Ml O Lm: Stories of Mobile Legend Gamers in Accomplishing their Learning Modules Amidst Covid-19 Pandemic: A Case Study

Abstract

The Covid 19 pandemic has heightened the use of mobile phones among learners all over the globe. Hence, the students who got involved and soon got addicted into playing mobile games whether these are pre-installed, offline, or online have also increased significantly. This addiction may be associated to learners’ academic performance especially in the implementation of the new learning modality in the School Year 2021-2022. To highlight this issue, the researcher conducted a study describing and revealing the experiences of the two junior high school students, who were habitual mobile legend gamers, and the impact of their addiction to learning module accomplishment and submission. The researcher utilized judgmental sampling technique in this study which qualified the two participants among many of those who met the requirements because of the significant changes on their academic performance relevant to excessive playing of Mobile Legends. Analytic strategy and descriptive approach by Yin (2014) as also used in the study of Cadosales (2018), was employed to gather and analyze data focusing on the common themes emerging from their stories as they battle on the adverse effect of playing ML while accomplishing LM. A narrative story was created through inquiries and storytelling based on the transcribed interview responses. From the two Mobile Legend gamers’ revelation of the cases, themes based on their highlighted stories were described, analyzed, and compared to Mobile Legend’s heroes and characteristics. The findings of the study affirmed that stress, depression, isolation, and lack of actual communication and socialization lead the two cases to venture in engaging themselves into playing mobile legends. Moreover, their academic performance was badly affected when associated to excessive and unrestrained playing of Mobile Legends.