Digital Games and Learning
Professor: Dr. Samuel McCready
Semester: January 2026
Course information: https://met.ubc.ca/courses/etec-544/
Course Website: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec544met/
Description
Famously, Friedrich Schiller (1794) claimed that persons were ‘most human’ when they were at play. More recently, digital media and learning theorists have suggested that learners may learn best when they are ‘at play,’ where serious play and educative/learning action coincide. This course examines play as it is currently developed and popularly imagined in digital games in order to more closely examine what is “learned” and at play in those immersive environments.
Although computer gaming represents, for some people, something unfamiliar, potentially subversive, and antithetical to education’s intellectual and social goals, play has always been a powerful vehicle for learning. There is little doubt that young people today, who represent computer gaming’s largest and fastest-growing audience, are learning a great deal in and through digital play, but what is it they are learning and how? The purpose of this course is to give serious attention to and careful analysis of the contemporary digital forms of gameplay.
This course is intended to give an overview of theories of play, including their application in/to digital environments, review the cultural and social aspects of digital game play and the use of digital games for learning and in schooling more generally, and, finally, to consider game design strategies and approaches that best suit educational aims and purposes. The primary goal of the course is to consider the scholarship on games, game culture, play, and digital game-based learning within the context of 21st century educational discourses and policies, including the requirement in many educational jurisdictions to provide a code-based curriculum for K-12 learners. This course will cover, in broad strokes, theories of play, game culture, representation in games, digital game-based learning, and thinking through game design. The course is intended to give a balanced overview of the key/pivotal ideas and theories and research in the area. Further, the course is intended to challenge you to think like a game designer who is designing game-based learning environments while being attentive to the representational issues present in gameplay culture more broadly.
Learning Objectives
This course and its related assignments, discussion, and activities are directed toward the following goals:
- Understand the key theoretical approaches to play.
- Describe the approaches to, problematics of, and the key outcomes from game-based learning research.
- Critically examine gameplay culture/s and their social and representational implications.
- Understand some basic tenets of game design and its application to learning settings.
- Gain experience both playing and making digital games.
Activities
This course is meant to provide an opportunity to examine the current and past literature on play, games and representation, game design approaches, and digital game-based learning. It is organized into a discrete set of activities, each of which has its own associated readings and assignments. Your challenge is to create your own way through the activities, with some crucial individual and whole group check-in points along the way. Note: you can begin this course from any of the activities; they are meant to be complementary, and assignments are designed for discrete consideration of readings/issues/problematics.
You will choose to complete six Individual Intellectual Productions (collectively worth 30% of your final grade), each related to one of the following selection of eight topics:
Activity 1: Theories of Play
Activity 2: Learning Through Game Design
Activity 3: Foundations of Digital Games & Learning
Activity 4: Learning & Digital Games, Meta Empirical Reviews
Activity 5: Learning Through Games: Classroom-based Studies
Activity 6: Intersectional Perspectives on the Culture of Digital Gameplay
Activity 7: De-Colonizing Videogames
Activity 8: Game Design Redux: Approaches & Challenges to Designing Differently
Assignments & Assessment
Assignments for this course are divided into the following 4 categories:
Individual Intellectual Productions (30%)
Videogame Review (15%)
Synchronous Events – Required Attendance (15%)
Collaborative Final Project (35%) and Project Proposal (5%).
1. Individual Intellectual Productions *includes required readings
Unless clearly indicated, your job is to choose 6 out of the 8 activities to complete for your intellectual productions. Those are required to be posted to your own website that you create and share with the course instructor/whole class.
2. Videogame Review
With direct reference to the principals of games outlined in Ian Bogost’s text, your job is to review a videogame of YOUR choice. The review should make sure it draws on and analyses the game with a view to also figuring out what, if anything, could be recognized as “learning” while playing.
3. Synchronous Events: Required group synchronous attendance (15%):
Whole Group: Syllabus Tour (First week of official class start date) – 2.5%
Whole Group: Discussion of Text – Bogost, I. (2011). How to do things with video games. University of Minnesota Press – 5%
Smaller (assigned groups): Check-In Re: Videogame Design Choice – 2.5%
Whole Group: Presentation and Demonstration of Final Project – 5%
4. Collaborative Final Project
In a small (no more than 4) group or, if you choose, individually, the final project is to design an analog or digital game that has a learning mechanic at its very core. Part 1 of the assignment is to come up with a videogame/analog game design document (5%) based on one of the design templates explored in this course. Part 2 is to collaboratively design a game using any of the free tools available: Twine, RPG Maker, GameMaker, Unity, or Construct 3 or similar, but NO scratch projects will be considered. If you choose the analog game route, you have to design all playable elements, and there must be an accompanying rule sheet + video that demonstrates gameplay.