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For decades, educators and researchers have been interested in ways to develop learners’ identities and capacities for thinking as designers. Designers generally think in ways that include varying sets of complex, flexible, reflexive, situated, and social problem-solving processes (e.g., Buchanan, 1992; Krippendorff, 2006; Rittel & Webber, 1973; Schön, 1983). Thinking in such ways is important because they empower learners to be change agents who can identify and seek to address the open-ended problems of our world that characteristically lack a singular correct answer. Despite the value of preparing citizens to think creatively in the face of complex problems of social import, schooling continues to foreground settled problems with single, pre-established answers (Carroll et. al. 2010; Retna, 2016). Such schooling approaches are concerning, in part, because of longstanding criticism they draw from education and literacy researchers (e.g., Gee, 2004, New London Group, 1996) and findings that show students as being highly disengaged in this type of education (e.g., National Research Council and Institutes of Medicine, 2004).
Activities such as game design, which emphasize the value of making things, are typically associated with constructionist (Papert, 1980) forms of pedagogy and may also be helpful for fostering designerly ways of thinking. In this vein, educators have sought to better understand the roles of design thinking and of makerspaces in enhancing the learning process and outcomes of learners (Raz, 2019). Game design as its own activity is often leveraged to help students think like designers while developing other skill areas. For instance, digital game design (e.g., Games, 2010; Ruggiero & Green, 2017) is popular because it affords unique opportunities to think as designers in ways that are simultaneously relevant to promoting media literacy, developing computational thinking, and greater interest in computer science (Gee & Tran, 2016). Although research in game studies has primarily focused on digital games (Torner et al., 2016), the design of tabletop games has been shown to cultivate ways of thinking and talking like designers (Kessner et al., 2021) in ways that also lead to multiple rich discussions centering on, for example, systems thinking on environmental issues (Parekh et al., 2019, 2021), civic engagement, (Kongeseri & Coley, 2019), and the development of “soft skills” (Bunt & Greef, 2020).