By Aaron Delgaty
Game-based learning is often discussed as a solution to a familiar problem: disengaged learners. Games, we are told, increase motivation, participation, and enjoyment. They make learning fun. In practice, they often take the shape of icebreakers and learning breaks, opportunities to get up and move around.
That framing isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. Fundamentally, it misses the opportunity to harness the potential of play as an epistemic tool.
In my experience teaching research methods to undergraduates, play isn’t primarily useful because it motivates students to learn. Rather, it is useful because it creates opportunities for them to safely practice ways of thinking and acting that cannot be learned through reading, lecture, or even traditional case studies. Play here is not an engagement strategy; it’s the method itself.
This distinction matters, especially for educators teaching judgment-heavy skills: research, ethics, decision-making, interpretation, interviewing, negotiation, conflict management, instruction, or any form of applied practice where 1) variability is a constant and 2) there are no clean right answers.
The Limits of Reading & Explanation
Some skills are easier to develop by doing. Practicing conversation with a partner accelerates language learning, for example.
And some skills are almost impossible to build without a safe context in which to practice them before the consequences are real: Mechanics and surgeons practice their craft for hundreds of hours before ever performing professionally.
Typical professional life is full of more mundane examples:
- Navigating difficult conversations with colleagues, direct reports, or supervisors
- Making decisions under uncertainty
- Balancing competing priorities across teams, especially in the absence of formal authority
- Negotiating and compromise
- Managing ambiguity and emotional regulation
The catch is that, unlike repairing an engine or stitching a cut, professionals are often expected to perform these critical skills well without ever having been given a low-risk environment in which to practice. Learning on the job is still the go-to pedagogy for many industries and organizations, much to the detriment of learners and stakeholders alike.
Sure, we can describe these skills. We can assign readings about them. We can even test students on the vocabulary associated with them. But learners do not internalize them until they have to act. And they do not explore the edges of what’s possible or push themselves beyond their starting zones if they don’t have a safe space to experiment with what works and what doesn’t.
This is why athletes scrimmage: It mimics the actual flow and feel of the game, without the stakes.
Games, when designed well and integrated intentionally into learning, create similar low-risk, high-experience environments.
What Games Actually Do Pedagogically
Well-designed learning games introduce four conditions that are difficult to achieve through lecture alone.
Low-Stakes Failure
Learners can be wrong without punishment. This matters more than we often admit. Graded environments incentivize defensiveness and performance; games incentivize experimentation.
Incomplete Information
Players rarely have all the facts. This mirrors real-world practice far better than textbook problems, which often present information as complete and orderly.
Time Pressure & Social Negotiation
Games force decisions to be made with others and in the moment. This surfaces reasoning processes that would otherwise remain hidden.
Immediate Feedback
Poor assumptions fail quickly. Weak reasoning becomes visible. Learners do not need to be told they made a mistake when they experience it.
None of these features are about fun or motivation per se (although they certainly can be fun and motivating). They are about epistemic practice: learning how knowledge is formed, tested, and acted upon.
Play As a Way of Teaching Judgment
Judgment is one of the hardest things to teach and one of the easiest things to underestimate.
In my experience teaching data literacy and analysis, for example, students often assume that good decisions follow naturally from good data. This is rarely true. Misinterpretation, overconfidence, selective framing, or institutional pressure can lead to bad decisions even when the highest-quality data is readily available.
Games allow students to rehearse these failure modes.
Consider a simple classroom activity: Students are presented with three short data claims. One is true. One is misleading. One is fabricated. Their task is not to identify the correct answer, but to explain why a claim deserves trust or skepticism.
No statistics are required. No formulas are invoked. What students must do instead is ask questions:
- Who measured this?
- What does this term actually mean?
- What’s missing from this comparison?
- Why does this sound impressive? Too impressive?
Over time, students stop asking “Is this right?” and start asking “Does this make sense?” Not just in the contexts presented in class, but in their lives broadly.
That shift from correctness to plausibility, from answers to reasoning is the heart of judgment. But the line is fuzzy and nuanced. Playing the game helps you find the edges.
Why Motivation-Based Framings Miss the Point
When games are justified primarily as motivational tools, they are often judged by the wrong criteria: engagement metrics, participation rates, or enjoyment surveys.
This leads to two problems.
- First, it encourages superficial design. Games become point systems layered on top of unchanged content, rather than environments that reshape how learners think.
- Second, it obscures the seriousness of what play is doing. Educators may feel the need to apologize for games, framing them as breaks or icebreakers, rather than as core instructional methods.
These assumptions make perfect sense. Culturally, “game” = “play” = “fun.”
However, in practice, the most effective learning games I have used are not always the most enjoyable. I expect students to become tense, to get frustrated, to feel lost. Failure is an important teacher, and better to fail here than with a subject or stakeholder.
The build of the game serves to simulate real situations and real pressures. The objective of the game is for learners to build critical thinking muscle and gain practical experience. The desired outcome is confidence. Fun is a nice bonus.
Explore Game-Based Learning!
Registration is open for the Learning Guild’s Game-Based Learning online conference, June 10–11, 2026. Engaging, interactive sessions will:
- Offer a behind-the-scenes look at building a game-based compliance course
- Suggest strategies for moving learning from passive to active—and boosting long-term retention
- Consider the challenges and rewards of developing a virtual escape room
- Explore the need to align tools, players, and execution to deploy successful learning games in your environment
Register today! Free for Professional-level and Enterprise members.
Image credit: sankai
