How Games Teach

Arizona State professor and noted expert on game-based learning design James Paul Gee discusses 13 learning principles that games use to "hook people on learning and engage them for the long haul." These principles fit into three categories:

Empowered Learners

• Agent or Codesign principle: Players must feel like what they do affects the game.
• Customization principle: Players must be able to adapt the experience to their own learning styles, solve problems in different ways, and try out new strategies for playing the game.
• Identity principle: Games tell players who they will be in a game (their role) and what they will get out of playing the game.
• Manipulation: Games give players a variety of tools to engage the body and mind while controlling the fine details of the game.

Problem-Based Learning

• Level Design principle: Problems are ordered so that each level of a game teaches players to solve increasingly difficult problems.
• Pleasantly Frustrating principle: Problems sit just on the edge of the "regime of confidence." The game is challenging, but players know they will eventually succeed, with effort. This allows players to persevere and attain a state of flow.
• Cycle of Expertise principle: Players face a challenge, practice it until it becomes routine knowledge, and then face a new, higher challenge that disrupts their mastery. They continue to work in a cycle of challenge, practice, mastery, and higher challenge.
• Just In Time and On-Demand Information principle: Instead of frontloading information before its relevance is clear, games disseminate information as needed or as players request it.
• Fish Tank principle: Games allow players to encounter complexity in samples, instead of all at once.
• Sandbox principle: Games provide an arena of bounded risk in which players can explore.
• Skills as Strategies principle: To get good at anything, players need to practice. Games make that practice interesting and meaningful by encouraging skills practice as a strategy for accomplishing goals.

Deep Understanding

• System Thinking principle: Within a game, players interact with a set of rules and make decisions that affect the game's outcomes. Good players create a model of the game in their head and use this to strategize how they will play the game.
• Situated Meaning or Meaning as Action principle: Images, actions, and experiences of the game give the words and worlds of the game meaning.

This is how games teach, says Gee. As teachers decide what kind of learning they want to achieve, games can be one of many tools to draw on for deep, problem-based, learner-empowered learning.

ASCD Express, Vol. 9, No. 20. Copyright 2014 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.