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The term “game-based learning” is relatively modern. But out of all the different names—including “gamification”, “edutainment”, and more—we agree the most with this one. It fits our online store and its content best.

So, what is it?

Game-Based Learning means an educational curriculum where playing games (digital or physical, commercial or not) is the most important element.

It’s not “gamification”, which means simply adding game-like mechanics on top of something else. It’s not exclusively learning through playing games. It’s not “Edutainment”, which is often used to refer to the large number of “educational videos” and “educational video games” in the world.

Game-Based Learning means that the primary focus is playing games. Ready to learn a new topic? Pick one of the many games that explores it.

All the other stuff—textbooks, quizzes, exercises—are the complement. You can add them on top or fill in gaps. But games come first. It’s the starting point.

And it’s not just video games (which is what most people assume). It includes board games, card games, sports, and more. It includes multiplayer games that allow you to be social and train social skills all the time too. It includes game-adjacent activities, such as unique group activities you can play on a Friday afternoon with the whole class.

Our online store most closely aligns with this idea of game-based learning. We already provide over a hundred board games and multiplayer games through a range of topics. But we’re not all about games! We write stories, we create traditional educational resources, we create puzzles and escape rooms. At the very start, our biggest category was actually (pub) quizzes.

In a sense, the traditional system of education could be called “Reading-And-Testing-Based Learning” or “Passive Learning”.

Why does it work?

Perhaps the better name might be activity-based learning or project-based learning. That second term is a bit more common. It’s mostly used by creative or hyperactive people, as they often start all sorts of creative projects (even at a young age) and use that to learn.

Learning is proactive. You’re never learning anything by sitting back and listening, or by solving the same repetitive exercises. You’re not learning very efficiently if you’re not engaging with it and picking personal projects that you want to do.

Learning is dynamic. Each person is different. They learn at a different pace, prefer a different approach, memorize things in a different way. Most of the things that our government requires teachers to do … actually hurt education for neurodivergent people.

Learning is practical. The reason for learning—and why we like learning new stuff—is so we can use it in practice. So that we can solve problems, optimize our daily life, and so forth. You’re not motivating anyone, and you’re inefficient, if you teach things in a vacuum without connecting it to the real world.

All these things are covered by games and game-like projects. The world is made of systems; games simulate systems. Every important skill is a system of facts and understanding; games simulate these systems.

Surgeons use simulations nowadays to learn and practice. The only reason those simulation games are not released (or won’t be successful) as commercial games is because of the barrier to entry and a small target audience. Learning surgery is not really applicable when a kid is still learning to read or count. Most kids don’t dream of becoming a surgeon. But if someone wanted to learn surgery, they would absolutely love to play that simulation and get a great deal of value out of it.

Our only gripe with this term (“Game-Based Learning”) is that it’s not really necessary. Learning and fun are the same thing. You’re basically saying “Learning Using The Best Learning Tools!” ;)

For a deep dive into these ideas, you can read some of our other articles.

A Gameful Future?

For many years, people would scoff at this idea. They’d laugh at you and call you silly.

But there is hope! There is positive news! The tides of public perception seem to be turning, even if our systems of education are lagging behind hopelessly.

More and more large games include specific educational plans or components, such as Minecraft Education. This normalizes the idea of game-based learning for a wide audience. It also makes it easier for schools to introduce it, for which we’re thankful.

More and more classic board games also release a kids version. Bundles of these are often sold (at a discount) to schools, treating the “Kids” version basically as the same game but in educational mode.

Funnily enough, even AI seems to agree. We spoke to a teacher who asked ChatGPT to give him a step-by-step lesson plan for some specific topics he wanted to teach. The AI responded by saying that this is a very bad way to teach it and instead gave him a general map of activities and games around the topic ;) We were honestly surprised to hear this, as AI is known for being very conservative and not wanting to make any definitive statements. But, well, it had read the science and seen the statistics on education, so it probably knows that our current approach isn’t the best.

We hope that our resources add to this amazing curriculum of game-based learning. It is absolutely doable and absolutely better than what we have right now.

It does raise an interesting question, though. School obviously does teach some things. Even if everyone’s reading level isn’t great (and somehow dropping even further), they can still read somewhat. The better students leave school with a set of core skills including reading, writing, and mathematics.

School doesn’t typically use games. Most kids will wholeheartedly agree that school is boring and sucks. They’re not having fun a lot of the time.

If fun and learning are the same thing … then how come that kids still learn a wide variety of things at school?

Because they make it a bit more like a game! Our systems of education are already simulating games, just in a bad and incomplete way.

  • We have tests: challenges and problems to solve.
  • We have feedback: your grade or mistakes on something.
  • We have a competitive leaderboard: comparing your grades to others'.
  • We have side quests: optional homework exercises, electives.

The elements that make school slightly effective as a learning tool, are all stolen from games. They’re executed in a way that would give any game designer nightmares, ruining the fun of the game. But still! As much as tests are ineffective and we all hate them, they are a component that makes school slightly more like a game. Without them, even less learning would happen.

Students also “gamify” it by themselves, subconsciously or not. You probably had a bunch of classmates in high school who had invented their own “learning strategies”. They would give themselves rewards for studying another chapter. They’d use some flash card system or whatever to challenge themselves in randomized ways. Or they would be rebellious and stretch the limits of what you could say and do in an essay. The creative people would invent a personal project that used what they were learning in school. If all else failed, people would have competitions about who could get the best grade or how far they got when studying.

Given the opportunity, humans will gamify anything. We can even gamify moving the lawn or emptying the dishwasher. We invent silly challenges like mowing the grass in a specific pattern, or emptying the dishwasher in less than a minute.

And we do it because it helps us learn. Games ARE learning. The only parts of our schooling systems that work, that actually teach you something, are the things we’ve subtly gamified already.

That’s why we truly believe game-based learning is the future and we’re helping make it a reality.

We also write this as a kind of advice to people stuck in the rigid system (both teacher and student). If school isn’t doing it for you, then make it a game yourself. Invent silly challenges. Experiment. Try to make it practical. Try to shorten the feedback loops and involve other people. It’s not only the best way, it’s pretty much the only way to get learning going.