each requires 
encounter with difference or otherness. 

It’s an odd move, but I requested my library name badge read, 
Chris Rosser, Necromancer. While this title typically gets a confused 
stare and sometimes a laugh out of students, the term reveals some-
thing important about librarianship: librarians connect patrons with 
the words and thoughts of other minds, often the minds of those long 
dead! Such acts of blessed necromancy are facilitated by the collec-
tions we build and preserve. So, librarians as collectors conveys the 
access we provide to other minds, to unknown ways of thinking and 
of being, calling forth the strange and unexpected, which is the art 
and science of necromancy. 

We are also curators—and this marker of identity is where much 
of our focus will be in this session because curation of information 
is how we build out robust spaces for desire-driven learning that is 
the heart and soul of what we mean by gameful design. But let me 
suggest what gamification is not: gamifying learning is not simply or 
merely adding game elements to instruction—elements like points, 
badges, leaderboards, and avatars. Such elements add a gamified 



LISTEN AND LEARN SESSIONS  219

feel, but gameful design is so much more. Gamification means ap-
plying game-design principles in non-game contexts (Boskic and Hu 
2015): “gamifying a learning experience offers a means for imbuing 
education with curiosity, imagination, and play; it offers freedom to 
make mistakes (a mess-up means starting over again and again un-
til you’ve gained the skills to level-up). Through gamified learning, 
students are driven by desire to explore and overcome challenges” 
(Rosser 2020, 176). 

Several years ago, I discovered Kevin Bell, whose book Game On! 
Gamification, Gameful Design, and the Rise of the Gamer Educator ex-
changes gamification with the concept of gameful design. Bell says, 
“Gameful design takes elements of what makes games, or other forms 
of engagement, intriguing, boils them down to a fundamental level, 
and then applies them to educational experiences” (Bell 2017, 17; cf. 
Bell 2018, 42). Reframing gamification as gameful design has truly 
been a game changer in my own instructional design. 

In my own teaching and in all my courses, I incorporate five ele-
ments of gameful design: structure, story, aesthetic, play, and desire. 
Structure refers to a cohesive conceptual model around which the 
course is built. Story refers to an imaginative world or narrative into 
which students are invited and that facilitates course flow. Aesthetic 
refers to sound and image that captures imagination as students play 
through the course. Play refers to aspects of gameplay, like adopting 
an avatar or gamified persona, earning badges or micro-credentials, 
gaining special tokens for obliterating misses, exploration that leads 
to serendipitous discovery and reward, boss fights instead of exams, 
and other such elements that make learning feel like play. And fi-
nally, desire, which to me is the most important element of gameful 
design, by which we build the course to foster and facilitate learning 
motivated by desire, with loads of options, low risk, high flexibility, 
and high capacity for reward. Two other elements—not necessar-
ily gamified elements but crucial nonetheless—are feedback and 
reflection. We’ll spend more time with each of these elements as we 
discuss two exemplar gamified courses: Eat, Play, Love: Adventures 
in an Information Ecosystem, and Heroes in the Making.    

MOVE 3: WHY WE PLAY

To better frame our next move, let’s consider: Why might gameful 
design offer a beneficial approach to course design, specifically for 



220  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

today’s learners? Although I’ve mentioned this in past presentations, 
I think it’s important to offer my own philosophy of teaching, not 
least so that it becomes apparent that gameful design is not kitsch—
we don’t diminish our teaching by incorporating gameful design:

Learning is an encounter between self (sameness) and other (difference). 
Whole-person learning considers body, mind, heart, and soul—aspects 
envisioned as thriving, understanding, desiring, and imagining. Through 
facilitated encounters between self and other, students enlarge capacity 
to thrive, broaden understanding, clarify desire, and electrify imagination, 
so that love and learning transform body, mind, heart, and spirit. My pur-
pose therefore is (in)formation—to reach and transform a student’s heart, 
soul, mind, and strength. I recognize that the truest path to the heart is 
not through the head but through the gut, and gamification enables us to 
bring learning to spaces of desire. Transforming the whole person involves 
reorienting or clarifying desire so that students’ love (i.e., what they desire) 
vectors more truly toward diverse others. Love is therefore both the moti-
vation and goal of teaching. (Rosser 2020, 177-78)

As co-curricular spaces, our libraries can intentionally facilitate 
third-space encounters between self (sameness) and neighbor (differ-
ence). In my own context, (in)formation is our catchword, conveying 
identity and intent as we fulfill our ethical and instructional aims to 
form and inform for whole-person learning. 

So again, let me underscore: gamification is not kitsch; we as in-
structors do not diminish our teaching when we incorporate game-
ful design. On the contrary, gameful design brings learning to spaces 
of desire, important for learning because humans are players — we 
are creatures-at-play — and human activity (including learning) is 
infused with play (cf. Huizinga 2014; Rosser 2020). My philosophy 
of teaching is informed by a belief that humans are players, which, 
among other things, means that humans intend the world through 
story, and story is truth’s profoundest delivery device. We make 
sense of the world through story because we are storied creatures; 
so, rather than thinking about ourselves as thinking things (homo 
sapien), we are instead playful things (homo ludens), driven as we 
are by story and by desire.  

Gameful design empowers librarian-instructors to actualize (in)
formation as we live, move, and have our being in liminal spaces be-
tween the curricular and co-curricular. Gameful design can facilitate 
encounter between self and other in special worlds where students, 
as whole persons motivated by desire, are formed and informed. This 
is the heart of gameful design.     



LISTEN AND LEARN SESSIONS  221

MOVE 4: HOW WE PLAY AT LEARNING

To introduce a gamified media literacy course I teach entitled Eat, 
Play, Love, let’s attend to the first minute of an under-four-minute 
introductory video together (https://bit.ly/EatPlayLoveIntro). Here’s 
the script from the video’s beginning:

Friends, welcome to Media Literacy! My name is Chris Rosser and I’m Theo-
logical Librarian for the Beam Library; I’ll be your instructor—or maybe bet-
ter, I’ll be your travel guide—as we engage media literacy and discernment 
as a game we’ll be playing together all semester. 

Media Literacy is a three-hour, online, gamified course that sharpens crit-
ical-thinking skills for more thoughtful, ethical information consumption. 
Students participate in information creation and dissemination, identify 
and analyze misinformation and disinformation, and encounter media-
immersed humanity not just as consumers but as neighbors to love.

Hmph. That description sounds boring. OK, let me tell you what the course 
is really about: Media Literacy is just the stuffy name for the course catalog; 
the real name for our course is Eat, Play, Love: Adventures in the Informa-
tion Ecosystem.

And our course is a game we’ll play for the next three weeks, encountering 
and engaging news, media, and information in real time. You see, rather 
than just thinking about media literacy or media ethics, we’re paying at-
tention to who and what humans are and how and why humans behave the 
ways they do in relation to information. 

The purpose of this course is to challenge participants to play with 
media literacy, or media discernment, as crucial for (in)formation. As 
mentioned, we wonder: “Is it possible that our use of media—our use 
of these devices that tether us one to another—is it possible that our 
use of media might initiate within us growth and maturity?” (Ross-
er 2022, 183). These are questions we’re wrestling throughout our 
course, ethical questions similar to gritty tensions raised in games 
like The Last of Us, for example, with which some might be familiar 
through the recent HBO series. Ambiguity and gritty questions are 
the foundation of robust world building.   

So, first, we consider structure. While the course unfolds linear-
ly (task to task and module to module), the course and all activities 
reflect an overarching model, Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” 
cycle: leaving the familiar or status quo, followed by departure into 
unfamiliar spaces where heroes encounter trials and then ultimately 
return from their trials with a treasure of discoveries made in spe-
cial, upside-down adventures (Campbell 2008). 

https://bit.ly/EatPlayLoveIntro


222  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

The Hero’s Journey is a cycle of departure, initiation, return, and 
this cycle is also the spiral of experiences we encounter in students, 
especially those beginning college-level studies, who depart the fa-
miliar for the unknown. So, the Hero’s Journey model naturalizes 
movement into and through “special worlds” so that encounter with 
the unfamiliar becomes a normalized experience; in other words, 
the Hero’s Journey model normalizes the strange. 

Including an architecture—what we’re calling structure—means 
incorporating an overarching model so that students might better 
conceptualize their journey as learners through the course and be-
yond. Let’s take just another couple of minutes to consider a second-
ary orientation video that better explains the story, aesthetic, and 
play elements of this course (https://bit.ly/EatPlayLoveActivation). 
Here is the video’s under-four-minute script:

Hero, you’ve been activated! Briefly, let’s overview the game we’re playing 
and get you started off right. As you know, you’re a hero with a sword, a 
sword named Krino, and you’re on a mission to discern the true intentions 
of Medea Literati, a super secret organization with global influence. In 11 
moves—and by the way, we’re calling each new learning content a “move”—
in 11 moves, you’re gonna make it out of this nightmare dungeon-crawl 
with some answers. Resistance is counting on you, hero! 

Each move will take about three hours (or less, depending on your pace). 
Since this is a three-week course that’s worth 3 credit hours, we have to 
think in terms of a 15-week semester and a course that meets three times 
each week. You’ll work through 11 moves, each taking about three hours 
time-on-task, with a couple of extra bits of content thrown in, and some 
work in a side-quest-like desire-driven learning space called the Ianua Fo-
rum. So, if you’ll commit to three hours a day (not including weekends or 
holidays!) over the duration of our three weeks together, you will have no 
problem finishing this course—you’ve got this hero! 

Alright, here’s how to get started. Begin by overviewing the syllabus; you’ll 
probably wanna review the syllabus throughout our course to see how far 
you’ve come and all you have left to overcome. Sometimes, the syllabus isn’t 
enough, so don’t hesitate to reach out to your instructor—I am here to help! 

Next, take a moment to explore Blackboard, see what’s lurking behind each 
menu item, and get a sense for where things are in terms of our course 
platform. And when you are ready to begin, click Dungeons, and let’s go. 

New content opens each time you click “Mark Reviewed.” So, to access your 
next move, click “Mark Reviewed,” and new content will appear. Each move 
is introduced with a special transmission from Resistance Headquarters 
to help orient you, to give you a sense of what to expect. Listen to (or read) 
the transmission, click “Mark Reviewed,” and your next move will appear. 

https://bit.ly/EatPlayLoveActivation


LISTEN AND LEARN SESSIONS  223

For each move, you’ll find instructions about how to proceed. Follow the 
instructions completely so that you don’t miss anything, since there are 
typically multiple minor tasks to accomplish for each move. 

You’ll proceed in this way—clicking “Mark Reviewed” and opening and com-
pleting new content—until you reach your final move, which is called Hour 
11: Resolution. As described in your syllabus, you’ll learn more about this 
“final showdown” as our game progresses. 

Throughout, you’ll be responding to discussion prompts or posting content 
in submission folders—and if you have questions as you go, be sure to ask 
your instructor. You’ll also be spending some time in the desire-driven learn-
ing space of the Ianua Forum (ianua is a Latin term for “door”). But you’ll 
learn more about the Ianua in a separate video, hero. You’ll also hear more 
about grades and badges as we go, so don’t sweat it; let’s just get started.  

Finally, be on the lookout for non-required opportunities to gather with 
other heroes for our Virtual Dumpster Fires! These are always a great 
chance to sharpen each other and share what we’re discovering. Alright, 
once you’ve explored a bit and feel comfortable, click Dungeons, open new 
content by clicking “Mark Reviewed,” knock out your tasks, and let’s do this, 
hero! Three hours a day for three weeks, and this adventure will be worth 
it. Reach out if you have questions, and keep Krino sharp. Let’s go! 

As you can see, we incorporate story as an important aspect of 
gameful design. Humans are storied creatures, and we inhabit sto-
ried worlds, making sense of the world through story (cf. Rosser 
2020). Since the term student can signify a character in the drama of 
learning, we design to build out the stage upon which students will 
play. “The imagined world of story is formative space, and what we 
learn in storied worlds follows us out” (Rosser 2020, 180). Gameful 
design, then, involves developing storied worlds for students to in-
habit as they play through the course. 

In the case of Eat, Play, Love, students imagine themselves to be a 
hero-traveler bearing a sword named Krino—the Greek root of our 
term critical thinking—on a spiraling adventure through the infor-
mation ecosystem. Students come to see themselves as a hero-char-
acter carrying Krino; they are invited to “don the hero’s garb, strap 
on the hero’s katana, and to see themselves as a character in a story 
as much as they are a student in a class” (Rosser 2020, 180). Students 
are encouraged to post an avatar or image that conveys how they 
envision themselves as heroes. 

Perhaps surprisingly, introducing an overarching story does not 
require drastic revision to tasks and assignments; not every aspect 
of the course must be saturated by the story. Instead, learning hap-



224  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

pens beneath the overarching narrative so that krino simply offers 
a touchstone throughout, recalling students to the story of our game 
without the game itself turning into a distraction. So, as you design, 
consider crafting storied worlds your students can inhabit; encour-
age them to see themselves as characters on a journey as they play 
through the course. 

Gameful design also thinks about aesthetics. Syllabus design can 
be playful, and your learning management system can become a 
playground of gifs or images embedded within discussions, tasks, 
and announcements, aesthetic aspects that convey story, reminding 
students of the game. In Eat, Play, Love, students earn a special token 
for going beyond bare-minimum requirements; they can get the Red 
Mage, a token that lets them obliterate a missed task. In our LMS, 
an earned Mage appears as a GIF: armor igniting in flame to reveal 
spreading wings! So, gameful design makes good use of the LMS and 
syllabus by aesthetically conveying play-full elements.

Beyond story, aesthetics, structure, and play, we discover desire-
driven learning as the beating heart of gameful design. Friends, as 
librarians we are curators; that’s a strength we have, and curation is 
a profoundly transformative aspect of gameful design because cura-
tion fosters and facilitates desire-driven learning. 

Now, what I mean by desire-driven learning is this: learning that is 
driven by desire (a super technical description!) The way to accom-
plish or to facilitate desire-driven learning is to create lots and lots 
of non-required options, to allow for high flexibility, and to provide 
loads of feedback (students need to feel instructor presence, to know 
we’re all on this journey together). Briefly, let’s consider a video sum-
mary of a one-week course entitled Heroes in the Making. The video 
was created to introduce faculty to gameful design; it reviews and 
reinforces gameful design concepts we’ve covered in this session and 
also describes desire-driven learning (https://bit.ly/HeroesInTheMak-
ingCourse). Here’s the under-five-minute script: 

Dear Faculty, I’m gonna do my best to condense this presentation on gami-
fication for the Fall 2022 Faculty Workshop down from 25 to under five 
minutes. Here we go! 

Gamification refers to the incorporation of game design into course design. 
But gamifying a course is not just a kitschy move; there are profound peda-
gogical reasons for gameful course design, and not least because gameful 
design pays attention to who humans are and how humans learn. People 
are players, we learn with and are driven by our gut as much as our nog-
gins. People are desiring, storied beings, and we make sense of the world 

https://bit.ly/HeroesInTheMakingCourse
https://bit.ly/HeroesInTheMakingCourse


LISTEN AND LEARN SESSIONS  225

through story. So, in my own courses, I apply two primary aspects of game 
design: I invite students to adopt a persona, to see themselves as a hero 
who carries a sword named Krino (a tool for discernment); and I invite them 
join our hero’s journey, a model around which our course is constructed. 
Now, you can pause the video and read my own philosophy of teaching, 
if you like; this captures the heart of why gameful design is impactful for 
me and for my students and how gameful design centers whole-person 
learning and transformation. 

The ethic energizing all my courses is the self-other construct, and whad-
daya know that construct also mirrors our Hero’s Journey model. I use the 
hero’s journey because it normalizes experience of the strange and un-
known—students anticipate that they will encounter new and challenging 
learning, but they also anticipate return to the familiar, but now empowered 
with new knowledge, insights, and experiences. So, let me share a gamified 
course—Heroes in the Making—as a recent exemplar of gameful design. 

During Honors Summer Academy, Heroes in the Making met face to face 
daily for one hour with some outside-of-class work to be completed online. 
As you can see, the syllabus reflects the course’s playful intent. Outside-
of-class learning content followed the contour of the hero’s journey, and 
students were required to select and complete one Heroic Task each day. 
Completion of a task earned the students XP (or, Experience Points), and 
students were encouraged to complete work beyond the required mini-
mum to earn extra XP since our course culminated in an epic Boss Battle, 
and abundant XP was a key to victory! Students also had opportunity to 
earn XP in a fully optional, non-required space for desire-driven learning. 
In this forum, discussion threads provided lots of options for further learn-
ing that resonated with or reinforced our in-class conversations. I added 
new options daily, which typically consisted of a curated video to watch 
and a simple prompt to guide reflection. Here are some results to consid-
er: In total, there were 311 posts (about 160 from students, and the rest 
offered my feedback to student posts); the totally optional, desire-driven 
learning forum offered 17 different threads, and most were worth five (5) 
points; this optional forum received 125 posts, and students earned 267 
total non-required points! All of their earned XP was needed to overcome 
the nasty Human Salvo Cleric (there’s a backstory here, don’t worry about 
it now)—and the boss battle involved using XP to cast attacks or charms 
by rolling giant, inflatable dice at the Cleric (who was one of my kids in 
costume, super fun!) 

This brief video doesn’t offer space for me to describe how gameful design 
helps me assess learning outcomes, how gameful design helps me create 
a culture of reflection and feedback, how gameful design can generate a 
robust learning community in virtual spaces—but it does, and if you wanna 
know more about gameful design, I’m here for it. So, all the best as you 
incorporate strategies for active learning this semester; the Teaching and 
Learning Committee is here to help! 



226  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

Crafting spaces to facilitate desire-driven learning by creating 
numerous, non-required options is the heart of gameful design. 
This concept has been proven in my own courses, including a recent 
World Religions course, which I’ll hopefully more fully discuss in a 
future Atla Annual Conference session. For now, suffice to say that 
out of over 100 learning experiences created to guide learning and 
fulfill outcomes, students chose their own path to course comple-
tion; they followed their heart into learning they desired, and their 
reflections posted at each point of encounter powerfully conveyed 
the substance and value of these learning experiences. Among 30 
students and in all the threads of our many discussion options, we 
made over 1,350 posts! Half of those posts reflect my own feedback 
to students, revealing robust interaction between students and in-
structor normalized in a gamified context, since “games . . . create a 
two-way communication path embedded in a ludic [playful] space” 
(Breuer, Bessant, and Gudiksen 2022 140). Robust feedback and in-
tentional reflection are key to learning, knowledge transfer, and 
retention (cf. chs. 5-6 in Chan 2022). But consider: 30 students made 
nearly 700 substantial posts; this means that almost every student 
composed the equivalent of a 10-12 page paper and didn’t even re-
alize it. We’ll talk more about this course in a future Atla session.    

MOVE 5: PLAYFUL TAKEAWAYS 

Friends, here we are, at journey’s end. Heroes, you did it—you suc-
cessfully navigated the light and dark of another Atla Annual ses-
sion. And what did you gain as you rounded the arc out of strange 
encounters with out-of-the-box course design and now return to your 
status quo? Let me briefly share my own takeaway, what I discern as 
the aim of gameful design:

Through gameful design, together with students we inhabit story 
as class becomes its own storied world; students envision themselves 
as hero-travelers in search of light from new learning facilitated by 
encounter; they are a hero carrying a sword called Krino (discern-
ment), not a weapon but a tool for facilitating encounter between self 
and other. Intentional, humble encounter between self and other is 
our ethical orientation since we know that learning and love each 
requires encounter between self (sameness) and other (difference). 
Through encounter, we enlarge our capacity to love the neighbor 
as the self, which makes learning a game worth playing and game-



LISTEN AND LEARN SESSIONS  227

ful design a worthwhile endeavor. As noted above, gameful design 
brings learning to spaces of desire, where whole-person transfor-
mation involves reorienting or clarifying desire so that students’ 
love (i.e., what they desire) vectors more truly toward diverse oth-
ers (Rosser 2020). Love then becomes both motivation and end (or 
telos) of teaching, and gameful design empowers us—curators and 
creators—for (in)formative instruction.  

For associated materials including course syllabi, a gamified 
course final, and videos from these and other gamified courses, vis-
it: https://bit.ly/eatplaylovefinal.

REFERENCES

Bell, Kevin. 2018. “Gameful Design: A Potential Game Changer.” 
Educause Review (May-June): 41–48. https://er.educause.edu/-/
media/files/articles/2018/5/er183103.pdf. 

———. 2017. Game On! Gamification, Gameful Design, and the Rise 
of the Gamer Educator. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 
Press. 

Boskic, Natasha, and Sharon Hu. 2015. “Gamification in Higher 
Education: How we Changed Roles.” Proceedings of The Ninth 
European Conference on Games Based Learning, 741-748. 

Breuer, Henning, John Bessant, and Sune Gudiksen. 2022. 
Gamification for Innovators and Entrepreneurs: Using Games to 
Drive Innovation and Facilitate Learning. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Campbell, Joseph. 2008. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato, 
CA: New World Library.

Chan, Cecilia Ka Yuk. 2022. Assessment for Experiential Learning. 
New York: Routledge.

Huizinga, Johan. 2014. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in 
Culture. Boston: Beacon Press.

Rosser, Chris. 2022. “Left to Our Devices: Playing with 
Spiritually Formative Media Discernment.” Atla Summary of 
Proceedings 76 (November): 182–96. https://doi.org/10.31046/
proceedings.2022.3156.

———. 2020. “Gaming Information: Gamified, Transformational 
Learning in Research and Theology.” Atla Summary of 
Proceedings 74 (December): 178–89. https://doi.org/10.31046/
proceedings. 2020.1837.

https://bit.ly/eatplaylovefinal
https://er.educause.edu/-/media/files/articles/2018/5/er183103.pdf
https://er.educause.edu/-/media/files/articles/2018/5/er183103.pdf

