Chapter 9: Comments on Research Comparing Games to Other Instructional Methods: Marc Prensky Games2train

“Research on instructional games” is a lot like “instructional games,” in that the terms cover a lot of territory. Both have a ton of bad examples— far more than good ones—with a few good, and excellent, instances at the top. Ideally, in both cases, we would want to separate the quality examples from the chaff, and look only at the good stuff.

So, since much of the stuff—both the games and the research about them—is what the editors of this volume characterized in an informal conversation as “disappointing, lamentable, and poor” one is left with the questions: Do we just throw all the bad stuff away? Or is there something valuable to be learned, both from the bad games and the bad research?