Game-Based Learning

While cognitive theories and intuition point to game-based learning as holding a great deal of promise, games are not fitting into the educational landscape with the ease anticipated by champions of game-based learning. A number of technical, cultural, and ethical factors demand attention as the role of game-based learning in formal education evolves.

Games of all stripes have long been of interest to educators as a way to engage and motivate students to learn new concepts and apply their knowledge in a meaningful context. Learning theories from the sociocultural cognition family of learning theories point to the potential games have to motivate, engage, and provide authentic learning experiences. Despite this promise, however, games (particularly video games) have struggled to penetrate the formal education marketplace. Furthermore, some scholars have suggested that the application of game mechanics towards non-game environments is a manipulative and exploitative practice. Nonetheless, games are an increasingly important medium where school-aged children spend much of their time. As such, it is important for educators and educational researchers to understand games in the context of this greater media landscape and what it means for the future of learning.

Game-based learning is sometimes mistakenly referred to as "game theory," however, the term game theory refers to the use of mathematical models to study decision-making, and is not related to game-based learning. The relationship between games and learning and the use of games as a vehicle for learning has long been of interest to educators. Interest in game-based learning among scholars, funding agencies, educational technology start-ups, large educational publishing companies, and the White House has increased since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Leading theorists in the field are exploring the intersection of games and learning and what games can teach us about learning.

Applications

Learning is a life-long endeavor for humans and can occur via a designed experience (such as at a workshop, in a classroom, via a museum exhibit, or by watching a documentary) or via un-designed experiences such as free play or personal reflection. Game-based learning is typically discussed in the context of designed learning experiences, both in terms of what learning designers can glean from game design and in terms of how to utilize games as part of a designed learning experience.

Sociocultural Learning Theories

There are numerous theories about learning, and in understanding game-based learning, the family of theories that are of greatest use are the sociocultural learning theories. These theories of learning emphasize the roles that communities and tools play in how humans learn. Scholars from education, psychology, anthropology, and sociology have contributed and built upon this body of knowledge, which has its origin in the work done by Lev Vygotsky in the early part of the twentieth century. Vygotsky's emphasis on the role adults and peers play in learning, along with how cultural context affects learning and the importance of play in cognitive development, have been fruitful in generating learning theories that suggest game-based learning to be worthy of deeper investigation. One of Vygotsky's most enduring ideas was that of the zone of proximal development (ZDP). Cognitive tasks that a learner cannot perform on his own but can perform with outside assistance are said to lie within the ZDP. Understanding where a learner's ZDP is for particular learning objectives is critical for scaffolding learners through mastery of that learning objective. As research into learning moved toward more constructivist models, the role of mentors, peers, society, and culture could not be ignored. To be sure, the basic idea behind ZDP frequently emerges in sociocultural learning research, sometimes under other names such as cognitive apprenticeships or legitimate peripheral participation.

To accept that learning and cognition are social phenomenon is also to accept that cognition is distributed. That is to say that an individual's knowledge is distributed among an individual's social network and the tools in the environment. People often use tools that make them work more efficiently or boost their knowledge base. Distributed cognition and sociocultural learning theories are critical for understanding the arguments behind game-based learning.

Games and Learning Experiences

Fullerton (2008) compares two very different experiences that are recognized as games (as opposed to toys, puzzles, or dramatic play): The card game Go Fish and the video game Quake. Through this comparison, Fullerton draws out what she identifies as the essential components of a game:

• Players: A game is designed for players. Unlike other forms of entertainment, games demand active participation.
• Objectives: Games lay out specific goals for players. Whether it is collecting the most cards or shooting the most enemies, or getting a basket in a net, games provide players with goals.
• Rules: All games explain what players can or cannot do in pursuit of the goals.
• Resources: Games provide players with resources to draw upon to achieve the goals. For example, a puck, a Scrabble tile, or a chance card.
• Conflict: In a game, the player has to work against something or someone to obtain the goals. Other players might pose a conflict. Hazards in a video game are another example of conflict.
• Boundaries: These can be physical boundaries, such as the lines on the floor of a basketball court, or they can be conceptual boundaries via the social agreement of a game. For instance, players agree that only in the Go Fish game are they discussing and bargaining over the cards involved.
• Outcomes: Games involve uncertain and unequal outcomes. Players will lose or win, but that is not certain from the outset of the game. That uncertainty is important as it drives the players through the game.

In examining these components outlined by Fullerton, the overlaps between games and well-designed learning experiences become apparent. Learning experiences are designed with learners in mind. There is an objective that learners are working toward in the interest of specific outcomes. Well-designed learning experiences will likely provide learners with resources, such as videos, pencils, workbooks, Erlenmeyer flasks, or audiotapes to support the learner.

The degree to which learning and games overlap on those elements is arguable, and there are certainly less apparent overlaps, such as boundaries and conflict. One can find a detailed exploration of these arguments in Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2007). Gee unpacks thirty-six learning principles that are manifest in both "good" games and effective learning experiences. By examining social learning and linguistic theories around situated cognition, distributed cognition, cultural models, multimodal principles, identity, self-knowledge, and others, Gee is able to weave all of Fullerton's elements into a schema for effective learning design.

Educational Video Games

Gee's work speaks to what makes any designed learning experience an effective one, it is not an explicit advocacy of the use of games in general or video games in particular as learning tools. Rather, Gee's argument centers on the fact that modern video games are challenging and cognitively demanding. Players are often frustrated at many junctures in trying to reach the video game's objectives. Yet, through the forces of a competitive marketplace, game designers need to figure out how to make their games just challenging enough to be compelling while providing rewards, help, hints, and reinforcement to keep players from quitting or giving up in frustration. These competing pressures yield the most popular video games on the shelves as the product would otherwise not thrive, and people would not purchase those products. Gee poses a similar challenge to educators, schools, and curriculum designers: Design learning experiences that are challenging yet pleasurable.

Gee's contribution revived interest in educational video games, but interest in games for learning began in the 1970s, with the earliest personal computers. In a white paper from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Richards, Stebbins, and Moellering (2013) note that older titles such as Math Blaster, Oregon Trail, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego, and Sim City enjoyed tremendous success in both the K-12 institutional market as well as the commercial markets. A new generation of educational games initially had a harder time achieving similar success. Companies such as BrainPop and Discovery Education have begun to aggregate and deliver games to fill curricular niches across all grade and subject areas. The challenge these companies faced in finding profitable models for educational games underscored a fundamental disconnect. The stigma of using games as tools for learning had all but fallen away, but schools were reluctant to buy learning games in a commercially viable way. With all the enthusiasm around game-based learning and the mutual vision educators seem to share for their potential, why was market success been such a challenge? Richards et al. identified several potential issues, including uneven technological capabilities among schools, supplementary curricular budgets that were in flux, and the wide, confusing range of game products of varying quality.

This began to change as the twenty-first century progressed, however, and schools embraced educational video games as the selection and quality increased. Encouraged by studies that showed game-based learning focused on problem-solving had positive effects on learning outcomes, especially in mathematics, many schools embraced educational video games in the classroom. Game-based learning also increased in schools as access to one-to-one technology increased. By 2022, 60 percent of schools in the US provided students with Chromebooks and, therefore, access to video game platforms increased across socioeconomic levels. The increase in support for game-based learning further increased as students were forced to rely on technology during the COVID-19 pandemic as educational video games became a welcomed tool of supplemental learning in an unsure educational environment. Research on game-based learning in the classroom continued to show positive effects on student outcomes in terms of cognitive functions, motor control, and perception. By 2023, video games in the educational setting had become so ubiquitous that many schools had eSports teams in which video games became a competitive sport like soccer or lacrosse.

Games and Behavior Modification

As formal learning scholars grappled with the ideas presented by Gee and others researching and developing games for use in the classroom, many in the private and commercial sectors began to consider how game mechanics can be used for motivation and behavior modification. This application of game mechanics to areas where behavior modification is desirable, such as in marketing, training, and education, has come to be known as "gamification." Gamification leverages individuals' desire for such things as self-expression, mastery, competition, status, and achievement in pursuit of a desired objective.

Game designer McGonigal (2012) championed the role games can play in addressing global and societal problems such as poverty and climate change. Games and gamified experiences hold the potential for solving cognitively complex problems. For example, the game Foldit is an online game about protein folding. The game received special attention and acclaim when it was noted that human players were able to outperform the computationally demanding, algorithmically generated solutions to questions in protein folding.

Gamification has been utilized across a variety of efforts, including employee recruitment and retention, physical fitness, social network participation, ideation, and customer loyalty. Concerns emerged, however, that gamification techniques began to encourage unintended behaviors, as people would try to, for lack of a better term, "game the system." That is, maximize desired quantitative outputs for the outputs themselves, or, to revisit Fullerton's framework, to obtain the desired outcomes without pursuing the intended objective. Critics such as Bogost (2011) have been adamant and vocal in their warnings that gamification is exploitive and manipulative, particularly when employed as a marketing strategy in for-profit commercial endeavors. Bogost described efforts as a type of "exploitationware."

Transmedia in the Learning Landscape

While the use of game mechanics to sculpt human behavior continues to garner critics and champions, other scholars are pointing out the ubiquitous role video games play in the American childhood media landscape. To be sure, where some critics of gamification criticized the movement's emphasis on mechanics over narrative, other scholars turned their attention to the value of narrative in games. Video games are a critical part of the transmedia experience common to children in many parts of the Western world. By the 2020s, it was common for children to begin to access video games at the preschool level through games produced by learning platforms such as ABC Mouse and Khan Academy Kids. Transmedia defines the play, storytelling, and learning of most American children ages six to eleven. As is implied by the name, transmedia describes phenomena that cross media platforms: books, televisions, movies, live action, social media, Internet, and games. Because of their interactive nature, video games play a key role in the transmedia landscape. As such, Jenkins has distilled what it is about transmedia that is of particular import to educators and, in doing so, has challenged educators to consider the role games (and particularly video games) can play in the transmedia learning landscape:

• Spreadability vs. drillability: Spreadability refers to the ability to scan a media landscape for bits of interesting information or data. This is the way traditional survey or introductory courses have typically approached information. Drillability refers to the ability and opportunity to dig deeper into content and asks educators to think carefully about motivation, what motivates students to try and learn more about a subject?
• Continuity vs. multiplicity: Continuity refers to the coherent story told by a media landscape. In education, this commonly manifests itself as a canon. Multiplicity, on the other hand, asks learners to think about perspectives other than that of the established canon. As an example, educational technology scholar Squire used the computer game Civilization to invite players to think about alternate histories: What if North America had colonized Europe, for example? How might the world be different today?
• Immersion vs. extraction: Immersion refers to the ability of media (theme parks, simulations, online worlds, video games) to immerse students in a different world. Extraction refers to the students' ability to take those lessons and experiences back with them to their own everyday world.
• World building: Since transmedia experiences are often outside of the core narrative, they can provide richer environments in which these peripheral narratives play out. In a school setting, for instance, this might mean that students read historical fiction to accompany a history lesson, thus moving away from stories of presidents or generals to understanding or imagining the everyday life of citizens of those eras.
• Seriality: With the seriality principle, Jenkins (2010) asserts that educators can learn from good, serial storytellers. In a serial, chapters are satisfying as units in their own right but entice the reader to continue onto the next chapter with a cliffhanger. Classrooms should offer an equivalent of cliffhangers to motivate learners.
• Subjectivity: Transmedia experiences allow audiences to explore a central narrative through new eyes. A good example of this is the book Wicked, which tells a story from the perspective of the antagonist from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. As such, they offer new perspectives. Using the example of a history class, this means students get to examine a battle from the perspective of the Greeks and the Persians, for example.
• Performance: Transmedia experiences lead audiences to want to participate and develop their own performance of the material. Jenkins uses much of his scholarship on fandom and fan experiences for this principle. Jenkins points to communities such as Star Trek fans (but other examples include Harry Potter or fans of the Marvel Universe) wherein the media becomes so meaningful to fans that the narrative of the media lives on with fans long after the media property has been retired. Performance is a point of interest as it points to issues of motivation and involvement that are of interest to the formal education community. To extend on the historical example used above, this could include asking students to dress up in period costumes and reenact important or even quotidian moments in history. The large community of Civil War impersonators who participate in larping is an example of how transmedia experiences can extend into lifelong learning.

Viewpoints

Where Fullerton discusses the role of the game designer in establishing rules, boundaries, and goals, Jenkins paints a media ecosystem in which learners become the rule makers and the rule breakers, where learners test boundaries and push past them. As such, Jenkins points the way to a post-games way of looking at games-based learning, one in which games are one piece of a media puzzle that must be mastered by children of the so-called information economy.

Games, particularly video games, will continue to be part of the rich media ecosystem inhabited by the distributed, situated minds of school-aged children. While anyone who has played an immersive game can intuit the power games have to shape knowledge, ideas, and values, the role of games in formal education settings remains to be seen.

Terms & Concepts

Cognition: The processing of information. Cognition can refer broadly to processes involving things like judgment, reasoning, problem-solving, new knowledge acquisition, comprehension, decision-making, memory, and attention.

Distributed cognition: A sociocultural learning theory that argues that knowledge of a subject lies not only within an individual but also within that individual's physical and social environment.

Game: A form of play that is bounded by rules, often competitive, and relies on some sort of skill.

Gamification: The use of game structures or game mechanics to incentivize a desired behavior or directly cause a behavior change.

Game mechanics: The rule-based systems that are designed to govern actions bounded within a game.

Learning: The act of acquiring new (or building upon and refining existing) knowledge, behaviors, skills, or values.

Situated cognition: A sociocultural learning theory that posits that knowing cannot be separated from doing and that knowledge is dependent upon external contexts. Situated cognition challenges the assumption that knowledge can be transferred from one context to an entirely novel one.

Sociocultural learning: A family of learning theories that reject the notion that human development can be understood only from the point of view of the individual. Social learning theories argue that social interaction and the external world are interwoven and inextricable from the individual.

Transmedia: Telling a single story across a variety of different media such as film, books, and video games.

Video game: A game that relies on the electronic manipulation of images.

Zone of proximal development: The delta between what a learner can do unaided and what they can do with assistance when working towards a particular learning objective.

Bibliography

Boudreau, Emily. "Find Fun: How to Recognize Video Games that Engage Kids of All Ages in Learning." Harvard Graduate School of Education, 29 June 2021, www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/21/06/find-fun. Accessed 23 July 2024.

Bogost, I. (2011). Gamification is bullshit. Retrieved January 15, 2015 from

Colavito, M. (2022, Apr. 8).Should we use Chromebooks so much in school?NHS Chief Advocate. Retrieved May 28, 2023, from https://nhschiefadvocate.org/2022/04/should-we-use-chromebooks-so-much-in-school

Custer, K. & Russell, M. (2020, Feb. 10). It's time for schools to embrace video games. National School Boards Association. Retrieved May 28, 2023, from https://www.nsba.org/ASBJ/2020/February/esports

DeLoura, M. (2013) Games that can change the world. Retrieved January 15, 2015 from

Fullerton, T. (2014). Game design workshop: A playcentric approach to creating innovative games. New York, NY: CRC Press.

Gee, J. P. (2007). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Revised and updated edition. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Hamari, J., & Koivisto, J. (2013). Social motivations to use gamification: An empirical study of gamifying exercise. Proceedings of the 21st European Conference on Information Systems, Utrecht, Netherlands, June 5-8.

Jenkins, H. (2010). Transmedia storytelling and entertainment: An annotated syllabus. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24(6) 943-958. Retrieved March 22, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Complete.

McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken. London, UK: Jonathan Cape.

Pratama, L.D., & Setyaningrum, W. (2018, May 7). Game-Based Learning: The effects on student cognitive and affective aspects. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1097. 10.1088/1742-6596/1097/1/012123

Richards, J., Stebbins, L., & Moellering, K. (2013). Games for a digital age: K-12 market map and investment analysis. In New York, NY. Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Retrieved January 12, 2015 from:

Suggested Reading

Afari, E., Aldridge, J., Fraser, B., & Khine, M. (2013). Students' perceptions of the learning environment and attitudes in game-based mathematics classrooms. Learning Environments Research, 16(1), 131-150. Retrieved March 22, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete.

Bourgonjon, J., De Grove, F., De Smet, C., Van Looy, J., Soetaert, R., & Valcke, M. (2013). Acceptance of game-based learning by secondary school teachers. Computers & Education, 67. 21-35. Retrieved March 22, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete.

DiSessa, A. A. (2001). Changing minds: Computers, learning, and literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Flanagan, M., & Nissenbaum, H. (2014). Values at play in digital games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Werbach, K., & Hunter, D. (2012). For the win: How game thinking can revolutionize your business. Wharton Digital Press.