Teaching and Games. Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Previous special issues from gamevironments have explored, e.g., games’ entanglements with democracy (Pfister, Winnerling and Zimmermann 2020), nationalism and identity (Kienzl and Trattner 2019), ethics, and sociocultural developments (Grieve, Helland, Radde-Antweiler and Zeiler 2018). In this special issue, we hope to contribute to these explorations further by anchoring them in a specific environment: education. Through education, we encourage students to develop critical literacies that prepare them to analyse society, culture, politics, and ethics. Through the use of games, as well as the making of games, teachers are trying to find ways to empower students further in these pursuits. Games can provide meaningful spaces for learning and discourse, but in which ways does the actual game contribute to the space – in which ways might they detract from it? Understanding games and education is to understand the role of technology in a crucial part of society, and the contributions in this special issue will look at games as vehicles of learning, teaching, activism, exploitation, culture, and politics.