Digital Games: Changing Education, One Raid at a Time.

Opening The Doors

Digital games have now been embraced by the academic research community (DiGRA, 2010) as a research topic, as well as discovered by the education sector as a highly interactive media that can support and foster learning, as opposed to being only for recreation or simply a waste of time – as playing games is still today often labeled (ENGAGE, 2010; ECGBL, 2010). However, many research publications focus on the negative effects of recreational video games (Gibbs & Roche, 1999; Anderson & Dill, 2000; Rollings & Morris, 2000), while others are found to suggest the positive side in the learning effects provided by Game-Based Learning. Druckman (1995) suggests that the learning effects from digital games are purely as a result of the effective motivation created by playing recreational games, and supports Malone’s (1981) theory; that the intrinsic motivation and the challenge created by video games is what improves the uptake of knowledge. Other researchers state that the drill and practice opportunity provided by video games improves learning (Wartella, 2002; Clark, 2004), yet some debate that there is no substantial proof that players learn from such games (Subrahmanyam et al., 2000), or that skills learnt from video games are transferred outside of this domain (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2005). Some publications also suggest that the research methodologies employed in many of the above studies are flawed (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2007; Pivec, 2009), adding weight to those who advocate that Game-Based Learning does not work and that games have no place in the field of education.