MINECRAFT AND MORALS - THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS OF THE USAGE OF DIGITAL GAMES IN EDUCATIONAL AND LEARNING CONTEXTS USING THE EXAMPLE OF TEACHING MEDIA ETHICS IN SECONDARY EDUCATION WITH MINECRAFT

Using digital games in educational and learning contexts can be done in different ways. On the one hand, one can use the so-called serious games, sometimes described as "any marriage of educational content and computer games" [1 p145]. In other words: Games "with the intention to entertain and to achieve at least one additional goal (e.g., learning or health)" [2 p3]. On the other hand, one can use games in educational and learning contexts that were primarily developed for entertainment purposes. The usage of these different types of games in educational and learning contexts comes along with certain possibilities, advantages, and benefits but also with certain limits and disadvantages. One of them is, for example, the "chocolate broccoli problem" [3 p18] which means that "[k] ids, particularly pre-teens, tweens, and teens shy away from games they are told are good for them, or labelled as educational" [3 p18]. That is to say, using (certain) digital games in a certain way may contradict one's own educational intentions. A problem that is given with the usage of non-serious games on the other side may be potentially given age limits that narrow down the range of games teachers can use in educational and learning contexts. In this paper, we present - from a theoretical point of view - how game-based learning and the games used in it can be differentiated, what the possibilities of these different types can be but also what and where the limits of the usage of either serious and non-serious games are. Additionally, we will give short but concrete examples of how the different types of games can be used in educational and learning contexts. To illustrate the ideas presented more precisely and to examine an example in greater detail, we will also present a theoretical concept based on Lawrence Kohlberg's Just Community concept [4,5,6]. In it, the game Minecraft [7] functions as a space in which the learners have to cooperate and create a Just Community. So, the game is used as a supportive medium for the learning of ethical theories here: the contractualist theory - in secondary education as a part of teaching media ethics and improving moral reasoning. Since this concept has not yet been conducted and / or empirically surveyed, we will only give a prospect of how this concept can (and potentially will) be realized and surveyed in the future. Due to the fact, that the increase of the level of moral reasoning according to Lawrence Kohlberg [8,9] is the primary goal of the concept, a pre-post-measurement that uses either quantitative (e.g. the so called "Briechle-Test" [10]) and / or qualitative methods (especially interviews) to collect data can be used. We assume that the results would show that the usage of Minecraft in (media) ethical learning contexts is reasonable with regard to the learning objectives. This paper can therefore be seen as a starting point for a further empirical investigation.