Gamevironments (ISSN 2364-382X) is an international, interdisciplinary, diamond open access academic journal for research on digital games. The journal publishes two issues per year, one regular issue and one special issue with a guest editor on a specific topic. Each issue consists of academic articles as well as other contributions, such as research reports, interviews, or game or book reviews. There are no fees or charges for processing or publication. All articles are subjected to an external double-blind peer review process. Research reports, interviews, and game or book reviews are reviewed by the editorial team. For further information on the peer-review process, see the Submissions page. Gamevironments is hosted and published by the State and University Library Bremen (SuUB) and is affiliated with the Institute for Religious Studies and Religious Education at the University of Bremen, Germany and the International Academy for the Study of Gaming and Religion (IASGAR). The editors-in-chief are Kerstin Radde-Antweiler (University of Bremen) and Lissa Holloway-Attaway (University of Skövde).
Beyond Play. Towards a Non-Gaming-Centric Gaming Research
A world with digital gaming in it is different from a world without it. This introduction takes that observation as its point of departure and argues that digital gaming is a relevant, and so far underused, context for studying the transformative power of media in deeply mediatized societies. Building on the editors’ programmatic account of beyond play (Schwarzenegger et al. 2025), we suggest that gaming be approached not merely as entertainment or play, but as gamevironments in which technological innovation, communicative practice and cultural change become observable in compressed form. The special issue grew out of the international conference Beyond Play, held at the ZeMKI, University of Bremen.
Copyright (c) 2026 Christian Schwarzenegger, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, Karsten D. Wolf
This Time it’s for all the Marbles. Towards Social Justice in Digital Gaming. Introduction to the Special Issue
The previous special issues of gamevironments, issues #13 (2020) and #11 (2019), explored the connections of games and (anti-)democratic ideals (Pfister, Winnerling and Zimmermann 2020) and nationalism and identity (Kienzl and Trattner 2019). This special issue aims to examine the ways in which games and gaming are connected to and potentially accelerate undemocratic and bigoted movements while simultaneously highlighting projects and perspectives from games and games research that learn from analyzing these issues and then use that knowledge to work towards social justice and against oppression. This introduction presents the logic of the special issue and suggests a path for reading the contributions, starting with those articles which trace the relationship between games and oppression and then moving to those that occupy this problem space and offer potential steps toward solutions. This special issue contains nine peer-reviewed articles as well as a game review, an interview with a designer of games for media literacy education, and two reports that offer practical guidelines for anti-oppressive, reflexive, and revolutionary game design. Each contribution is briefly summarized here.
Triple Fun! Pedagogy, Play, and Parent Involvement in Religion-Based Board Games
Lil Banoon is an online venture started in 2021 by two sisters of the Dawoodi Bohra community, whose flagship products are two board games; Triple Fun (2021), and Ilm Street (2021). This paper will utilize an autoethnographic methodology, drawing on my own experiences of playing these games with my children, to show how games are being adopted for didactic purposes within the Bohra community. As a parent and educator, I reflect on the process of playing these games as a family, how my children perceive and learn through these two games, as well as the impact of these on parents and educators. I argue that such games foster creativity, provide children with opportunities to explore ideas, and improve developmental skills while also exploring the challenges of incorporating games into our religious curriculum. These games form just one part of a larger focus on the development of teaching aids for religious pedagogy within the Bohra community and Islamic communities in general. I present how the creation and dissemination of these religious games is located within a specific pedagogic and religious environment where Muslim parents seek to introduce new pedagogies to inspire a love of religion against Islamophobic and racist sentiments.
Playing to Grow. Roundtable Interview on Games, Education, and Character
In this roundtable interview moderated by Paul Darvasi, lecturer at the University of Toronto and co-founder of Gold Bug Interactive, Owen Gottlieb and Matthew Farber discuss research and practice at the intersection of religion, character education, and games in schools. Gottlieb is an associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, founder and lead faculty at the Initiative in Religion, Culture, and Policy at the MAGIC center, and founder and director of the Interaction, Media, and Learning Lab at RIT, where he specializes in interactive media, learning, religion, and culture. Farber is an associate professor of educational technology and coordinator of K12 and Secondary Teacher Education Programs (STEP) at the University of Northern Colorado, where he also co-directs the Gaming SEL Lab. He writes for Edutopia, has authored several books and papers, and has collaborated with UNESCO MGIEP, the iThrive Games Foundation, and Games for Change. This conversation occurred over Zoom on 10 October 2022, and is sometimes specific to how schools, education, and educational television function historically and currently in the United States.
A Case Study of Teaching Complex Skills in Philosophy Through Games. Are You Flourishing?
This paper explores the potential for and challenges of teaching sophisticated and flexible skills in philosophy using games. The setting is philosophy at a UK university, and the example is a game-based learning activity designed by the author for teaching the topic transformative experience within a skills-based third-year undergraduate module, Communicating Philosophy. This module’s learning outcomes include for students to be confident applying philosophical skills in novel settings, and this provides an incentive to teach in ways that challenge students’ conceptions of how ideas can be communicated. The multiplayer card game Are You Flourishing? (2022) was therefore designed by the author as an engaging game that raises questions about rationality, subjective value, and the challenge posed by transformative experiences as discussed by Paul (2014, 2015). In this case study I describe the game and its rationale, its application in a particular classroom, and the impact of the game’s inclusion on the student experience. This allows reflection on the potential for games to help students develop more flexible skills and build toward “professional artistry” (Schön 1987, 14). The results indicate a game-based learning activity that was seen as moderately enjoyable and encouraged reflection about transformative experience, games and gamification, and ways of communicating philosophy, in a substantial majority of participants, as well as being viewed as contributing to learning by a smaller majority. Problems with the activity generally centred around the complexity of the rules and other features of effective facilitation, indicating that similar projects to exploit the freedom and creativity afforded to learners by games should focus on identifying ways to simplify without compromising the game’s aims and on making facilitation as effective as possible by streamlining the explanation of rules.
Role-Playing Games in the Classroom. Highlighting Biases, Player Behaviours, and Ethical Decision-Making
Video games offer a wealth of potential topics for instruction at the university level. Theoretical content can be made more concrete and accessible and allow students to consider course content in new ways. Topics related to biases, stereotypes, behaviour, representation, and ethics can be explored. This is particularly true for narrative-rich games, like role-playing games and games that feature religion. These aspects of some video games can support and extend course content on numerous topics including structural inequalities, cultural influences, and player motivations as they relate to narrative content and contexts. Taken together, instructors can use examples from video games to support student discussion and learning by pairing video game content with higher-level theory and course materials. These approaches are effective in engaging students, grounding course concepts, and supporting learning outcomes.
The Aetherlight. A Case Study of the Formational Potential of a Game
The Aetherlight (2016) is a point-and-click adventure game designed for 9-12-year olds to entice them to engage with the grand narrative of scripture through an allegorical reimagining in a 3D steampunk world. That is a lot to ask of a game. Conceptualised primarily as an educational game, The Aetherlight (2016) also needed to be an excellent game to draw in a generation with high expectations of the game experience. In addition to these two objectives, The Aetherlight intended to point players away from the game to real-world interactions with the Bible and to live well as Christians in their own communities. Can a game possibly do all of these things? This article will explore the making of The Aetherlight and the tensions between the competing agendas to make an excellent game, to educate, and to direct the players away from the game towards engagement with the Bible and real-world interactions as Christians. Just as the characters in The Aetherlight story wrestle with their own humanity, the game team wrestled with each other over philosophy, pedagogy, and ethics at every stage of development. In doing so, the process of making a theologically formational game for tweens became theologically formational for all who worked on it. This case study reveals how diversity of thinking, experience and skills can converge to create an invitational game where side quests, speedrunning, and grinding all form part of the narrative to engage players with the philosophy and ethics of the Christian way of life.
Re-Imagining Christian Education Through Neurodivergent Fellowship, Play, and Leadership in Online Videogaming
From Fall 2020 to Spring 2022, the Center of Theological Inquiry, funded by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Diverse Intelligences Initiative and in collaboration with Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland, created a Minecraft (2011) videogame prototype titled The Spiritual Loop. This videogame prototype was designed and developed for fostering spiritual growth and connection based on ethnographic research with neurodivergent persons and their Christian faith communities in the United States. Considering the lack of access disabled persons experience with respect to Christian communities in the US (Carter 2007), alongside the disproportionate emphasis on educational and therapeutic outcomes with respect to neurodivergent gamers (Spiel and Gerling 2021), our participatory fieldwork with neurodivergent players led us to emphasize the game’s opportunities for spiritual connection versus mastery of biblical content or Christian virtues. This paper highlights two findings with respect to gaming and Christian education. First, despite the consistent emphasis on fostering Christian community and connection, neurotypical players frequently mistook the game’s goal as Christian education, whereas neurodivergent players readily appreciated the game’s fellowship potential. Second, neurodivergent players seamlessly assumed leadership roles in online game play, confirming the ability of online communities to transform theological hierarchies (Campbell 2012). Based on these findings, we suggest that a bifurcation in fellowship and education in traditional Christian formation reflects ableist biases. The flexible, playful environment presented in online gaming spaces offers critical opportunities for fostering fellowship between neurodivergent and neurotypical Christians, as well as untapped opportunities for neurodivergent leadership to flourish in reimagining more accessible environments for Christian education.
Ma Nishtana: What is Jewish about Jewish Games?
What makes Jewish games Jewish? We argue that it is not simply Jewish content, but an engagement with Jewish ideas through ritual, intertextuality, and/or culture. We explore this thesis through the analog role-playing game Ma Nishtana: Why Is This Night Different (2023). We show how the game engages Jewish knowledge transmission in all three modes, over and above its overt engagement of the Exodus story. This approach can introduce players to Jewish modes of being, including how we intertwine history, ritual, stories, and rules. This in turn can help address misconceptions about Jewish experience, particularly those that derive from Christian supersessionism and hegemony.
Silence, Distance and Disclosure. The Bleed between the Far-Right and Gaming
Through a close reading of oral history data, this paper demonstrates how far-right ideas circulate through discursive discourses that simultaneously conceal and disclose in gaming space. Henry Urbach’s theory of the closet and queer disclosure will facilitate this, providing a framework in which we can observe how the far-right exists within gaming space whilst obscuring its proximity through fantastical distance and absence. Gaming spaces are understood as an ecosystem in which ideas can be naturalised, denaturalised and (re)produced, and this ecosystem represents the room in which Urbach’s in-wall closet sits. The conceal/disclose dichotomy the far-right operates through will be explored by looking at modes of implicit identity and spatial policing. The representative possibilities of the closet will allow us to scrutinise how said identities and spaces are characterised as under threat through narratives of (self)victimisation. Said narratives, in turn, lean into far-right discourses that justify and activate certain emotions and world views. The unstable boundary the closet manifests by housing the mess (the far-right) allows the wider room (gaming space) to appear tidy; in other words, for the far-right to circulate in obscure and unaccounted for ways. Notice of correction: On 23 October 2023, the article “Kaufman, I. (2023) Silence, distance and disclosure. The bleed between the far-right and gaming. Gamevironments 18, 1–37. https://doi.org/10.48783/gameviron.v18i18.232” was edited to anonymise the article’s interview participants. References to participants’ forenames throughout the article have now been removed. The article is otherwise unchanged.
“This is a Zombie Apocalypse – it’s an Entirely Different Situation.” Teachers’ Deductive and Inductive Framing of Digital Games in Ethics Education
This article investigates teachers’ instructional strategies when using The Walking Dead (2012) in ethics education, in a course intended to teach students how to use ethical theories like deontology and utilitarianism as a basis for their own moral reasoning. By analyzing audio and video data from several teachers’ classes, the study has identified two main instructional strategies, labeled deductive and inductive framing. The former sees class discussions carefully staged by the teacher in a manner that gives a good overview of the game’s dilemmas, and with ethical theories being foregrounded as general principles through which the dilemmas are discussed. Inductive framing, inversely, starts with discussing the particularities of the dilemmas, and with teachers asking open-ended questions that can be answered in either a curricular or an everyday manner. Analysis indicates that deductive framing is useful when students have yet to fully appropriate the ethical theories, whereas inductive framing often leads to confusion and unfocused classroom discourse. However, inductive is well suited for when students have made the ethical theories their own, as it affords them an opportunity to think in a critical and independent manner, without too much reliance on the teacher’s guidance and instruction. The paper concludes that a combination of the two instructional strategies can be a fruitful approach for teachers wishing to use digital games in ethics education.
Returning to My Appalachia. The Resurgence of Fallout 76. A Game Review
Released in Fall 2018, Fallout 76 was an ambitious project to expand the popular Fallout universe in several ways – backfilling the narrative for the first survivors of the Great War and introducing a massively multiplayer online format. Along with this expansion was the anchoring of the game within a cultural and geographic location in Appalachia. Unlike common pejorative portrayals of Appalachia, Fallout 76 authentically and meaningfully engaged the region, in particular the US state of West Virginia. Although the game was considered a failure by many, subsequent expansions of the game have been popular. This essay probes at least one reflective reason for the game’s endurance: the unique sense of place that it provides for players foraging, crafting, and exploring the West Virginia backcountry.
Interview with Per Backlund, Professor of Informatics, in the Division of Game Development at the University of Skövde, Sweden
In this interview, Professor Per Backlund shares his experience working for more than 20 years as a researcher and teacher in videogames. He outlines his initial interest in games, in the early 2000s, while completing a Ph.D. at Stockholm University and teaching part-time at the University of Skövde in Sweden. He shares how he moved from more general research in computer science and IT to a more specific focus on games, particularly on serious games and game-based learning issues. He also discusses his role as a teacher and Program Director in the very large games education (600+ students) at the University of Skövde, sharing the challenges of supporting interdisciplinary research. As founder and chair of the new Council for Swedish Games Researchers, he also describes the aims of the organization: to bring greater understanding to the specific needs of creating a sustainable Swedish ecosystem for game development. He explains the primary objectives of the Sweden Game Arena consortium, meant to promote Swedish game development in Skövde and beyond, and its newest initiative, via the recently-funded Level Up Swedish Game Industry (or Level Up) project, where he serves as university coordinator in the project management team. Finally, he speculates about the future needs for games and game research in rapidly developing and shifting technological and socio-cultural contexts for game-making and game research.
Teaching with Games. Formative Gaming in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics. Introduction to the Special Issue
This special issue explores the power of games to shape worldviews, share perspectives, develop religious identities and provoke ethical reflection. Contributors bring together ideas from classrooms of philosophy and religious studies with case studies from religious communities and companies engaged in game design, and reflect on their own experiences as makers, players, teachers and critics of games. This introduction proposes a concept of formative gaming to explain this multidisciplinary, multi-context approach. The issue includes four articles, two reports and an interview, and this introduction briefly summarises each contribution before identifying the key themes and shared questions that emerge across the collection.
Research report on the post-doctoral project Gaming the Nation.
"Blood for the Blood God!" Engaging with Gods and Religion in the Warhammer 40K Universe
In the tabletop miniature wargame of Warhammer 40,000 (40K), religion is everywhere. Whether participants choose to play as a techpriest, a battle nun Adepta Sororitas or a Chaos Daemon, they are engaging with the religious themes of the Games Workshop franchise. This report gives an update on my current research project at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School where I am investigating the religious lore of 40K, how painters/players navigate these themes and whether they experience flow while painting.
Fanatical Alien Monsters. Halo and Religion in Fan-Forum Discourse
Despite Halo’s extensive cultural footprint since its 2001 debut, its religious themes have largely been overlooked academically, an oversite this project attempts to address. Utilizing thematic analysis of forum discussions from 2018 to 2023 on the r/halo subreddit, this small-scale research project aims to explore how fans of the Halo franchise utilize and discuss the term religion. Preliminary findings of this study indicate that fans critically engage with the portrayal of religion in Halo, often drawing parallels between the franchise’s alien antagonists and real-world religious groups, where religiosity and monstrosity commonly become intertwined. This dialogue extends beyond gameplay, touching on broader societal and existential issues. This project contributes to the understanding of how video games like Halo can influence players’ perceptions of religion and offer a platform for exploring complex moral and existential questions, and how players can perceive video game monsters in a manner that transcends simple game mechanics.
Copyright (c) 2024 Emma Milerud Sundström
Blessed Are The Geek. Christian Gaming Content Creators and Digital Discipleship
The exploration of how religious communities adapt to an increasing reliance on technology and the Internet to create, provide, and promote religiosity has long been a topic of concern within the field of digital religion. One of these adaptations is digital discipleship, which utilizes modern technology, online trends, and communities to spread the gospel in virtual spaces. As such, this project focuses on digital discipleship within gaming communities, specifically analyzing how Christian gaming content creators combine video games with their religious faith. As content creators, these individuals utilize video games as ways to spark conversations about Christianity, and to further their understanding of Biblical teachings that result in a closer spiritual connection. From initial observations, there is a difference in whether in creator uses video games to either further their own connection with their faith, or to introduce Christian beliefs to others that they encounter because of a shared interest in gaming. This rise in content creators that openly intertwine their faith with their gaming content shows in a shift the relationship between Christians and secular media, in that Christians are utilizing secular media for discipleship, rather than creating Christian versions of secular media.
"Fear the Old Blood." Bloodborne, Christian Concepts of Communion, and Theological Reflection
What might it mean to read video games as a source for critical theological reflection? This project explores the extent to which FromSoftware’s 2015 classic Bloodborne can be read in just this way for at least two reasons. Firstly, the game makes visible foundational but often taken-for-granted Christian themes, as well as their internal paradoxes. Secondly, Bloodborne’s gameplay is structured through these themes in ways that invite the player to take on a mode of theological reflection which allows them to think creatively beyond the conditions giving rise to these paradoxes.
Pirating Platform Studies. The Historical Impact of Latin American Clone Consoles, 1973-1994
As a sub-discipline of game studies, the field of platform studies could benefit significantly by destigmatizing piracy and paying more attention to how clones, copies, knockoffs and bootlegs have contributed – and continue to contribute – to video game history and global game culture. Yet to date, myriad so-called clone consoles from Latin America and other regions of the global south have remained conspicuously absent from most scholarship on platform studies and video game history. Platform studies’ overall focus on formal-market development tends to start and end with developers in the global north, while failing to account for how players across the global south have historically accessed games made for the Atari, Nintendo Entertainment System and other platforms. This article focuses on the historical contributions of clone consoles developed in Latin America from the 1970s to the 1990s, showing how they were much more than copies, and in fact laid the groundwork for the eventual development of sustained national game industries. Clone consoles from Latin America also reflect the ways local creators must adapt imported technologies to make them functional for local users, frequently leading to innovations and improvements on the originals. Together, the consoles examined here demonstrate that we cannot fully understand the history of video games or the evolution of global game culture without an appreciation for the contributions of piracy and unlicensed development in bringing game technologies to players across Latin America and the global south.
The Subject of Games. Cartesian Anxiety in Game Cultures, Game Studies, and Gameplay
This article argues that game studies must directly confront the heretofore implicit conflict between different constructions of the human subject at the center of games research and criticism. The conception of a self-coherent and rational player is at odds with a relativistic notion of the player as a malleable surface of inscription, and this tension manifests as Cartesian anxiety. But both these constructions of the subject are bound to the figure of the cogito and thus to the present. Lacan’s theory of the split subject is advanced as one possible way forward, as it postulates a thinking, reasoning subject that is nevertheless irreconcilably sundered from the libidinal and affective dimensions of its being. This theory of the subject is articulated to an approach to games analysis that centres gameplay, the agonistic interplay of forces animating players’ engagement with games, and illustrated through a discussion of the public outcry around the release of No Man’s Sky (2016) and its subsequent updates and patches.
Gamification. A Conceptual Critique to Move Forwards
Gamification has become a considerable part of game culture. Alongside that, it has garnered significant support and criticism that has left researchers and practitioners polarized on their perception and utilization of gamification as a label and a practice. The aim of this article is to attempt a re-clarification of the gamification concept and to utilize the gamevironment analytical framework on a larger analytical scale that allows us to reflect on gamification and game studies as research fields. Based on that, I view gamification through the lens of gamevironments and provide directions for future researchers.
Understanding Modern Views on the Middle Ages Through Research-led Learning. A Teaching Report
This report brings insights from a course in Medieval game studies held at Kiel University from April to July 2023. In games, the medieval era is often depicted as a dark and cruel time on the one hand and a romanticized time on the other. One of the main focuses of the course was to look behind these narratives and how to examine games as an object of research further than just looking for historical inaccuracies. This shows some important methods for teaching game studies and discusses opportunities and representative results, as well as possibilities to improve this type of course embedded in regular studies of history without a gaming focus. We hope to demonstrate some approaches to involve game studies in curricula in which it was not included previously. This teaching report focuses on the research-led learning aspect of the course, which had a high amount of individual space for the students to create their research process, discusses some results that evolved out of the seminar, highlights the problems of teaching game studies to an audience which is not familiar with researching modern media and propose some solutions to these problems.
Copyright (c) 2024 Philipp Frey, Joana Hansen
The Byzantine Army in Video Games. Common Misconceptions Shaping Popular Perceptions
Scholars of Byzantium cannot afford to ignore the growing medium of video games, which play a key role in shaping the modern perception of Byzantium among a formative audience. In numerous popular strategy games, Byzantium is differentiated from other contemporary civilizations and factions through a series of highly specific historical vectors including the Varangian guard, kataphraktoi, and the so-called Greek fire. Given the constraints of the medium, this leads to significant distortions in its reception by players. This problem is further exacerbated by the same emphases and omissions being persistently deployed across disparate video game titles spanning the last three decades. Byzantium is thus molded into something it was not. Reasons for this range from Enlightenment thought to modern political discourse, and from gameplay concerns to marketing demands. Understanding these are essential to course-correcting Byzantium’s historical legacy in the modern milieu, particularly since younger demographics often first encounter Byzantium in the medium of video games.
Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character (2023) by Joleen Blom. A Book Review
A review of Joleen Blom's book Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character (2023, Amsterdam University Press).
Bible Games as Religious Educational Tools in Seventh-Day Adventist Church. A Ludic Inventory
The Seventh-day Adventist Church has developed some analogical and digital games with religious education purposes over the last decades, so this article seeks to answer the following question: how does the Bible study paradigm influence the production of religious games at Seventh-day Adventist Church? The article maps the main Seventh-day Adventist game titles in English from the 1930s to nowadays, building a ludic inventory. Based on elements and procedures of content analysis method, the analysis of elements of the ludic inventory as title, game mechanics, genres, etc., show that the text-based Bible study paradigm of Seventh-day Adventist Church influenced the production of the church’s games with fundamental characteristics of Bible study guides incorporated into the game design and production, such as: (1) a question-and-answer style, (2) an emphasis on mastering text-location in the Bible, and (3) a memorization of texts. Besides, the analysis of the ludic inventory also presents that the SDA games were designed under some Seventh-day Adventist religious education principles, involving the discussion about the conceptual binomials competition versus cooperation and fun versus recreation.
Teaching and Games. Introduction to the Special Issue
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.
Towards an E-class Stimulating Social Interactivity based on Digitized and Gamified Brainstorming
How do we strengthen the social bond in the case of a situation where we have to conduct a distance-learning course? Since we can no longer do without digital tools, this article proposes to use of digital media where young audiences may wish to actively participate. The idea is to set up an e-class where everyone can contribute and be stimulated. In this context, we propose to set up digital brainstorming, based on the best products on the market and adding gamification attributes. Being careful not to make it a serious game, we developed a gamified online application that allows working out issues creatively and collectively. To study positive or negative impacts of gamification, we organised multiple user-tests comparing professional tools and our proposal. This led to a thinking on the type of gamification assets and when to use them within the creative process.
Still in Another Castle. Asking New Questions about Games, Teaching and Learning
Research on digital game-based learning has mainly been concerned with exploring questions related to a core set of assumptions: that games, in a general sense, are effective learning tools by virtue of being motivating, engaging, adaptive and allowing for consequence-free failure and playful learning. This article revisits these assumptions and their associated questions in two levels: by subjecting them to parts of the Digital Game-Based Learning-literature problematizing these assumptions, and by contrasting them with a case-study conducted on teachers’ use of, and pedagogical reasoning for, using a commercial entertainment game in a course on ethics. The resulting discussion can be summed up in three main points: 1) that the arguments of game’s effectiveness relating to motivation, engagement, adaptivity and graceful failure should be reconsidered, and in some cases even dismissed, 2) pedagogical tools cannot easily be studied separately from their surrounding context, as implementation of a classroom element can result in widely different learning environments, and 3) if research on Digital Game-Based Learning aims to advance the field of game-based educational practice, then this requires a new set of questions to be asked, giving attention to the situated configurations of games and game elements, teachers, students, curricula and learning goals.
The Ethics of Citizen Science and Knowledge Games. Five Emerging Questions About Games that Support Citizen Science
Citizen science games such as Foldit (2008), EteRNA (2010), Eyewire (2012), and StallCatchers (2016) have been increasingly used to produce new knowledge. These games rely on the participation of the public – often amateurs or nonscientists – to help solve large-scale problems by contributing and analyzing information through a game. We can call these games knowledge games, as they enable researchers and the public to work together to produce new knowledge. However, there has been little attention to the ethical and social implications of knowledge games, possibly because they constitute a small proportion of both games and citizen science activity and because their goals are societally beneficial, e.g., cure cancer, halt Alzheimer’s disease. The purpose of this article is to explore and deliberate the ethical complexities of knowledge games. Five key areas of concern emerged from a literature review of related domains: data (How is data collected, managed, analyzed, manipulated, and used?), the game’s context (How does using a game affect knowledge production?), accessibility (Is the game accessible and equitable in participation?), participation dynamics (How are players valued?), and design (How are ethics embedded in the game’s design and what is the impact?). Recommendations and next steps are discussed.