Games as Education: Learning Without Realizing We're Learning

By Lyla Ross, CEO, Gamers Engaged

September means back to school, with new subjects and another year of learning. But what if learning doesn't always look like a classroom?  What if the classroom included different and new modalities of learning?

We often think of learning as something that happens when someone teaches us something. A teacher explains a concept, we study it, practice it, and demonstrate that we understand it. But people learn differently, and sometimes the most meaningful learning happens when we aren't consciously trying to learn at all.

Games are a powerful, multisensory tool for learning through experience. 

Learning Doesn't Have to Look Like Learning

The word "learning" can feel formal and even loaded, conjuring images of classrooms, teachers, textbooks, assignments, and tests. For some people, that works. For others, experiential learning is how they best engage with a new topic, as it offers multiple pathways for information to sink in, and playing games is an excellent way to do just that!

Games naturally create connection. They give us a goal, a set of rules or information to work from, and the opportunity to make our own choices and see what happens. Instead of simply being told how something works, we get to experience it. A game doesn't necessarily need to contain a lesson for learning to happen. Often the learning comes from what the player has to figure out in order to progress in the game.

The Bridge Between Theory and Experience

One of the challenges of learning is that information can be difficult to understand when it exists only in theory. We can be given all the information we need, but that doesn't necessarily mean we understand how it fits together or what to do with it.

Sushi Go! is one of my favorite games, let’s use it as a simple example.

Before playing, there are quite a few rules to understand. Tempura comes in pairs, Dumplings become more valuable as you collect more, and Maki rolls reward the player with the most. There are multiple rounds, different cards to collect, and decisions to make about what to keep and what to pass. On paper, that's a lot of information.

But the game doesn't ask you to hold all of that information in your head at once. You look at your hand, make one decision, and pass the rest. Then you get a new hand and make another decision.

As you play, the rules begin to have context. You see what happens when you collect two Dumplings instead of one. You notice that another player keeps taking Maki rolls. You start recognizing which cards work together and thinking about what might come back around to you. Information that felt like a list of rules at the beginning becomes something you can use.

That's the bridge between theory and experience.

You're no longer simply remembering that Dumplings become more valuable when you collect more. You're deciding whether taking another Dumpling is worth giving up the card someone else might need.

You may not be thinking, I'm practicing probability right now. You're trying to make the best choice with the information you have. And that's where the learning happens. You make a choice, see the result, and use that experience to inform your next choice. You aren't just being told how the system works. You're interacting with it.

The game doesn't have to stop and announce that you're learning. You're already doing it.

When the Chaos Starts to Make Sense

Games give us these aha moments all the time. When I played Captain Sonar as part of the game research for Gauntlet Infinity in 2017, the chaos of the game suddenly started to make sense.

The game is played with two teams of four. It is asymmetric, so every player has a different role and responsibility, and it is played in real time. There is a captain, but the team can only succeed when everyone does their job well.

Before we started, there was a lot to learn. Rules were explained, instructions were given, and each player had to understand what they were responsible for and when it would become important. Then we started playing.

The first practice round was chaos. We fumbled through our roles, called out instructions, talked over each other, and focused on the boards in front of us. We were trying to keep track of everything happening at once.

Then the captain called for a torpedo. I didn't have a torpedo to launch. The circuits needed to be repaired first. And suddenly, the chaos shifted into focus.

I began to understand that if I did one thing, it allowed another player to do something else. If the captain called one action, I could anticipate what they would need from me next. It was on me to communicate what needed to happen so the team could be successful. The different roles around the table weren't separate tasks. They were parts of one larger system.

The chaos started turning into patterns that made sense. It was exhilarating and exciting to suddenly understand how best to execute on the objective! In that moment, I wasn’t thinking about what I was learning. I was trying to play the game.

In the background, whilst all the chaos ensued, I was learning about individual responsibility, teamwork, active and passive listening, time and priority management, major conflict resolution (if you know, you know :) ), and how my actions could contribute to a larger goal.

The rules gave me the information I needed to play. The experience of playing helped me understand what that information actually meant.

Making the Learning Visible 

So how do we promote this experiential type of learning for more classrooms?  There are plenty of amazing individual educators, librarians, and after-school program facilitators who are bringing games to their classrooms, but this is generally because they are gamers themselves.  And those environments often lose momentum and benefits of the utilization of those games when the teacher moves to a different school or program.  Imagine what it could look like if there were a more systemic adoption of games for learning! 

If we want games to have a larger and more lasting place in education, we need to get better at showing what is happening during play. That means evaluating more than whether students enjoyed a game or whether a game successfully taught a particular piece of content.  

It means the games industry supporting efforts to research and evaluate the educational impacts of games!

It means working with educators to help gather data from observations they make in the classroom.

Educators can observe and document questions like:

• What core competencies (student learning goals) might the game touch upon?

  • Critical Thinking

  • Communication

  • Collaboration

  • Content Knowledge

• What decisions did learners have to make?

• What kinds of problems did they encounter?

• How did they respond when their first approach didn't work?

• Did their strategy change as they gained information?

• What patterns or systems did they begin to recognize?

• What did they understand after playing that would have been difficult to understand through explanation alone?

These observations give us a way to connect the experience of play to broader learning goals without requiring every game to become an “educational game.” 

According to a new article by King Panda Games, in the tabletop games arena alone, there are roughly 3,500 new titles released each year.  Can you imagine how exciting it would be to include more of those in the classroom?

If we want schools, administrators, parents, funders, and policymakers to see games as legitimate learning tools, we need to be able to articulate not only that games work, but how learning happens through them. 

We're Learning More Than We Think

We sit down to play games, not to learn. We're there to have fun with friends, operating submarines, telling stories, or assembling sushi platters. But somewhere along the way, we start to understand something we didn't understand before. 

The value of games in education isn't simply that they make learning more fun. It's that the learning is inherently built into the fun, making learning more accessible to more people, especially those who might struggle in a traditional classroom setting.

Games remind us what learning can look like when we have the chance to experience something for ourselves. We don't always recognize those moments as learning, and we don't have to. The learning simply happens because we are engaged in the experience.

Play turns learning into experience.