Video Games in the Classroom
Video games used in learning fall into four categories, ranging from purpose-built edutainment to commercial
games integrated as-is into the curriculum (Exhibit 2). Each of these has potential for learning, but as Papert (
1998) notes in reference to educational games, "Shavian reversals—offspring that keep the bad features of
each parent and lose the good ones—are visible in most software products that claim to come from a mating
of education and entertainment” (88). Games that come into contact with the educational establishment often
become "teacherized" by the need to embed, add, or refer to educational content linked to
performance-related outcomes within the curriculum. Each of the four main categories has this element of
teacherization within them, although the reversioned commercial game has the greatest possibility for
producing a truly gamelike learning experience. One example of this is the DoomEd research and
development project, which attempted to create such a game by integrating learning content into a modded
video game (Exhibit 3). A new genre might emerge from this combination of commercial entertainment values
and curriculum standards, but it is the location of games within the curricular system, as much as the design
of the games themselves, that creates the teacherization phenomenon and produces gamelike learning
rather than truly entertaining learning games. Any new genre of learning game will need to some extent to sit
outside of the curriculum if gaming values are to be preserved.