Comments on “Reflections on ‘A Review of Trends in Serious Gaming’”

In large measure, we would add our support to Tobias and Fletcher’s (2012) reflections on our article, Our Princess Is in Another Castle: A Review of Trends in Serious Games for Education (Young et al., 2012). Both research teams conclude that there is reason to be optimistic about the educational impact of video games despite a shortage of definitive evidence to that effect. Tobias’s book chapter (Tobias, Fletcher, Dai, & Wind, 2011) surveyed a wide array of potential instructionally relevant dependent variables that can be affected by video game play. In contrast, our article pinpointed only academic achievement on in-school topics, likely accounting for the narrow overlap between the citations we reviewed and those reviewed by Tobias and Fletcher (2011). Our collective findings suggest a need for clear operational definitions of educational gaming research terms (including narrative structure, game features, and mechanics), which we refer to as affordances (Gibson, 1986; Greeno, 1994), in order to explain how such features dynamically interact with player goals and intentions to define the way games are actually played. Clarity in how these aspects of interactive game play actually impact learning is at the heart of the challenge to justifying the use of games in education. Yet, rather than focusing only on the players’ cognitive processes, we would prefer that research focus fully on the complex, dynamic interplay of player intentions, player skills, game affordances, and meta-game affordances, as well as the social contexts in which gaming occurs (e.g., homes, workplaces, school classrooms).

It is mainly in this area that we differ from Tobias and Fletcher (2012). First, we cannot accept their contention that games are somehow a subset of simulations. If the term simulation is to have any meaning at all, it must refer to designs whose main objective is to be as veridical as possible with some real-world process. Mario’s trip through a drain pipe, while exhibiting some signs of earth-like gravity and physics, is intentionally designed not to act like the real world; thus, games, in general, are potentially mis-educative about real-world dynamics and fail to act as optimal simulations in support of school curricula. Moreover, the adoption of simulations—such as simulations of weather, atomic interactions, frog dissections, business decisions, the economy, and mechanical designs—in classrooms has been an accepted practice for years, resulting directly from the use of simulations for research and design in science, engineering, and mathematics. Video games are decidedly not linked to academic careers in the same way simulations are linked to jobs in the fields of science and engineering, nor are they traditionally applied in the same types of real-world settings. Rather than defining games as a subset of simulations, we suggest the use of a Venn diagram that separates the two but shows their occasional instances of overlap.

Tobias and Fletcher (2012) also seek to make the study of video games primarily about a transfer of cognitive processes from game play to non-play school tasks. Not only is transfer quite difficult to find (e.g., Detterman & Sternberg, 1993), but the notion is premised on an assumption that the cognitive processes involved in playing a particular game are somehow identical across players and can be controlled as independent variables during empirical study. As we expressed in our original publication, we believe this princess is in another castle. In fact, citing works in situated cognition, ecological psychology, and grounded cognition, we hoped our article would shift the game-based learning dialogue away from speculation about internalized, gameplay-induced cognitive processes to the unique interactions of each player with the affordances (i.e., invitations to action) designed into each game. In our article, we emphasized that video game play is dynamic and situated (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Different players play the same game with different goals, intentions, and definitions of achievement, which can lead to very different, and even opposite, academic outcomes. A player’s game-player interactions change dynamically from play to play such that the same game can never be played precisely the same way twice. We can only conclude that the educational outcomes of video game play rely heavily on the nature of this interaction and not solely on the nature of the cognitive processes presumed to be involved.

Grand Theft Auto IV, for example, prompts the player/protagonist to follow a narrative progression through a fictitious parallel of New York City. Though the player can easily follow a given path through the game’s story trajectory, the interactions he or she has with the designed content will inevitably differ each time a single mission is played, varying in terms of civilian and property destruction, routes taken to halt a runaway enemy, vehicles chosen for use each time, and more. Additionally, the game’s prescribed ruleset offers affordances for play that can deviate wildly from the game’s original goal: If the player seeks to intentionally attack police officers instead of fulfilling mission objectives, he or she may exhibit goal-seeking and related cognitive processing that is largely antithetical to the designer’s intent. The same could be said for an avid Halo player who spends time creating a vehicle catapult using a well-positioned pile of dead bodies or a World of Warcraft (WoW) player who aims to find the farthest possible distance to fall from the game’s sky ceiling to its lowest elevated level of terrain. WoW is particularly exemplary here, given its massively multiplayer design and the fact that dynamics between players can produce an infinite variety of gameplay goals not considered by the game’s designers.

In each of these cases, emergent game-player interactions contain valuable information about the ways players learn from, adapt to, and modify the games they play. There is simply no reason to believe that players will automatically adopt the goals of the game designers or play using a consistent and identifiable set of cognitive processes. By ignoring the situativity of participant-environment relationships (e.g., Greeno, 1998), we again run the risk of pursuing a princess in the wrong castle.

The omnibus nature of Tobias et al.’s (2011) review of educational outcomes from video game play nicely complements our more targeted review of specific achievement outcomes of games in the areas of mathematics, science, language learning, physical education, and history (Young et al., 2012). However, the differences between the two articles highlight the need for a variety of research approaches to understand the instructional potential of video games for learning in order to counter the perpetuation of overly broad generalizations about serious games in education. We suggest that researchers avoid the figurative rabbit holes of transfer and cognitive processing by instead concentrating on a situated view of video game play that may be more fruitful in determining how learning from video games emerges in context as an interaction of player, game environment, and social environment characteristics.