Whenever I describe school and grading as a kind of game, people get upset. “Learning in school is serious business!” “Grades are important for my future!” “Don’t trivialize this!” But “school as game” is a useful metaphor when thinking about the design of learning and assessment. 

It’s not just that I think of school as a kind of game. It's that I think  of school as a terrible game, in which the rules and incentives produce the wrong outcomes, with grades and grading systems at the heart of the problem. This position should not be shocking to anyone reading the “Teachers Going Gradeless'' blog. Many posts on this site discuss approaches to ungrading, implementing mastery-based forms of learning, or otherwise rethinking our current grading and testing systems. This post zooms out a bit and considers the larger learning environment. 

Good Games are Great Learning Environments

Nearly twenty years ago I came across Jim Gee’s book, What Videogames have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, in which he  argues that in order for a video game to be commercially successful, it must also be a great learning environment. Essentially, games that thrive in the marketplace must both appeal to our natural curiosity and our desire to continually learn new things. They also need to find just the right level of difficulty to keep us challenged. If the game is too easy, we get bored. If it’s too difficult, we get frustrated. You may recognize this as a simplified version of Flow Theory. What needs to be emphasized about Gee’s work is that he was not talking about “educational” games. He was talking about entertainment games like Call of Duty or Bioshock. His arguments can also describe successful games in any context, like board games or sports. But even though his theory is about entertainment-based games, it is important to stress that a good game doesn’t work because it is “fun,” but because it is engaging. 

Successful games, including well-designed learning games, can be described as “hard fun.” You feel like you are challenged or even struggling in the midst of the experience, but also don’t want to stop trying until you find success. Gee lays out 36 principles that further describe how good games work, and on the whole these principles are a good summation of sociocultural or constructivist learning theory. I often have my new learning sciences graduate students read Gee’s book as a good introduction to learning theory before we read the foundational theorists themselves. 

As I pointed out above, Gee was talking about entertainment games. Many others have focused on the development of educational or learning games using Gee’s principles. This post is about something else: looking at learning environments themselves through the lens of games and using principles derived from learning and motivation theory to make them into better and more engaging experiences for learners. In other words, making learning into a “better game!”

Defining Games (and School)

As I explored the game design space more deeply, I came across the work of two leading game designers, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. In their influential handbook of game design, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, they consider a range of definitions for games before presenting their own omnibus definition:

A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.

School is a system with components that include levels, courses, curricula, and so forth. Players include teachers, students, parents, administrators, etcetera. There are definitely rules (!) about all kinds of things in school, and grading systems represent one set of rules. And the quantifiable outcome of the game of school is typically your degree, grade, or GPA. 

In a game, when players start acting in ways that are counter to “good play,” we adjust the rules. Professional sports leagues constantly tinker with their rules to keep the game entertaining or to deter emergent bad behavior such as cheating. In school, there is ample evidence that the dominant system of letter and percentage-based grading is harming the value of the experience for all involved. Students become too focused on their score/grade, leading to a decreased focus on learning, decreased motivation, increased cheating and other forms of academic misconduct, and increased anxiety and depression. And we’ve known about these problems for a long time. How do we keep learners focused on learning instead of on their grades? 

Gamification: Coercive Design for Learning

One approach is gamification. Gamification is the application of game-like features—such as points, avatars, badges, leveling up, or leaderboards—in non-game situations. Frequent flier miles are a classic example of gamification. They use points and levels to incentivize you to use a particular airline more than others. But an important thing to understand about gamification is that it is fundamentally manipulative, a way to use extrinsic rewards to control behavior for the benefit of those in power. For this reason, Ian Bogost calls gamification “bullshit” and I agree. Frequent flier miles don’t change the basic mechanics of engaging with air travel, they just control how the flier interacts with it. When gamification is applied in classrooms, it’s usually as a layer on top of the existing system of grades, exams, and other structures. Earn a badge for good attendance! Use good behavior and earn a new outfit for your avatar! Get a good grade and earn edu-bucks to spend in the school store! Tools like Class Dojo, though they aspire to be something more, are most often used to create these kinds of coercive gamification mechanics that don’t change anything about the basic systems, rules, or scoring mechanisms (grading systems) of school. And because they are mostly extrinsic, they have negative add-on effects, like reducing interest in learning itself. Let us (please) put gamification aside, especially if we are attempting to empower learners through ungrading.

Gameful Learning: Designing for Meaningful Engagement

What’s better than gamification? Rather than rewarding students for moving deck chairs around the Titanic, let’s redesign the rules and underlying systems of the classroom to foster greater intrinsic motivation, making learners captain of their own ship. Let’s design our assessment systems to focus learners on meaningful goals and support learning in pursuit of those goals. You know, like a well-designed game! My research group refers to this pedagogical approach as “gameful learning.” You might sometimes see it called “meaningful gamification” or “deep gratification.” Whatever you want to call it, the process starts with asking what you really want learners to take away from a learning experience, and then asking how we can best support everyone in getting there. I argue that this process most often starts with how we think about assessment or grading. 

My colleagues and I have devised a set of ten design principles that together embody gameful learning. The principles are inspired by and drawn from the work of Gee, a range of motivation theories, cognitive and social constructivist learning theories, and our observations of how students learn and engage in our own classrooms. The ten principles are:

Provide Clear Learning Goals

Nobody plays a game without knowing what the objective of the game is, and nobody wants to learn something if they have no idea what the larger purpose of that learning is. “Because it will be on the test” is not a larger purpose.

Balance Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

The discussion of gamification above may leave the impression that intrinsic motivation is always good, and extrinsic motivation is always bad. But in fact all learning environments need a mix of both. School is a particularly challenging place to develop true intrinsic motivation, as learners’ goals usually lay beyond school. Say your long term goal is to become a doctor. Even if being in school is not motivating, you may understand that doing well in school is a requirement for this future. This can motivate you to work hard in school, something that the motivation literature refers to as “identified” extrinsic motivation. But at least you're chasing a goal you’ve chosen for yourself, which is better than a goal that someone else sets for you. 

Support Autonomy

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) tells us that a feeling of autonomy is crucial for developing intrinsic motivation. Autonomy means that you can make meaningful choices, either about what you are working on, how you approach the work, etcetera. In gameful learning, we emphasize providing multiple pathways for learners. The end goal matters much more than how learners get there. 

Create a Sense of Belonging

SDT also argues that intrinsic motivation is fostered by a feeling that you are recognized as an individual, and that you feel supported in your efforts. Creating a sense of mission or purpose in a classroom is one way to achieve this. 

Create Early Wins and Visible Progress

Games provide ways for newcomers to get some early success under their belt, and provide a steady path towards greater challenges. For example, tee-ball is a junior version of baseball that can be played without the sophisticated coordination and understanding of strategy required for the full version of the game. You can experience success without mastering all the complex mechanics of batting. This principle also comes from SDT, where it is referred to as providing support for developing competency. Nobody should be made to feel like a failure on the way to success. 

Allow for Productive Failure

Speaking of failure, today’s school system is completely intolerant of failure. If a high school student wants to gain entrance into a selective college, it feels like perfect grades and test scores are required. The way traditional percentage-based grading systems are designed, there’s no room to do poorly on even a single test. But why does your performance on the midterm matter more than what you actually understand at the end of the learning process? Or your resilience in coming back from a setback? In real life, it’s how you finish that counts. In gameful classrooms, we emphasize that there should be no “single points of failure” in the experience. 

Encourage Exploration

When you remove the punishing effects of failure from a typical grading system, you open up opportunities for learners to explore and take risks. And that, after all, is how you really learn. We don’t want learners to learn the “right answer,” we want them to understand the problem space. That is usually accomplished by a combination of poking around, and of getting things wrong before you can even understand what it means to be right.

Foster Identity Play

Ideally, learning in school is preparation for our future lives. Psychologists refer to taking what we learn in one context and applying it in another transfer, and it is one of the most difficult things to achieve in education. Authenticity can help, both by enabling students to see purpose in what they are learning (this is related to providing a clear learning goal), and allowing them to learn in the role of someone who applies what they are learning in practice. As a simple example, you can learn about science in terms of facts and formulas. Or you can learn how to think like a scientist in terms of reasoning and problem solving. Given the ease with which one can look up a formula these days, clearly learning how scientists think and approach problems is the more valuable (and transferable) skill. This framing is a kind of identity play, and games are great at this. In a game, you become a scientist, soldier, athlete, etc. You try on that identity for a while. Doing this can heighten your investment in whatever you are working on, by making it feel both more authentic to the learner and linking it to ways of thinking that are authentic to practitioners in the real world.  

Include Opportunities for Practice and Reinforcement

Most things worth learning aren’t learned easily. We can support the learning of challenging ideas or concepts by allowing learners to see things from many different perspectives, and allowing them to practice finding solutions in many different ways. One thing video games are great at is letting you practice something over and over and over. The computer never gets tired of you, and can provide infinite practice. It’s a bit more challenging in the classroom, of course. But the more opportunities we can build in for students to practice applying new ideas, the better. (Note: I’m not talking about “drill and practice” worksheets here. See the above principle about identity play and authenticity!)

Embed Assessment in Learning

The tenth principle of gameful learning is the most directly relevant to how we think about grading. In games, we don’t quiz players on whether they understand the game. Their performance in the game is direct evidence of their understanding and skill. Typically, schooling treats assessment as an “event” separated from learning. Not only does this lead to inauthentic forms of assessment (timed sit down exams where you can not collaborate or refer to any resources are rarely seen in the real world), it also interrupts the time we have for learning. Researchers have developed approaches to measuring learning without interruption using techniques sometimes called “stealth assessment.” 

This has been a brief introduction to the ten principles of gameful learning. While it is not necessary for instruction to embody all ten of these principles to be gameful, the more of them you employ the more gameful your learning environment will be, and the more engaging for learners. If you want to explore these ideas in more depth, we’ve created an open online course on gameful learning. You can also learn more at the Gameful Pedagogy site. We’ve created a tool called GradeCraft to facilitate classroom implementation of gameful learning. We explore gameful learning from a learning sciences research perspective here. I also wrote about GradeCraft in an earlier post on this blog about the need to create new infrastructures to support new ways of approaching assessment and grading. 

Gameful Learning and Going Gradeless

Gameful learning is more or less agnostic about how you teach: Lecture, hands-on or active, problem-based, small-group. The principles can be applied to improve engagement in conjunction with any way you are comfortable teaching. It also works with any subject matter or content area. At the University of Michigan, our Center for Academic Innovation has supported the use of gameful learning by more than 225 different instructors in 152 different courses across 47 different academic programs from engineering to political science to dentistry. We’ve also worked with instructors at more than 135 institutions and organizations around the world. 

In contrast to its agnosticism about pedagogy, gameful learning does have a strong perspective on assessment and grading (which is why I am writing about it here). Once you embrace the ideas of embedded assessment and support for productive failure and risk taking, support for autonomy through enabling multiple pathways to success, and so on, it becomes difficult to endorse or use traditional percentage-based grading or to use high-stakes exams on their own. That said, there are a wide range of different approaches to assessment that are compatible with gameful learning, including mastery or competency-based grading, contract grading, standards-based grading, or even full ungrading where you provide feedback to learners without assigning a final grade. 

GradeCraft as currently designed uses a combination of points and learning goals. Learners accrue points towards goals instead of working to maintain an average, which is more consistent with the way games work. However, we recognize the shortcomings of points. They can be just as extrinsically motivating as any other kind of letter or percentage-based grade. Future versions of GradeCraft will more directly support learning and feedback without the need for points, more directly supporting mastery- or competency-based assessment models. 

Gameful learning is designing for learning. Assessment and feedback are critical to formal learning, in order to support students’ continuous development and progress. What is not required are grades, especially percentage-based grades or grades based on inauthentic forms of assessment. As you think about how games might inspire your thinking about learning, remember that it is not about fun! Good games don’t work because they are fun. They work because they are challenging yet engaging. Going gradeless and gameful learning are all about engagement. 

Barry Fishman is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of Learning Sciences in the School of Information and School of Education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His research includes a focus on successful games as models for engaging learning environments and the creation of transformative and sustainable approaches to learning and teaching using technology. You can find him on Twitter at @BarryFishman.