User Experience in Board Games: An Agentive Semiotic Evaluation in Higher Education Settings

Abstract

Play has emerged as a valuable pedagogical strategy in higher education, offering experiential and situated learning opportunities that integrate knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Within this context, analog board games are gaining renewed attention as tools that foster strategic thinking, collaboration, and emotional engagement. This study explores educational board games not merely as content carriers, but as intentionally designed artifacts that shape meaningful learning experiences. The research examines two Colombian games with distinct design paradigms: Guanga: Textiles Andinos (cultural-symbolic) and Construyendo la Autopista (technical-procedural). Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the study combines designer interviews, artifact analysis, and gameplay observation with biometric data (facial expression analysis, eye tracking, and GSR) and standardized questionnaires (MEEGA+).  The originality of this research lies in the application of agentive semiotics to board game analysis, a perspective rarely explored in Game-Based Learning. Instead of viewing players as passive decoders of signs, this framework analyzes how design decisions create conditions for agency, action, and sense-making. Findings reveal that while Guanga fosters a reflective agency characterized by creative tension and symbolic exploration, Autopista promotes a procedural agency defined by stability and operational execution. This study contributes to game design research by proposing an experience-centered methodology to evaluate how players activate and transform intended meanings through embodied interaction.