Open-Ended Video Games: A Model for Developing Learning for the Interactive Age

With Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games gracing the cover of Harper’s September 2006 magazine, video games and education, once the quirky interest of a few rogue educational technologists and literacy scholars, reached broader public awareness. The idea of combining video games and education is not new; twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan praised video games for their potential to train “a new generation of warriors.” Meanwhile, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop declared video games among the top health risks facing Americans.1 Video games, like any emerging medium, are disruptive, challenging existing social practices, while capturing our dreams and triggering our fears. Today’s gaming technologies, which allow for unprecedented player exploration and expression, suggest new models of what educational gaming can be.2 As educational games leave the realm of abstraction and become a reality, the field needs to move beyond rhetoric and toward grounded examples not just of good educational games, but effective game-based learning environments that leverage the critical aspects of the medium as they apply to the needs of a twenty-first-century educational system. We need rigorous research into what players do with games (particularly those that don’t claim explicit status as educational), and a better understanding of the thinking that is involved in playing them.3 We need precise language for what we mean by “video games,” and better understandings of how specific design features and patterns operate,4 and compelling evidence of game-based learning environments. In short, the study of games and learning is ready to come of age. Researchers have convinced the academy that games are worthy of study, and that games hold potential for learning. The task now is to provide effective models of how they operate.5 This chapter offers a theoretical model for video game-based learning environments as designed experiences. To be more specific, it suggests that we can take one particular type of video game—open-ended simulation, or “sandbox” games—and use its capacity to recruit diverse interests, creative problem solving, and productive acts (e.g., creating artwork, game