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Participatory narratives are compelling, at least partly because of their ability to help players suspend disbelief in the fictional world in which they engage. Game makers have used the phrase “This is Not a Game” (TINAG) to capture the willingness of players to buy into such narratives in ways that promote productive roleplaying and authentic engagement. Although TINAG has permeated the academic and popular literature on gaming and immersive narratives for decades, there has not been a scientific grounding for the term that provides researchers support for a more rigorous study of the topic. This article makes two primary contributions. First, it provides a definition of the Perception of TINAG based on a systematic literature review of 50 articles that define or describe critical characteristics of TINAG: The Perception of TINAG is a player’s acceptance that they are embedded in and able to influence a fictional story woven into the real world. Second, the paper develops and validates a survey instrument that researchers can use to measure the Perception of TINAG and its three unique components: (1) the player accepts that they are embedded in a fictional story, (2) the player believes their actions influence the narrative, and (3) the player perceives that the story is woven into the real world. We evaluated the instrument using exploratory factor analysis using expert reviewers and game players. We include a table of the articles describing TINAG and our final scale to facilitate future research. 

In this paper we introduce an approach to cybersecurity education and helping students develop professional understanding in the form of a Playable Case Study (PCS), a form of educational simulation that draws on affordances of the broader educational simulation genre, case study instruction, and educational Alternate Reality Games (or ARGs). A PCS is an interactive simulation that allows students to “play” through an authentic scenario (case study) as a member of a professional team. We report our findings over a multi-year study of a PCS called Cybermatics, with data from 111 students from two different U.S. universities who interacted with the PCS. Cybermatics increased student understanding about certain key aspects of professional cybersecurity work, improved their confidence in being able to successfully apply certain skills associated with cybersecurity, and increased about half of the students’ interest in pursuing a cybersecurity career. Students also reported a number of reasons why their perceptions changed in these areas (both positive and negative). We also discuss design tensions we experienced in our process that might be encountered by others when creating simulations like a PCS, as they attempt to balance the authenticity of designed learning experiences while also sufficiently scaffolding them for newcomers who have little background in a discipline. 

Providing learners with authentic ethical situations in a formal educational environment can be challenging. While we encounter ethical situations daily (e.g., how we treat those around us; temptation to illegally use copyrighted content), some types of ethical situations are high-risk, rare, and/or embedded into contexts that learners don’t typically inhabit. For example, learners studying user experience design may someday be pressured by a boss to implement “dark UX” patterns to increase sign-ups by deceiving users. Learners can benefit from the ability to practice recognizing unethical behavior, making decisions in ethically complex contexts, and learning from their responses. A new genre of highly realistic educational simulations, called Playable Case Studies, can provide a context in which players can experience ethical conundrums in a safe environment, helping learn from mistakes and successes. In order to make the experience authentic and not obviously about ethics, it makes sense to embed ethical experiences into simulations focused on other topics in which ethical issues arise. An example of this approach is described, wherein an ethical situation is embedded within a cybersecurity Playable Case Study called Cybermatics. Many questions remain about how to design and evaluate such experiences in ways that lead to effective learning.