“If you think about it, you see a Darwinian sort of thing going on here. If a game, for whatever reason, has good principles of learning built into its design — that is, if it facilitates learning in good ways — then it gets played and can sell a lot of copies, if it is otherwise good as well. Other games can build on these principles and, perhaps, do them one step better. If a game has poor learning principles built into its design, then it won’t get learned or played and won’t sell well. Its designers will seek work elsewhere. In the end, then, video games represent a process, thanks to what Marx called the “creativity of capitalism,” that leads to better and better designs for good learning and, indeed, good learning of hard and challenging things.
It would seem intriguing, then, to investigate what these principles of learning are. How are good video games designed to enhance getting themselves learned — learned well and quickly so people can play and enjoy them even when they are long and hard? What we are really looking for here is this: the theory of human learning built into good video games.
Of course, there is an academic field devoted to studying how human beings learn best and well — namely, the field of cognitive science. So we can, then, compare the theory of learning in good video games to theories of learning in cognitive science. Who’s got the best theory? Well, it turns out that the theory of learning in good video games is close to what I believe are the best theories of learning in cognitive science. And this is not because game designers read academic texts on learning. Most of them don’t. They spent too much of their time in high school and beyond playing with computers and playing games.
And, too, there is a key place — though hardly the only one — where learning takes place: school.”