Welcome to NASAGA 2022
Welcome, gamers, to 2022 with the North American Simulation and Games Association! 2021 has hissed its last toxic breath, whispering promises that it will revenge itself upon us one day. …
Guest Post: Distributed Practice Pt.2
This week we welcome back guest blogger Dave Eng, founder of University XP to illuminate some of the complex concepts surrounding distributed practice in games-based learning.Dave Eng is an intellectual …
Using Democracy 3 to Teach Civics
In this month’s deep dive on using games for classroom education, we will be mixing theory and application as we explore Democracy 3, a wonderful little political simulator. This politics …
Is Gamification Still Bullshit?
In his landmark 2011 speech, Dr. Ian Bogost declared that “gamification is bullshit.” As one of the most prominent scholars on games (both then and now), these words challenged a …
August Learning Games Spotlight: Fiscal Ship
This month we will be starting a new series in the NASAGA blog: learning games spotlights. In this new series, we will spotlight games that were built to teach and …
Learning Games: Using Play to Teach
Playing to learn and learning to play are two fundamental concepts of the human experience. Learning games, often associated with the idea of “serious play”, can refer to either games …
Games for Learning: Three Fields of Study
When I began working in games research about a decade ago, games for learning was still the catch-all term to describe any intersection of the two ideas. Over the last …
Game Learning: Authentic Experience
A major part of experiential learning is providing the learner with authentic experience. We can use games and game learning to simulate authentic experiences to a degree that normal instruction …
Narrative Learning with Games
What’s in a story? Essentially everyone old enough to process language knows the basics of story and storytelling. We know that stories usually have characters, a setting, a plot, a …
Games for Experiential Learning: A Primer for Researchers and Educators
One of the most powerful affordances that researchers and educators find in games is their ability to act as experiential learning tools. Scholars Dieleman and Husingh (2004), Kurt Squire (), …