Historically, games have been associated with play outside of school contexts, but in light of low testing scores and increasing rates of high school dropouts, many are looking to games for educational benefits in schools. Pelletier (2009) has challenged educators to resist the urge to frame games as a way to salvage education by claiming that the value of games should be rethought in terms of “the situated signification of ‘game’ rather than games causing learning” (p. 83).
Klopfer, Osterweil, and Salen (2009) in Moving Games Forward: Obstacles, Opportunities, & Openness, on the other hand, provide a conceptual path for people and organizations interested in fostering the development of games for learning purposes. Resisting the urge to make an either/or argument, they make “a case for learning games grounded in the principles of good fun and good learning” (p. 1) and devote their efforts to motivating and informing educators and researchers who want to constructively participate, as creators and consumers, in the gaming domain.