WCER Working Paper No.

2005-4
June 2005

Video Games and the Future of Learning

David Williamson Shaffer

Richard Halverson

Department of Educational Psychology/

Wisconsin Center for Education Research/
Academic ADL Co-Laboratory
University of WisconsinMadison
dws@education.wisc.edu

Department of Educational Leadership &

Policy Analysis /
Wisconsin Center for Education Research/
Academic ADL Co-Laboratory
University of WisconsinMadison
halverson@education.wisc.edu

Kurt R. Squire
Department of Curriculum & Instruction/
Academic ADL Co-Laboratory
University of WisconsinMadison
kdsquire@education.wisc.edu

James P. Gee
Department of Curriculum & Instruction/
Academic ADL Co-Laboratory
University of WisconsinMadison
jgee@education.wisc.edu

Wisconsin Center for Education Research

School of Education University of WisconsinMadison http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/

Copyright 2005 by David Williamson Shaffer, Kurt R. Squire, Richard Halverson,

and James P. Gee
All rights reserved.
Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for noncommercial purposes by any means,
provided that the above copyright notice appears on all copies.
WCER working papers are available on the Internet at http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/publications/
workingPapers/index.php.

The research reported in this paper was supported in part by a Spencer Foundation/National
Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship, a grant from the Wisconsin Alumni Research
Foundation, a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award (REC0347000), the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning CoLaboratory, and by the Wisconsin
Center for Education Research, School of Education, University of WisconsinMadison. Any
opinions, findings, or conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies, WCER, or cooperating institutions.

Video Games and the Future of Learning

David Williamson Shaffer, Kurt R. Squire, Richard Halverson, and James P. Gee
Computers are changing our world: how we work . . . how we shop . . . how we entertain
ourselves . . . how we communicate . . . how we engage in politics . . . how we care for our
health. . . . The list goes on and on. But will computers change the way we learn?
We answer: Yes. Computers are already changing the way we learnand if you want to
understand how, look at video games. Look at video games, not because the games that are
currently available are going to replace schools as we know them any time soon, but because
they give a glimpse of how we might create new and more powerful ways to learn in schools,
communities, and workplacesnew ways to learn for a new information age. Look at video
games because, although they are wildly popular with adolescents and young adults, they are
more than just toys. Look at video games because they create new social and cultural worlds:
worlds that help people learn by integrating thinking, social interaction, and technology, all in
service of doing things they care about.
We want to be clear from the start that video games are no panacea. Like books and
movies, they can be used in antisocial ways. Games are inherently simplifications of reality, and
current games often incorporateor are based onviolent and sometimes misogynistic themes.
Critics suggest that the lessons people learn from playing video games as they currently exist are
not always desirable. But even the harshest critics agree that we learn something from playing
video games. The question is: How can we use the power of video games as a constructive force
in schools, homes, and workplaces?
In answer to that question, we argue here for a particular view of gamesand of
learningas activities that are most powerful when they are personally meaningful, experiential,
social, and epistemological all at the same time. From this perspective, we describe an approach
to the design of learning environments that builds on the educational properties of games, but
deeply grounds them within a theory of learning appropriate to an age marked by the power of
new technologies.
Video Games as Virtual Worlds for Learning
The first step towards understanding how video games can (and, we argue, will)
transform education is changing the widely shared perspective that games are mere
entertainment. More than a multibillion dollar industry, more than a compelling toy for both
children and adults, more than a route to computer literacy, video games are important because
they let people participate in new worlds. They let players think, talk, and actthey let players
inhabitroles otherwise inaccessible to them. A 16-year-old in Korea playing Lineage can
become an international financier, trading raw materials, buying and selling goods in different
parts of the virtual world, and speculating on currencies (Steinkuehler, 2004a). A Deus Ex player
can experience life as a government special agent, where the lines between state-sponsored
violence and terrorism are called into question.

Video Games and the Future of Learning

These rich virtual worlds are what make games such powerful contexts for learning. In
game worlds, learning no longer means confronting words and symbols separated from the
things those words and symbols are about in the first place. The inverse square law of gravity is
no longer something understood solely through an equation; students can gain virtual experience
walking in worlds with smaller mass than the Earth, or plan manned space flights that require
understanding the changing effects of gravitational forces in different parts of the solar system.
In virtual worlds, learners experience the concrete realities that words and symbols describe.
Through such experiences, across multiple contexts, learners can understand complex concepts
without losing the connection between abstract ideas and the real problems they can be used to
solve. In other words, the virtual worlds of games are powerful because they make it possible to
develop situated understanding.
Although the stereotype of the gamer is a lone teenager seated in front of a computer,
game play is also a thoroughly social phenomenon. The clearest examples are massively
multiplayer online games: games where thousands of players are simultaneously online at any
given time, participating in virtual worlds with their own economies, political systems, and
cultures. But careful study shows that most gamesfrom console action games to PC strategy
gameshave robust game-playing communities. Whereas schools largely sequester students
from one another and from the outside world, games bring players together, competitively and
cooperatively, into the virtual world of the game and the social community of game players. In
schools, students largely work alone with school-sanctioned materials; avid gamers seek out
news sites, read and write FAQs, participate in discussion forums, and most important, become
critical consumers of information (Squire, in press). Classroom work rarely has an impact
outside the classroom; its only real audience is the teacher. Game players, in contrast, develop
reputations in online communities, cultivate audiences by contributing to discussion forums, and
occasionally even take up careers as professional gamers, traders of online commodities,1 or
game modders and designers. The virtual worlds of games are powerful, in other words, because
playing games means developing a set of effective social practices.
By participating in these social practices, game players have an opportunity to explore
new identities. In one well-publicized case, a heated political contest erupted for the presidency
of Alphaville, one of the towns in The Sims Online. Arthur Baynes, the 21-year-old incumbent,
was running against Laura McKnight, a 14-year-old. The muckraking, accusations of voter fraud,
and political jockeying taught young Laura about the realities of politics; the election also gained
national attention on National Public Radio as pundits debated the significance of games where
teens could not only argue and debate politics, but also run a political system in which the virtual
lives of thousands of real players were at stake. The complexity of Lauras campaign, political
alliances, and platforma platform that called for a stronger police force and a significant
restructuring of the judicial systemshows how deep the disconnect has become between the
kinds of experiences made available in schools and those available in online worlds. The virtual
worlds of games are rich contexts for learning because they make it possible for players to
experiment with new and powerful identities (Steinkuehler, 2004b).

As Julian Dibbell, a journalist for Wired and Rolling Stone, has shown, it is possible to make a better living by
trading online currencies than by working as a freelance journalist!

Video Games and the Future of Learning

The communities that game players form similarly organize meaningful learning
experiences outside of school contexts. In the various Web sites devoted to the game
Civilization, for example, players organize themselves around the shared goal of developing
expertise in the game and the skills, habits, and understandings that requires. At Apolyton.net,
one such site, players post news feeds, participate in discussion forums, and trade screenshots of
the game. But they also run a radio station, exchange saved game files in order to collaborate and
compete, create custom modifications, and, perhaps most uniquely, run their own university to
teach other players to play the game more deeply. Apolyton University shows us how part of
expert gaming is developing a set of valuesvalues that highlight enlightened risk taking,
entrepreneurship, and expertise rather than the formal accreditation emphasized by institutional
education (Squire & Giovanetto, in press). If we look at the development of game communities,
we see that part of the power of games for learning is the way they develop shared values.
In other words, by creating virtual worlds, games integrate knowing and doing. But not
just knowing and doing. Games bring together ways of knowing, ways of doing, ways of being,
and ways of caring: the situated understandings, effective social practices, powerful identities,
and shared values that make someone an expert. The expertise might be that of a modern soldier
in Full Spectrum Warrior, a zoo operator in Zoo Tycoon, a world leader in Civilization III. Or it
might be expertise in the sophisticated practices of gaming communities, such as those built
around Age of Mythology or Civilization III.
There is a lot being learned in these games. But for some educators, it is hard to see the
educational potential in games because these virtual worlds arent about memorizing words, or
definitions, or facts.
Video games are about a whole lot more.
From the Fact Fetish to Ways of Thinking
A century ago, John Dewey argued that schools were built on a fact fetish, and the
argument is still valid today. The fact fetish views any area of learningwhether physics,
mathematics, or historyas a body of facts or information. The measure of good teaching and
learning is the extent to which students can answer questions about these facts on tests.
But to know is a verb before it is a noun, knowledge. We learn by doingnot just by
doing any old thing, but by doing something as part of a larger community of people who share
common goals and ways of achieving those goals. We learn by becoming part of a community of
practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and thus developing that communitys ways of knowing, acting,
being, and caringthe communitys situated understandings, effective social practices, powerful
identities, and shared values.
Of course, different communities of practice have different ways of thinking and acting.
Take, for example, lawyers. Lawyers act like lawyers. They identify themselves as lawyers. They
are interested in legal issues. And they know about the law. These skills, habits, and
understandings are made possible by looking at the world in a particular wayby thinking like a
lawyer. The same is true for doctors but through a different way of thinking. And for architects,
plumbers, steelworkers, and waiters as much as for physicists, historians, and mathematicians.

Video Games and the Future of Learning

The way of thinkingthe epistemologyof a practice determines how someone in the

community decides what questions are worth answering, how to go about answering them, and
how to decide when an answer is sufficient. The epistemology of a practice thus organizes (and
is organized by) the situated understandings, effective social practices, powerful identities, and
shared values of the community. In communities of practice, knowledge, skills, identities, and
values are shaped by a particular way of thinking into a coherent epistemic frame (Shaffer,
2004a). If a community of practice is a group with a local culture, then the epistemic frame is the
grammar of the culture: the ways of thinking and acting that individuals learn when they become
part of that culture.
Lets look at an example of how this might play out in the virtual world of a video game.
Full Spectrum Warrior (Pandemic Studios, for PC and Xbox) is a video game based on a U.S.
Army training simulation.2 But Full Spectrum Warrior is not a mere first-person shooter in
which the player blows up everything on the screen. To survive and win the game, the player has
to learn to think and act like a modern professional soldier.
In Full Spectrum Warrior, the player uses the buttons on the controller to give orders to
two squads of soldiers, as well as to consult a GPS device, radio for support, and communicate
with rear area commanders. The instruction manual that comes with the game makes it clear
from the outset that players must take on the values, identities, and ways of thinking of a
professional soldier to play the game successfully: Everything about your squad, the manual
explains, is the result of careful planning and years of experience on the battlefield. Respect that
experience, soldier, since its what will keep your soldiers alive (p. 2).
In the game, that experiencethe skills and knowledge of professional military
expertiseis distributed between the virtual soldiers and the real-world player. The soldiers in
the players squads have been trained in movement formations; the role of the player is to select
the best position for them on the field. The virtual characters (the soldiers) know part of the task
(various movement formations), and the player knows another part (when and where to engage
in such formations). This kind of distribution holds for every aspect of military knowledge in the
game. However, the knowledge that is distributed between virtual soldiers and real-world player
is not a set of inert facts; what is distributed are the values, skills, practices, and (yes) facts that
constitute authentic military professional practice. This simulation of the social context of
knowing allows players to act as if in concert with (artificially intelligent) others, even within the
single-player context of the game.
In so doing, Full Spectrum Warrior shows how games take advantage of situated learning
environments. In games as in real life, people must be able to build meanings on the spot as they
navigate their contexts. In Full Spectrum Warrior, players learn about suppression fire through
the concrete experiences they have while playing. These experiences give a working definition of
suppression fire, to be sure. But they also let a player come to understand how the idea applies in
different contexts, what it has to do with solving particular kinds of problems, and how it relates
to other practices in the domain, such as the injunction against shooting while moving.

The commercial game retains about 15% of what was in the Armys original simulation. For more on this game as
a learning environment, see Gee (in press).

Video Games and the Future of Learning

Video games thus make it possible to learn by doing on a grand scalebut not just by
wandering around in a rich computer environment to learn without any guidance. Asking
learners to act without explicit guidancea form of learning often associated with a loose
interpretation of progressive pedagogyreflects a bad theory of learning. Learners are novices.
Leaving them to float in rich experiences with no support triggers the very real human penchant
for finding creative but spurious patterns and generalizations. The fruitful patterns or
generalizations in any domain are the ones that are best recognized by those who already know
how to look at the domain and know how complex variables in the domain interrelate. And this
is precisely what the learner does not yet know. In Full Spectrum Warrior, in contrast, the player
is immersed in activity, values, and ways of seeing. But the player is guided and supported by the
knowledge built into the virtual soldiers and the weapons, equipment, and environments in the
game. Players are not left free to invent everything for themselves. To succeed in the game, they
must live byand ultimately masterthe epistemic frame of military doctrine.
Full Spectrum Warrior immerses the player in the activities, values, and ways of
seeingthe epistemic frameof a modern soldier. In this sense, it is an example of what we
suggest is the promise of video games and the future of learning: the development of epistemic
games (Shaffer, in press).
Epistemic Games for Initiation and Transformation
We have argued that video games are powerful contexts for learning because they make it
possible to create virtual worlds, and because acting in such worlds makes it possible to develop
the situated understandings, effective social practices, powerful identities, shared values, and
ways of thinking of important communities of practice. To build such worlds, one has to
understand how the epistemic frames of those communities are developed, sustained, and
changed. Some parts of practice are more central to the creation and development of an epistemic
frame than others, so analyzing the epistemic frame tells you, in effect, what might be safe to
leave out in a recreation of the practice. The result is a video game that preserves the linkages
between knowing and doing central to an epistemic framethat is, an epistemic game (Shaffer,
in press). Such epistemic games let players participate in valued communities of practice: to
develop a new epistemic frame or to develop a better and more richly elaborated version of an
already mastered epistemic frame.
Initiation
Developing games such as Full Spectrum Warrior that simultaneously build situated
understandings, effective social practices, powerful identities, shared values, and ways of
thinking is clearly no small task. But the good news is that in many cases existing communities
of practice have already done a lot of that work. Doctors know how to create more doctors;
lawyers know how to create more lawyers; the same is true for a host of other socially valued
communities of practice. Thus, we can imagine epistemic games in which players learn biology
by working as a surgeon, history by writing as a journalist, mathematics by designing buildings
as an architect or engineer, geography by fighting as a soldier, or French by opening a
restaurantor more precisely, by inhabiting virtual worlds based on the way surgeons,
journalists, architects, soldiers, and restaurateurs develop their epistemic frames.

Video Games and the Future of Learning

To build such games requires understanding how practitioners develop their ways of
thinking and acting. Such understanding is uncovered through epistemographies of practice:
detailed ethnographic studies of how the epistemic frame of a community of practice is
developed by new members. That is more work than is currently invested in most educational
video games. But the payoff is that such work can become the basis for an alternative
educational model. Video games based on the training of socially valued practitioners let us
begin to build an educational system in which students learn to work (and thus to think) as
doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, journalists, and other important members of the
community. The purpose of building such educational systems is not to train students for these
pursuits in the traditional sense of vocational education. Rather, we develop those epistemic
frames because they can provide students with an opportunity to see the world in a variety of
ways that are fundamentally grounded in meaningful activity and well aligned with the core
skills, habits, and understandings of a postindustrial society (Shaffer, 2004b).
One early example of such a game is Madison 2200, an epistemic game based on the
practices of urban planning (Beckett & Shaffer, in press; Shaffer, in press). In Madison 2200,
players learn about urban ecology by working as urban planners to redesign a downtown
pedestrian mall popular with local teenagers. Players get a project directive from the mayor,
addressed to them as city planners, including a city budget plan and letters from concerned
citizens about crime, revenue, jobs, waste, traffic, and affordable housing. A video features
interviews with local residents, business people, and community leaders about these issues.
Players conduct a site assessment of the street and work in teams to develop a land use plan,
which they present at the end of the game to a representative from the city planning office.
Not surprisingly, along the way players learn something about urban planning and its
practices. But something very interesting happens in an epistemic game like Madison 2200.
When knowledge is first and foremost a form of activity and experienceof doing something in
the world within a community of practicethe facts and information eventually come for free. A
large body of facts that resists out-of-context memorization and rote learning comes easily if
learners are immersed in activities and experiences that use these facts for plans, goals, and
purposes within a coherent knowledge domain. Data show that in Madison 2200, players form
or start to forman epistemic frame of urban planning. But they also develop their
understanding of ecology and are able to apply it to urban issues. As one player commented: I
really noticed how [urban planners] have to . . . think about building things . . . like, urban
planners also have to think about how the crime rate might go up, or the pollution or waste,
depending on choices. Another said about walking on the same streets she had traversed before
the workshop: You notice things, like, thats why they build a house there, or thats why they
build a park there.
The players in Madison 2200 do enjoy their work. But more important is that the
experience lets them inhabit an imaginary world in which they are urban planners. The world of
Madison 2200 recruits these players to new ways of thinking and acting as part of a new way of
seeing the world. Urban planners have a particular way of addressing urban issues. By
participating in an epistemic game based on urban planning, players begin to take on that way of
seeing the world. As a result, it is fun, too.

Video Games and the Future of Learning

Transformation
Games like Full Spectrum Warrior and Madison 2200 expose novices to the ways
professionals make sense of typical problems. Other games are designed to transform the ways
of thinking of a professional community, focusing instead on atypical problems: places where
ways of knowing break down in the face of a new or challenging situation.
Just as games that initiate players into an epistemic frame depend on epistemographic
study of the training practices of a community, games designed to transform an epistemic frame
depend on detailed examination of how the mature epistemic frame of a practice is organized and
maintainedand on when and how the frame becomes problematic. These critical moments of
expectation failure (Schank, 1997) are the points of entry for reorganizing experienced
practitioners ways of thinking. Building the common assumptions of an existing epistemic
frame into a game allows experienced professionals to cut right to the key learning moments.
For example, work on military leadership simulations has used goal-based scenarios
(Schank, 1992; Schank, Fano, Bell, & Jona, 1994) to build training simulations based on the
choices military leaders face when setting up a base of operations (Gordon, 2004). In the
business world, systems like RootMap (Root Learning, http://www.rootlearning.com) create
graphical representations of professional knowledge, offering suggestions for new practice by
surfacing breakdowns in conventional understanding (Squire, 2005). Studies of school leaders
similarly suggest that the way professionals frame problems has a strong impact on the possible
solutions they are willing and able to explore (Halverson, 2003, 2004). This ability to
successfully frame problems in complex systems is difficult to cultivate, but Halverson and Rah
(2004) have shown that a multimedia representation of successful problem-framing strategies
such as how a principal reorganized her school to serve disadvantaged studentscan help school
leaders reexamine the critical junctures where their professional understanding is incomplete or
ineffective for dealing with new or problematic situations.
Epistemic Games and the Future of Schooling
Epistemic games give players freedom to act within the norms of a valued community of
practicenorms that are embedded in non-player characters like the virtual soldiers in Full
Spectrum Warrior or real urban planners and planning board members in Madison 2200. To
work successfully within the norms of a community, players necessarily learn to think as
members of the community. Think for a moment about the student who, after playing Madison
2200, walked down the same streets she had been on the day before and noticed things she had
never seen. This is situated learning at its most profounda transfer of ideas from one context to
another that is elusive, rare, and powerful. It happened not because the student learned more
information, but because she learned it in the context of a new way of thinkingan epistemic
framethat let her see the world in a new way.
Although there are not yet any complete epistemic games in wide circulation, there
already exist many games that provide similar opportunities for deeply situated learning. Rise of
Nations and Civilization III offer rich, interactive environments in which to explore
counterfactual historical claims and help players understand the operation of complex historical
modeling. Railroad Tycoon lets players engage in design activities that draw on the same

Video Games and the Future of Learning

economic and geographic issues faced by railroad engineers in the 1800s. Madison 2200 shows
the pedagogical potential of bringing students the experience of being city planners, and we are
in the process of developing projects that similarly let players work as biomechanical engineers
(Svarovsky & Shaffer, in press), journalists (Shaffer, 2004b), professional mediators (Shaffer,
2004c), and graphic designers (Shaffer, 1997). Other epistemic games might involve players
experiencing the world as an evolutionary biologist or as a tailor in colonial Williamsburg
(Squire & Jenkins, 2004).
But even if we had the worlds best educational games produced and ready for parents,
teachers, and students to buy and play, its not clear that most educators or schools would know
what to do with them. Although the majority of students play video games, the majority of
teachers do not. Games, with their antiauthoritarian aesthetics and inherently anti-Puritanical
values, can be seen as challenging institutional education. Even if we strip aside the blood and
guts that characterize some video games, the reality is that as a form, games encourage
exploration, personalized meaning-making, individual expression, and playful experimentation
with social boundariesall of which cut against the grain of the social mores valued in school.
In other words, even if we sanitize games, the theories of learning embedded in them run counter
to the current social organization of schooling. The next challenge for game and school designers
alike is to understand how to shape learning and learning environments based on the power and
potential of gamesand how to integrate games and game-based learning environments into the
predominant arena for learning: schools.
How might school leaders and teachers bring more extended experiments with epistemic
games into the culture of the school? The first step will be for superintendents and public
spokespersons to move beyond the rhetoric of games as violent-serial-killer-inspiring-timewasters and address the range of learning opportunities that games present. Understanding how
games can provide powerful learning environments might go a long way toward shifting the
current anti-gaming rhetoric. Although epistemic games of the kind we describe here are not yet
on the radar of most educators, they are already being used by corporations, the government, the
military, and even by political groups to express ideas and teach facts, principles, and world
views. Schools and school systems must soon follow suit or risk being swept aside.
A New Model of Learning
The past century has seen an increasing identification of learning with schooling. But
new information technologies challenge this union in fundamental ways. Todays technologies
make the worlds libraries accessible to anyone with a wireless PDA. A vast social network is
literally at the fingertips of anyone with a cell phone. As a result, people have unprecedented
freedom to bring resources together to create their own learning trajectories. But classrooms have
not adapted. Theories of learning and instruction embodied in school systems designed to teach
large numbers of students a standardized curriculum are antiquated in this new world. Good
teachers and good school leaders fight for new technologies and new practices. But mavericks
grow frustrated by the fundamental mismatch between the social organization of schooling and
the realities of life in a postindustrial, global, high-tech society (Sizer, 1984). Although the
general public and some policy makers may not have recognized this mismatch in the push for
standardized instruction, our students have. School is increasingly seen as irrelevant by many
students past the primary grades.
10

Video Games and the Future of Learning

Thus, we argue that to understand the future of learning, we have to look beyond schools
to the emerging arena of video games. We suggest that video games matter because they present
players with simulated worlds: worlds that, if well constructed, are not just about facts or isolated
skills, but embody particular social practices. And we argue that video games thus make it
possible for players to participate in valued communities of practice and as a result develop the
ways of thinking that organize those practices.
Our students will learn from video games. The questions are: Who will create these
games, and will they be based on sound theories of learning and socially conscious educational
practices? The U.S. Army, a longtime leader in simulations, is building games like Full Spectrum
Warrior and Americas Armygames that introduce civilians to military ideology. Several
homeland security games are under development, as are a range of games for health education,
from games to help kids with cancer take better care of themselves, to simulations to help
doctors perform surgery more effectively. Companies are developing games for learning history
(Making History), engineering (Time Engineers), and the mathematics of design (Homes of Our
Own) (Squire & Jenkins, 2004).
This interest in games is encouraging, but most educational games to date have been
produced in the absence of any coherent theory of learning or underlying body of research. We
need to ask and answer important questions about this relatively new medium. We need to
understand how the conventions of good commercial games create compelling virtual worlds.
We need to understand how inhabiting a virtual world develops situated knowledgehow
playing a game like Civilization III, for example, mediates players conceptions of world history.
We need to understand how spending thousands of hours participating in the social, political, and
economic systems of a virtual world develops powerful identities and shared values (Squire,
2004). We need to understand how game players develop effective social practices and skills in
navigating complex systems, and how those skills can support learning in other complex
domains. And most of all, we need to leverage these understandings to build games that develop
for players the epistemic frames of scientists, engineers, lawyers, political activists, and other
valued communities of practiceas well as games that can help transform those practices for
experienced professionals.
Video games have the potential to change the landscape of education as we know it. The
answers to fundamental questions such as these will make it possible to use video games to move
our system of education beyond the traditional academic disciplinesderived from medieval
scholarship and constituted within schools developed in the industrial revolutionand towards a
new model of learning through meaningful activity in virtual worlds as preparation for
meaningful activity in our postindustrial, technology-rich, real world.

11

Video Games and the Future of Learning

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