Gamification is an educational strategy that uses game elements to motivate students and encourage behaviors that help them achieve specific objectives. In the educational context, role-playing games have been highlighted as an effective methodology to involve students in their own learning process. It allows students to assume different roles and make decisions, which facilitates more dynamic and meaningful learning.

The innovative experience described in this paper was applied in the Macroeconomic Policies course of the Master's Degree in Finance at the University of Murcia (Spain). Although gamification is less common in higher education, students of any age are attracted to games and challenges, which makes this educational methodology a tool with great potential. The experience was applied to the contents related to the European monetary policy. This subject is particularly complex and can be arid if it is approached through traditional master classes. Therefore, a role-playing game was used to facilitate assimilation of these contents. In the game, students were organized into groups representing different economic agents (families, companies, banks, the Treasury and the ECB). Each group faces challenges related to monetary policy and must devise and apply measures to solve the difficult situations that arose in the last two decades. The teacher is in charge of directing the game, ensuring that it runs smoothly and closely to reality, and encouraging the active participation of all the students.

The evaluation of the experience was fed by a questionnaire to the students to evaluate their performance through a rubric and collect their global assessment of the activity, the usefulness of the game and its strengths and weaknesses. The evaluation rubric considered five main dimensions: understanding and analysis, active participation, effective communication, respect and empathy, and creativity and imagination. Each dimension was evaluated on a Likert-type scale from 1 (poor performance) to 5 (excellent). The remaining questions were assessed on the same scale, with 1 being the lowest rating and 5 the highest, and the strengths and weaknesses of the game were collected through open-ended questions.

The questionnaire showed that more than 70% of the students rated their performance in the dimensions as good or excellent, with the sole exception of creativity and imagination, which decreased to 57%. The average assessment of the dimensions of the rubric is between 4.1 and 4.6 out of 5, falling to 3.9 in creativity and imagination. The students found the game interesting and useful for understanding monetary policy (86% and 93% of the responses rated it as 4 or more). Seventy-nine percent preferred to learn it through play rather than traditional methods and indicated that they participated more and used their creativity more in the game than in a normal classroom. The students highlighted interactivity, teamwork and a better understanding of monetary policy as the main strengths of the game. On the other hand, 29% of the students mentioned a lack of time as an area for improvement. A high percentage of students (86%) valued the activity positively.

In view of these results, this gamification experience through a role-playing game has proven to be an effective methodology for involving students in their own learning process, transforming the study of a complex reality into a dynamic, interactive and meaningful experience.

Keywords: Role-playing game, game-based learning, innovative teaching, postgraduate education, Economics.