There’s No Such Thing as an Educational Game

What makes a game teach — and why points and badges don't

Children learn by playing. Nobody finds this surprising anymore — you can see it in preschool curricula, in educational toys, in apps that teach counting by counting little sheep. What’s harder to admit is that adults learn exactly the same way; they just rarely have the courage to notice. This intuition — that play and learning aren’t opposites but deeply intertwined — has even acquired its own name and its own moment of fashion: gamification. With mixed results. Slapping game mechanics onto content that has nothing game-like about it rarely works — and that’s a good starting point for asking what a game actually is, and why it sometimes teaches and sometimes only pretends to.

What Is a Game

For the purposes of this text, I’ll work from my own definition. A game, as I see it, is something that satisfies four conditions simultaneously.

First, a game is a model of a fragment of reality. Not all of reality — always some slice of it, simplified and sharpened. Without this condition, it’s hard to distinguish a game from pure improvisation, where nothing represents anything else.

Second, a game has clearly defined rules. This condition filters out things that are close to games but aren’t quite — a casual social gathering, playing with figurines without an established goal. Something valuable happens there too, but it isn’t a game in the sense I want to use here.

Third, a game is a safe environment for trying things out. Its consequences are symbolic, agreed-upon — which sets it apart from gambling, sports betting, or competitions with real financial or life stakes. Mathematical game theory deals with those situations too, but in my view they belong to a different category: there the stake is a real resource; here it’s only a symbolic one.

Fourth, a game is undertaken voluntarily. It must be something one wants to do without being compelled — something that is its own reason, not merely a means to an end.

These four conditions didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens saw play as a free activity, separated from everyday life by time and place, governed by its own order, and free from material interest — which maps well onto my second, third, and fourth conditions. Bernard Suits took a different approach: he defined a game as a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles, where rules are accepted precisely because they create those obstacles. An elegant formulation, but one focused on structure — it doesn’t ask what those obstacles are actually supposed to serve.

And that’s where I want to mark a difference clearly. Neither of these definitions says explicitly that a game is a model of something. Yet that, to me, is the heart of the matter — and the bridge to the rest of this text.

The second difference is subtler but equally important. In Suits, rules are an obstacle the player voluntarily imposes on themselves — something that makes things harder, and by doing so gives the attempt its meaning. I look at rules differently: as a source of safety. A rule that is clear and stable gives predictability — I know what to expect, I know the world of the game won’t shift beneath me mid-attempt. That’s why a game can be a safe space for testing limits, strategies, and even oneself.

An interesting edge case for this definition is the traditional tabletop role-playing game — not its computer adaptations, but the live form with a Game Master. There, rules tend to be less formalized, sometimes negotiated mid-session, depending on the system. And yet the game doesn’t lose its predictability, because that function is taken over by a person — the Game Master acts as a living arbiter who keeps the rules from dissolving into anything-goes. Which is good evidence that what matters isn’t the letter of written rules, but whether someone — or something — guarantees their consistent application.

Games as Models of Reality

Let’s return to what sets my definition apart — and what I believe is the key to understanding the educational potential of games. A game is a model of a fragment of reality.

What does that mean in practice? That in designing a game, someone chose a slice of the world — a mechanism, a relationship, a tension — and built a simplified representation of it that you can participate in. Not observe from the outside, but actively engage with, bearing — even if only symbolic — consequences of your decisions.

Let’s start with examples everyone knows.

Hide and seek is a model of a simple, physical skill: hide and find. The rules are minimal, the model is literal — and children practice spatial awareness, alertness, and patience in it, not because anyone tells them to, but because they want to win.

Chess is a model of armed conflict — simplified to its limits, but faithful in what matters most: each piece has different capabilities, every move has consequences, and the winner is whoever thinks more moves ahead. The game models resource management, anticipation, and reading an opponent’s intentions. Chess has been played for over a thousand years — and has been teaching the same things throughout.

Bridge is a model of cooperation under incomplete information. Each player sees only their own cards — and must communicate with their partner through bidding: a sequence of coded calls from which the partner reads information about their hand, even though they can’t say directly what cards they hold. It’s a language with very precise rules. The game models something that is extraordinarily difficult in everyday life: how to act together when you can’t say directly what you know.

Mafia — a social game in which each player is randomly assigned the role of either a citizen or a mafioso — is a completely different kind of model. Here it’s not about strategy or cards, but about observation, bluffing, and social deduction. Who is lying? Who is hiding something in their behavior? How do you keep a straight face when you know more than everyone else? Among Us translates the same model to a screen — and shows that this isn’t limited to any one medium or generation.

These are obvious examples — each models something visible at a glance. But modeling can reach much deeper, into places you wouldn’t expect at first.

The simplest example I’ve written about separately, in my piece on the card game War. There the model is trivially simple — pure chance, zero decisions — and yet the game represents something, and through that representation teaches something. Here I want to show how far this modeling can go.

Phoenix Point is a strategy game in which the player manages a global response to an alien invasion, balancing between several human factions with conflicting goals. One day, working through one of the game’s dilemmas, I realized that instead of directly helping the weaker faction, it was more effective to persuade the stronger one to help them — because that changes the relationship between them in a way I myself cannot replace. It’s a lesson you could try to explain at a table, but only when I made that decision myself and saw its consequences in the model did I really understand what it was about. Especially in the context of parent-child relationships: there’s a difference between doing something for a child and creating conditions in which the child learns to do it themselves.

Daredragon Fellowship is a board game I designed myself. Its cooperation mechanics are built around a specific problem: what do you do when one player can gain more than others, but at the cost of the whole team? The game doesn’t tell players they’re practicing sacrifice and thinking in terms of shared interest. It simply puts them in situations where that’s the only sensible strategy. I can speak about it from the inside — I know what the design intent was. But I suspect the designers of the other games in this text would have similar things to say about theirs.

Chants of Sennaar is a game in which the player’s task is to decipher the languages of successive alien civilizations — not by memorizing vocabulary, but by observing context, gestures, and behavior. Along the way, the game reveals something that linguists know but is hard to feel from the outside: that language is not a neutral tool for transmitting information, but a reflection of the culture and perspective of the community that speaks it. Translation between languages turns out to be a non-trivial task not because words are difficult, but because behind words lie different ways of seeing reality.

At the end of this list has to come Baba Is You — a puzzle game in which the rules of the game are part of the board. Literally: phrases like “BABA IS YOU” or “WALL IS STOP” lie on the board as objects that can be pushed around. Changing a rule is a move in the game. A player who gets stuck on a level is usually stuck because they’ve unconsciously assumed something about what’s possible. The game repeatedly and very concretely proves that those assumptions are arbitrary. It’s a lesson in thinking itself — and probably the most abstract thing one can learn through a game.

Why It Works

One might ask: why does learning through a game reach places instruction doesn’t? Not that it’s always better — a textbook conveys facts faster, and a lecture can cover ground no game will. But something happens in a game that doesn’t happen in either.

The answer is built into the definition of a game — each of its four elements does something specific.

Start with voluntariness. A game is played without anyone requiring it. That sounds trivial, but it has a serious consequence: the player is willing to invest effort they would avoid in any other form. Tag and running on a treadmill engage the same muscles and require similar physical exertion. But children run longer, faster, and more willingly in tag — not because they’re being tricked, but because the form of the game makes the effort worth it.

The safe environment works in the opposite direction — it doesn’t raise motivation, but lowers the cost of trying. If consequences are symbolic, you can make mistakes, experiment, try strategies that might not work. In real life, a mistake often costs something — time, money, relationships. In a game it costs only another attempt. This makes players willing to enter situations they would avoid in real life.

Clearly defined rules make the model of reality concrete and keep it from being overwhelming in its complexity. Reality is unmanageable — it has too many variables to draw clean conclusions from. A game selects a fragment, simplifies it, and holds to those simplifications consistently. This lets the player understand dependencies that would be invisible in the full complexity of the world. Cause and effect is legible: I did this, that happened.

And finally — the model of reality. This is, I think, the most important element. A game doesn’t only engage and simplify — it shows why the skills being practiced and the knowledge being acquired exist in the first place. It embeds them in a context that gives them meaning.

Terra Invicta is a sprawling strategy game about repelling an alien invasion, set within a realistically rendered Solar System. Lagrange libration points — locations where the gravitational pull of two large bodies, say the Sun and Earth, balances out so that an object can hold a stable position there without constantly burning fuel — aren’t a curiosity to memorize in this game. They’re locations where it makes sense to place a space station, because physics makes getting there cheap and staying there easy. The game shows practical consequences: why these points matter, both in the game world and the real one. The SOHO probe, observing the Sun from a libration point between the Sun and Earth, is no longer an abstraction — it’s a logical consequence of something I already understand.

Tag works the same way. Running in circles on a treadmill is effort without explanation. In tag, it’s immediately clear why running is useful — to catch someone or get away. The game doesn’t just motivate you to run; it shows you why running matters.

This also explains why the model and the willingness to play so often travel together. A model is not a guarantee of appeal — there are games with a faithful model that get played once, of one’s own free will, and never come off the shelf again. But it is one of the sources of appeal, and the one that produces this particular kind of engagement: the player wants to keep going because something in the model actually depends on what they do.

The same principle operates in child therapy. A therapist working with a child through play chooses activities very deliberately — this game practices turn-taking, that one practices naming emotions, another practices understanding roles in a relationship. For the child, it’s play. And that’s exactly the point: the child is immersed in a model of social reality that makes sense to them — they’re playing shop, house, doctor — and in the process practicing something very specific. If they knew they were practicing, resistance would be inevitable. Immersion in the model makes learning indistinguishable from play.

Why “Educational” Games Often Don’t Work

If games have such educational potential, a question follows naturally: why do games that explicitly call themselves educational so often fail? Why is the word “educational” in a game’s name so often a warning sign for children rather than an invitation?

Wyldfyre from Ninjago only knew games like that. “Why would Jay be so crazy about a video game? They’re super boring. All that grammar and spelling. […] «Carrying the one.» «Using proper manners.» Blech!”

The answer is simple, though rarely stated outright: most educational games aren’t games in the sense I’ve described. They’re exercises in disguise. I’ll go on calling them games, because that’s what the market calls them — but that’s a genre label, not a qualification.

The classic example is games in which tasks — arithmetic, geography questions, grammar fill-in-the-blanks — fall from the top of the screen, and the player must solve them before they reach the bottom. The mechanic is simple and engaging. But the connection between the mechanic and the content is purely external: you could replace arithmetic with any other task and the game would work exactly the same. Addition isn’t part of any model — it’s just a gate to the next step.

The same applies to an entire genre of board game quiz-racers, where answering a factual question unlocks a move on the track. The question about the capital of France changes nothing in the game world — it has no effect on any dependency, no consequences beyond “you may advance.” The factual layer and the mechanical layer exist side by side, never intersecting.

The model is missing. And without a model there’s no meaning — only exercise. And that is where the boredom comes from: a child rejects such a game not because someone forgot to make it appealing, but because they sense that nothing in it really depends on what they do. Boredom is the symptom; the missing model is the cause.

This is the exact opposite of what makes games teach. My son learned to add quickly, earlier than his classmates at school — not because he had a game that taught him addition, but because he had a game where the result of addition determined the outcome of a battle. He calculated fast because he wanted to know whether he’d win the fight — not because anyone asked him to calculate. The arithmetic was part of the model, with consequences inside the game world.

This is where it’s worth naming the phenomenon behind most failed educational games: gamification, shallowly understood. The idea is simple — since children enjoy playing, maybe it’s enough to wrap learning in game mechanics? Add points, levels, badges, progress bars? The problem is that it’s not game mechanics that make games teach — it’s the model of reality the game contains. Sticking points onto an exercise doesn’t create a model. It creates an exercise with points.

An external reward can substitute for internal meaning for a while. But it can’t substitute for it permanently — and it won’t deliver what genuine immersion in a model gives: an understanding of why a given skill exists in the first place.

Wyldfyre discovered this in an arcade, when she stumbled onto a game where you had to shoot meteors from a tank. “What? This has nothing to do with bedroom organization. There’s video games where you can blast stuff? Wait… can video games be exciting?!”

Teaching Is Not Endorsement

If a game teaches through its model, then it teaches whatever it is a model of. That sounds like a truism, but it has an uncomfortable consequence: the mechanism described above works the same way regardless of what the model represents. A game in which treating people instrumentally is the effective strategy teaches that just as efficiently as bridge teaches cooperation. It isn’t the case that good games teach and bad ones don’t — bad ones teach too, and that is precisely the problem.

Sometimes the model is only a wrapper. The game has rules, a world, decisions — but those aren’t its real mechanism. Underneath works a reward loop tuned to keep you playing, or the pressure to purchase, or scarcity manufactured by the publisher and sold as value. Such a game teaches something too. Just not necessarily what’s printed on the box.

This is why “games teach” is not praise for games, any more than “books shape people” is praise for all books. It’s a description of a mechanism, not a recommendation. Whether a game is worth the time — yours or a child’s — is a separate question, and it needs a separate answer: what does this particular game teach, and do I want it teaching that?

Games as a Medium

Games teach — which, as we’ve seen, is not the same as saying games are good. This isn’t an argument against games. It’s an argument for taking them seriously, the way we take other media seriously.

Because games are a medium. Or rather — a family of media. The definition I’ve been working with covers very different things: video games and board games, sports and tabletop RPGs, card games and children’s street games. What unites them is interactivity — the player doesn’t observe, they act. And that’s precisely what their static counterparts don’t offer: a film can be watched, a series can be followed, a book can be read. But a game has to be played.

That difference has consequences. A game can teach physical skill, social competence — from handling defeat to thinking in terms of shared interest — strategic thinking, and attitudes toward rules and values, and along the way, knowledge from fields the player didn’t know they were interested in. It can also teach things we would rather it didn’t — by the same mechanism. Not every game teaches everything. But every game that is a real game — a model of reality with clear rules, a safe space for trying things out, and undertaken voluntarily — teaches something. Not always what we would have wanted — but always something.

Which is why the category in the title is empty. Where the word “educational” is redundant, it describes a game; where it isn’t redundant, it describes an exercise. There is no third case.

written July 2026