Critical digital game literacies education Open Access

Sian Bayne’s (2024) exploration of utopian and dystopian approaches to digital technology in education encourages educators to move the discourse beyond simplistic categorisations. Highlighting the prevalence of techno-determinism views, Bayne argues that both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives can limit our ability to engage critically with the complexities of educational technologies.

This paper aims to, on the one hand, trouble the celebratory rhetoric which is so often associated with calls for game-based learning and to, on the other hand, problematise claims that digital games, in and of themselves, are harmful. Through a re-engagement with how we theorise digital games in education, I hope to develop critical digital game literacies education as an approach to what English and literacy educators might do with and through such technology.

This project is premised on a critical attitude to the relationship between digital games and learning. It considers the productive capacity of drawing on multiple theories to inform how we engage with digital games in English and literacy education. Critical digital game literacies (CDGLs) refer to those game-related practices that foreground investigating paying attention to the ways social, cultural and material factors shape the way digital game technologies are imagined, developed, used and resisted. This includes both a critical approach and creative expansion, using design and redesign to tell alternative stories, about technology as well as humans. The “critical” of CDGLs is not monolithic. Rather, it derives its meaning from inside, across and in-between the four distinct disciplinary perspectives that are the focus of this paper (e.g. educational studies, postdigital studies, literacy studies and cultural studies), and as will be explored in more detail below. Each of these contributes a particular inflection to what it means to engage critically with digital games. Situating CDGLs within notions of English and literacy education draws attention to the need for explicit teaching. This teaching provides experiences that develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions necessary for all young people to consider how they engage with and use these technologies within their social and cultural contexts (Grimes, 2021; Ito, 2009).

This paper argues that English and literacy education in a postdigital age needs to find space to accommodate such activity. Postdigital, here, refers to a way of thinking about technology that rejects the idea that digital tools are distinct from or superior to traditional, analogue practices and where digital and non-digital aspects of life are deeply intertwined and inseparable. I begin by historicising the different ways that the relationship between digital games and learning has been constructed, exploring the different effects of these framings on how these technologies are viewed as learning technologies with the capacity to fundamentally change education. The paper then draws on Han’s (2024) analysis of the relationship between theory and narrative. The aim here is to demonstrate how different ways of theorising the digital games/learning dialectic make differently intelligible the characteristics and possibilities of CDGLs education. This analysis will draw on ideas and arguments from four areas (educational studies, postdigital studies, literacy studies and cultural studies) to demonstrate how the narratives which emerge from these theories produce new forms of perception about digital games. The discussion then turns to what these theorisations of CDGLS enable for English and literacy educations in terms of curriculum, pedagogy and research. From such a perspective, CDGLs are not limited to fleeting activity that takes place in students’ out-of-school digital lives. Rather, CDGLS are made a central plank in the literacy project of schooling.

Persistent theoretical orientations to digital games in education research constrain how the field understands contemporary gaming practices and the potential place of CDGLs in the English and literacy projects of schooling. Grimes (2021) argued that much of the literature associated with children’s digital and non-digital play sets up a reductionist internal polarity between good and bad play. There is a need, Grimes continues, to move beyond idealising and instrumentalising young people’s play. This section seeks to explore the characteristics of historical and more recent theorisations of the relationship between digital games and learning. In doing so, it demonstrate how the evolution of the field has opened up productive pathways for thinking beyond narrow framings.

Early framings of digital games in terms of affordances share similarities with edtech imaginaries that rely on rhetorics of disruption and techno-determinism. The emphasis on disruption is evident in the work of James Paul Gee (2003) who posits that digital games offer a unique learning environment characterised by immersive experiences and active engagement. From Gee’s work, there has evolved more techno-determinist positions adopted by those constructing digital game-based learning (DGBL) discourses. These positions rely on instructivist and constructivist paradigms. Instructivist paradigms emphasise the design of digital games for the purposes of instructional educational materials (Kafai, 2006). They highlight the capacity of well-designed games to both replace poorly performing teachers and to liberate other teachers from the responsibility of interventions (McGonigal, 2011; Prensky, 2007). Constructivist paradigms focus on the learning potential of immersion in microworlds where learners can interact with and explore complex ideas which can be tied to domain-based areas (Papert, 1980). Those leveraging constructivism highlight the learning benefits of participation in computational digital spaces designed around game-principles. Through such comparisons, they position contemporary schooling as deficient.

In contrast to those focussing on the positive contribution of digital games to learning, the field has seen the rise of scholarship interested in the unintended learning consequences that result from engagement with problematic digital game representations and digital game cultures. Concerns have been raised about the ways many popular digital games relate to and reproduce: racialised logics (Murray, 2017), violence and war (Crogan, 2011; Kline et al., 2003), hypercapitalism (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter, 2009), toxic masculinity (Amory, 2012), game-related gambling (Macey, 2021), sexism (Shaw, 2015), colonialism (Mukherjee, 2017) and poverty (Crowley, 2022). The concern raised by many critics of these representations is that through play, people will unconsciously and unquestioningly consume these problematic representations, and then reproduce them in the non-digital world. When these concerns are added to those that associate digital games and digital culture with the moral, intellectual and cultural decline of young people, e.g. (Haidt, 2024; Baron, 2015; Wolf, 2018) the consequences for how digital games are conceived as objects for play and study have been significant. For example, across the Anglosphere, restrictions and bans on young people’s engagement with digital technologies are growing (Reed and Dunn, 2025; Fardouly, 2025; Carah et al., 2025).

While efforts to legitimise gaming in educational studies have been crucial for establishing its credibility as a pedagogical tool, such legitimisation has sometimes allowed for gaming’s other animating dimensions, its affective, social, technical and political-economic dimensions, to go unexamined (Nichols, 2026). A postdigital gaming approach is emerging which signals a significant break from existing positions on the relationship between digital games and learning. Postdigital gaming suggests a dissolution of neat boundaries that have long structured thinking about games and learning, including the digital/analogue divide and the distinction between old and new literacy practices (Bacalja et al., 2026a, 2026b). Scholars arguing for a postdigital gaming position invite us to consider how educators might respond to these shifting conditions. They aim to move beyond the binary thinking that has characterised much educational discourse around digital games (Robinson et al., 2026). Postdigital gaming opens new pathways for understanding and enacting critical digital game literacies in schools, pathways that are attentive to complexity, contingency and the entangled nature of contemporary gaming practices.

In his analysis of the ways narratives produce the structures that give our lives meaning, Han (2024) argued that theory, far from being a mere abstract construct, actively designs an order of things. Theory creates a framework through which we can make sense of the world. For Han, theory serves as a lens that makes things intelligible. Theory “comprises things within a conceptual framework and thus makes them graspable” (2024, p. 50). When considered in this way, theory produces a narrative anchor – it “carries sense” (p. x) In what follows, I explore ways of framing critical approaches to digital games from educational studies, postdigital studies, literacy studies and cultural studies perspectives.

Theorising CDGLs education from multiple standpoints produces meanings which speculate about what constitutes adequate literacy education and educational futures. These perspectives were selected because each offer distinct yet complementary insights into how digital games function as sites of learning and potential critical meaning-making. Each offers ideas that contribute to defining CDGLs education in a manner that is attentive to the aforementioned complexity, contingency and the entangled nature of contemporary gaming practices. Working together they offer a more nuanced understanding of critical digital game literacies than any single discipline could provide.

If we are to push beyond polarising thinking regarding the teaching and learning implications of digital games in education, then we will need to engage with questions about the purposes of schooling and broader debates that seek to influence past, present and future imaginaries. When Biesta’s asks “what actually constitutes good education?” (2010, p. 1), he does so knowing there is no single answer. Rather, the question serves as a catalyst for thinking outside of personal preferences. Biesta reminds us that all educational activities, practices and processes are implicated in the question “as to what education is for” (p. 2). However, one of the problems with the field of education studies in recent times has been the focus on technical and managerial questions about efficiency and effectiveness of processes, at the expense of normative questions of good education.

Biesta’s articulation of the tension between the socialisation and subjectification functions of education provides insights for considering how digital games might be used for different educative purposes, beyond improving the quality of instruction. The socialisation function captures the way education supports students to become part of particular social, cultural and political “orders”. Taking on identities and learning how to be competent members of specific professional communities is an example of this. The subjectification function, or what Biesta also refers to as individuation, is the process of becoming a subject. Unlike socialisation, which is about the insertion of “newcomers” into existing orders, subjectification “hints at independence from such orders” (2010, p. 21). It is interested in ways that the individual can be and do something beyond these existing orders.

How educators approach education, whether through socialisation or subjectification, significantly influences how they will design learning experiences that centre digital games. For example, if we support the imperatives of neoliberal reforms in education, which reduce learning to a commodity form that serves the economic interests of corporations and the state (see Ball, 2012; Apple, 1979), such as socialising youth for economic productivity, then we are likely to favour game literacies that maximise instructional efficiency through behaviourist methods. Conversely, viewing education as subjectification is more likely to align with critical pedagogy advocates’ long-standing arguments that teaching and learning should emphasise resistance and change, and the fostering of critical consciousness (see Giroux, 1983). This perspective promotes classroom interventions which develop critical literacies, enabling students to understand how texts, including digital games, function ideologically. Student learn to recognise the values and assumptions embedded within them and to interrogate whose interests are served by particular representations and narratives. Essentially, an economic focus might prioritise learning through digital games, while a critical approach emphasises learning about how they work. These contrasting views lead to fundamentally different educational strategies and outcomes in the context of digital game–based learning.

The desirability of different digital game literacies cannot be decoupled from belief systems about schooling, and the role of digital technology in schools. Those investigating digital technologies from critical perspectives express concerns with the economic and business thinking that underpin popular sentiments about future learning. Selwyn (2016) argued that the appeal of the “digital fix” (p. 18) lies in disgruntlement with the current state of education. This disgruntlement is coupled with the simultaneous thesis of disruption – where technology-driven changes are offered as solutions. Such rhetoric is common among digital game–based learning advocates who use techno-idealism to argue that games and games design will “fix our education systems” (McGonigal, 2011, p. 14). These advocates also claim that games will increase economic dividends through improved learning outcomes (Prensky, 2007).

For others, it is not so much that claims about DGBL are just that, claims, but that game-based learning is inherently an unethical practice. For example, Williamson’s (2017) analysis of the popular educational platform ClassDoJo found that the technology operates more like a digital game. It facilitates psychological surveillance through gamification techniques to reinforce and reward student behaviours that are aligned with governmental strategies around social-emotional learning. For others (see Robinson, 2021), game-based platforms like ClassDojo augment long-standing disciplinary powers to produce the: “good student”, “good teacher” and “good parent”. As Robinson and Wright (2023) explained, there is a tendency for framings of digital game play and design to reflect neoliberal views that situate young people’s play within economic frames. Within such perspectives, the value of play and design is the extent to which they produce economic value and as a form of “financial future proofing” (p. 248).

Ideas from education studies, like those inherent in Biesta’s questions about the purposes of schooling, remind us that education systems have histories which shape what becomes new technologies. If we are to expand the potential use of digital games in schools beyond dichotomous positions, then we will need to consider questions about desirable and undesirable digital game literacies, and the value of pursuing critical orientations to them.

The rise of the postdigital as a theory to interrogate the relationship between digital technologies and learning reflects what Peters and Besley (2019, p. 30) call “a critical attitude […] that inquires into the digital world, examining and critiquing its constitution, its theoretical orientation and its consequences”. Seeking to reach beyond techno-determinism (Jandrić et al., 2018) and to engage with those combinations of digital, biological, material and social factors, the postdigital represents what Jandrić (2023, p. 17) refers to as a “generative concept”. The intent is to complicate digital-analogue and techno-human relations.

Postdigital concepts have begun to be deployed to explore the relationship between digital games and education. This work problematises claims and assumptions about the affordances of digital games and learning, including those first raised by Gee (see Bacalja et al., 2024). It challenges causal explanations that fail to account for the dynamic factors entangled within digital game ecologies (for recent examples, see Koutsogiannis and Adampa, 2022; Pettersen and Ehret, 2024; Robinson, 2022). Elsewhere (see Bacalja, 2025), I have proposed a framework for analysing studies of gaming in educational contexts which draws on ideas from postdigital theory. This framework is guided by three frames: entanglement, the myth of technology inspired change and a focus on continuities, histories and endurances. I briefly explore each of these frames here with the aim of making comprehensible the potential role of digital games within English and literacy education.

Firstly, one of the most common metaphors deployed by postdigital scholars is that of entanglement. Knox (2019) argued that our relationships with technology are already embedded in, and entangled with, multiple social practices and economic and political systems. Any combination of technologies with teaching methods must be understood in terms of situated, entangled combinations of diverse elements inherent to all educational activity (Fawns, 2022). When combined with the work of others seeking to show how the digital is interwoven with social, material and semiotic resources (see Burnett and Merchant, 2020), we are left with a way of thinking about digital games that requires paying attention to factors outside of the technology. As Burnett and Merchant (2016) concluded in their exploration of meaning-making experiences associated with young people’s virtual play in virtual worlds, educational experience is messy business. It is contingent on “interactions between body, text and place as they infuse each other in multiple acts of meaning-making” (p. 258).

Secondly, disrupting the myth that “technology alone has innate power to affect positive, market driven changes to the ways that people learn” (Jandrić et al., 2018, p. 896) represents a central feature of the postdigital attitude. Reaching beyond technological determinism requires holding to account claims about instrumental efficiencies as well as probing alternative futures. Much of the rhetoric from advocates of DGBL (e.g. McGonigal, 2011; Prensky, 2007) include wild assertions about the capacity of digital games to fundamentally change the nature of literacy and learning in schools. More critical approaches to digital game literacies suggest that the realities of contexts where games are deployed for formal learning are more complex (for case studies addressing the significance of context, see Burn, 2003; Abrams and Lammers, 2017; Beavis and Charles, 2005). This complexity is evident in Pettersen and Ehret’s (2024) analysis of young children’s encounters with digital media technologies, including digital games. These encounters were found to include not only instantiation of materiality and embodiment of the digital, “a fluidity of the interfaces between screen, body, and world” (p. 32) but also experiences that resonate and reverberate across events and over time.

Thirdly, conceiving of digital technologies in terms of their “continuities, histories, and endurances” (Knox, 2019, p. 358) allows for thinking which goes beyond novelty. Williamson et al. (2024) argued that one of the reasons that educational technologies do not always work as imagined or intended is due to a lack of appreciation for the complex and unpredictable institutions where they are enacted. Accounting for those socio-cultural-political systems which inform continuities, histories and endurances allows for digital game literacies that avoid the “contextlessness of glossy imaginaries and optimistic promises” (p. 335). It also correlates with conceptions of literacy that recognise how histories manifest in everyday activity (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017).

Those interested in bridging from digital game literacies that serve behaviourist logics to critical orientations about how digital games “work” must consider the multitude of phenomena that constitute games ecologies in English and literacy education settings.

Change in how literacy education has been theorised creates new orders of things and new forms of closure that sustain arguments for critical digital game literacies as a component of schooling. Specifically, looking at the social, digital and critical turns in literacy education offers insights into how literacies education can continue to evolve in response to technological advancements. This evolution is necessary given the need to prepare young people for a life that will be inescapably mediated through the digital.

The first shift, broadly conceived in terms of the social turn in literacy research (see Gee, 2015), expanded notions of literacy beyond the production of signs and the printed word and towards a greater emphasis on the social and cultural circumstances in which individuals live and learn (Gee, 1996; Street, 1995). Informed by the development of New Literacy Studies (NLS) (Street, 2003), this shift included the legitimisation of a range of multimodal and digital forms. The second shift is characterised by what Mills (2010) refers to as the digital turn in NLS. Responding to the increasing role played by digital technologies for communication, literacy research focussed on the consequences of this growth for literacies education (see Lankshear and Knobel, 2008). The digital turn reflects the shift to exploring the complexity of “digital literacy practices across multiple technologies, media, modes, text formats, and social contexts” (Mills, 2010, p. 262).

Early attempts to define digital play in terms of literate practice contain many of the same ideas that are fundamental to the aforementioned social and digital turns. For instance, Zimmerman (2009) defined gaming literacy as the ability to design games, while Zagal (2008) suggested a broader understanding that includes both the technical skills required to play games and the interpretive abilities necessary to “understand meanings with respect to games” (p. 2). Salen (2007, p. 301) emphasised the performative nature of play and uses the term “gaming literacies” to highlight the dynamic and multifaceted nature of this activity. More socio-culturally oriented definitions include work from Buckingham and Burn (2007, p. 328), who define game literacy as encompassing “how the social activity of play is defined and carried out, and how players are socially located”. Garcia et al.’s (2020a, p. 3) “layered approach”, also socio-culturally informed, identifies four key features of gaming literacies: “in-game interactions, physical gestures, deliberation and thought, and the social and cultural worlds that mediate play and its meaning”. These characterisations, along with those of others (see Bacalja, 2023; Abrams and Hanghøj, 2022), reflect efforts by both games studies and educational scholars to go beyond the medium itself and examine the social and cultural practices that are both enabled and constrained by digital technologies.

The third “turn” in literacy studies that informs CDGLs education is the critical turn. This movement has its origin in the broader critical turn in education which emerged out of the introduction of Marxist and other radical social theories in the 1960s (Gottesman, 2016). Unlike functional literacy, which Mayo (2004) described as technical processes such as basic reading skills, critical literacy refers to something more resistant and emancipatory. It captures processes through which individuals become empowered, (e.g. Freire, 1973; Freire and Macedo, 1987; McLaren, 1989). As Mclaren (1988, p. 214) puts it, critical literacy unveils and decodes “the ideological dimensions of texts, institutions, social practices and cultural forms such as television and film, in order to reveal their selective interests”. It is interested in differentiating between cultural systems of representation (print texts, writing, advertisements, etc.) and social, economic and material realities (Luke, 2018).

The past two decades have seen a growth in case study research explicitly interested in the nexus between digital games and critical literacy education. In Beavis and Charles’ (2005) study of Australian teenagers playing The Sims Deluxe as part of an English curriculum, students were involved in: playing the games for an extended period, imaginative writing asking students to design an extension pack for their chosen game, small group discussion and textual analytical work. This allowed them to engage in critical discourse about the gendered nature of their play. Gerber et al. (2014) described an 18-week unit involving commercial off the shelf games and extensive writing opportunities (writers workshops, narrative writing, expository writing, persuasive writing and multimedia composition). These supported students to juxtapose literature and digital games and to engage in dynamic and critical analyses of the texts across the unit. Finally, several edited collections focussed on literacy activities that go beyond skills-based paradigms (see Beavis et al., 2012; Garcia et al., 2020b; Gerber and Abrams, 2014), as well as my own work with high school students (Bacalja, 2018a; Bacalja, 2018b), has found that they can be scaffolded into understanding the many ways that game designers position audiences.

What these examples highlight is how the groundwork for providing students with critical engagement with digital games has been forming for some time, even if it has not been couched in terms of CDGLs.

Approaching digital games from a cultural studies perspective challenges assumptions about digital game play as either good or bad and asks us to consider the role schools play in cultivating certain kinds of individual through the knowledge and skills they enculturate. Normalising digital games as texts worthy of school study must contend with the enduring legacy of the “culture and civilization” tradition personified by the work of F.R. Leavis (1930) and Matthew Arnold (1869). This tradition, a reaction to the perceived effects of mass urbanisation and industrialisation on culture in England, and in fierce opposition to popular culture, is characterised by the study of canonical texts. It is shaped by a belief in the educative value of literature to civilise (Arnold, 1869). For Arnold, popular culture is anarchic, a threat to social order, and signals a cultural decline. For those of the “culture and civilization” tradition, education serves a crucial function. It aims to bring to the working class a “culture” that would counter the negative effects of the popular and return a sense of subordination and deference to class.

Escaping essentialising arguments about how people consume popular culture like digital games is made possible through advancements in how we understand the production of culture. This can be explored through a double “break” with the Leavis tradition. The first break involves the thinking of multiple contributors from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). From the 1960s onwards, contributors to the CCCS, including Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall (among others), articulated an approach to culture which produces a far more positive and productive groundwork for popular culture. The stress on human agency, and the active production of culture, problematised earlier assumptions about how the commodities of culture were consumed. This approach has significant implications for the study of meaning within popular culture texts like digital games, both for those asserting that educational games will support scholastic development, and those assuming that violent, sexist and racist themes in games will always cause harm.

The second break comes from post-structuralism, and the unavoidable instability of meanings derived from engagement with any text. On the one hand, popular culture texts are products of late capitalism, produced with and sustained through market economy logics where every commodity is inseparable from processes of mass production, reproducing the ideology of the system that produced them. To engage solely with this view is to emphasise the forces of domination that reduce individuals into populations positioned as dupes. On the other hand, ideas from Michel Foucault (1984), Jacques Derrida (2005) and Roland Barthes (1977) established the internal contradictions of texts. They showed how all cultural products entail semiotic richness and polysemy. This complexity is evident in Fiske’s (1989) analysis of jeans and their multiplicity of meanings. Fiske shows how fashion cannot have a single defining meaning. Associations between jeans and country American life might be constructed through advertising billboards that cover the country. At the same time, individuals reject these messages, ripping and marking their jeans in acts of resistance. From this perspective, digital games, like jeans, are “a resource bank for potential meanings” (p. 5).

Educational research that breaks from anti-populist sentiment has demonstrated the danger of making assumptions about the meanings young people will make from their popular culture practices. For example, Buckingham and Sefton-Green’s (1994)Cultural Studies Goes to School and Morrell’s (2004)Linking Literacy and Popular Culture demonstrate how engagement with popular culture in school contexts is not a threat to academic achievement. To the contrary, building strong connections between the two challenges narrow ideas about the “right” kinds of cultural texts. It also correlates with research suggesting that young people are not passive recipients of the messages in games. Rather, they negotiate their subjectivities with and through digital game play and design (e.g. Lewis Ellison, 2014; Lewis Ellison, 2017). This research addresses the importance of developing with children and adolescents a critical awareness of the social, political and economic messages emanating from different forms of popular media.

Questions of culture have been central to scholarship investigating literacies, digital games and learning. Beavis’ (1997) early work exploring digital games in school contexts argues for narrowing the gap between youth culture and schooling. Burn’s (2003) research into popular culture in the media classroom demonstrates the connections between digital and non-digital texts, but also the educative value of supporting students to analyse such connections. Likewise, Altura and Curwood (2015) posit that since games are cultural products, the challenge for educators is to help students use them “effectively” and “appropriately” to encourage learning . While others have explored how digital games can be analysed with students as a medium in their own right, arguing that the frivolity that often accompanies gameplay does not negate the importance of understanding how they work (Bacalja, 2018a; McDougall, 2007; Aguilera, 2022; Abrams and Lammers, 2017; Jolley, 2008).

Rather than accepting the more contentious aspects of digital game representations as reason enough to exclude these cultural forms from classroom study, the history of post-structurally informed critical cultural analysis suggests that schools and educators are already well-positioned to engage in the co-construction of meanings with students through CDGL practices.

I have argued thus far that theorising CDGLs education from the perspectives of educational studies, postdigital studies, literacy studies and cultural studies produces conceptual frameworks. These frameworks have the capacity to anchor a relationship between digital games and literacy and English learning. Across these perspectives, a shared commitment emerges: the recognition that critical digital game literacies cannot be reduced to instrumental or technical competencies. They must instead be understood as complex, socially situated and ideologically laden practices. Educational studies insist that questions about why we teach with games must precede questions about how; postdigital studies demands attention to the entangled ecologies in which games operate, resisting technological determinism; literacy studies grounds CDGLs within longer genealogies of meaning-making across modes and media; and cultural studies refuses essentialist readings of games as inherently good or bad, instead foregrounding the productive instability of meaning and young people’s active negotiation of cultural texts.

Yet these perspectives also generate productive tensions that enrich rather than diminish theorisations of CDGLs. Educational studies’ emphasis on normative questions about schooling’s purposes can sit uneasily with postdigital studies’ resistance to prescriptive framings, creating generative friction around what should constitute critical practice. Literacy studies’ focus on multimodal textual analysis, whilst complementary to cultural studies’ attention to representation and ideology, may privilege semiotic decoding over the embodied, affective and social dimensions of play that postdigital and cultural studies scholars emphasise. Furthermore, whilst literacy studies and cultural studies share genealogies rooted in critical traditions, their disciplinary inheritances diverge: literacy studies emerges from pedagogical concerns about skill development and social equity, whereas cultural studies interrogates the production and consumption of culture more broadly, sometimes at the expense of explicit educational outcomes. These divergences, between prescription and description, between textual analysis and lived experience, between pedagogical instrumentality and cultural critique, are not obstacles to overcome but rather productive multiplicities that prevent CDGLs from being reduced into a singular, reductive framework. Instead, they invite educators and scholars to hold multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives in productive tension, recognising that critical digital game literacies are best theorised and enacted through the simultaneous engagement with questions about education’s purposes, technological entanglement, multimodal meaning-making and the ideological work of cultural texts.

The aim thus far has been to demonstrate how literacy education which is responsive to contemporary youth digital culture must include an approach to digital games that does more than celebrate claimed affordances or lament possible harms. Here, I want to engage more precisely with what such a theorisation of CDGLs enables for English and literacy curriculum, pedagogy and research. Through this engagement, I explore the kinds of criticality that might emerge through such an education.

CDGLs education seeks to escape economic and instrumentalist frames and allow English and literacy educators to rethink how curriculum design is used to attend to the relationship we want to have with educational technologies broadly, and digital games specifically. Rather than digital game literacies as practices oriented towards existing curriculum designs, such as improving learning and academic performance, flipping the script asks how curriculum design might serve the goal of centring digital game literacies for critical attention. This approach responds to Biesta’s (2010) call to consider how education as a force of subjectification might enable individuals to be and do something beyond existing orders. It also invites us to consider questions of desirable educational outcomes.

What constitutes desirable English and literacy educational outcomes has been narrowing for some time as a result of economic imperatives driven by neoliberal forces (Holloway and Brass, 2018; Bacalja et al., 2026a, 2026b). Approaching the question of designing curriculum for desirable CDGLs might be led by a technoskepticism stance towards technology in schools (Pleasants et al., 2023). This stance draws on technical, psychosocial and political dimensions of digital games and digital game cultures to offer frames for thinking critically and making informed decisions about digital game use inside and outside of schools. Questions for those tasked with translating such goals into local curriculum creation remain. What would it mean to design English and literacy curricula that centre critical digital game literacies as ends in themselves? How might assessment practices for critical digital game literacies move beyond measuring comprehension or skill acquisition to evaluate students’ capacity for critical, technoskeptical engagement? Should critical digital game literacies be developed across the curriculum, or should they remain a distinct focus within English and literacy education?

Despite this paper’s emphasis on theory, it is essential that we move to consider practice and provide educators concrete examples of what exactly constitutes the “critical” in CDGLs, and how we get there. This is no easy task. At the very least, the emergence of critical orientations to digital game literacies prompts educators to consider practices that do more than develop functional skills. Aguilera and de Roock’s (2024) review of the critical turn in digital literacy studies suggest the emergence of at least four strands of critical practice, namely, revealing, interrogating, disrupting and transforming. When applied to interventions centring digital games, these might look like: revealing how game designers deploy algorithms and procedural logic to produce interaction, interrogating game representations to challenge normative perspectives, disrupting the gambling logics built into many popular games and transforming gameplay opportunities through digital and analogue game redesign. But these are starting points for teaching, rather than end goals. Teachers should remain open to interventions where the outcomes are not pre-determined.

While making digital technology an object of inquiry is a good starting point (Postman, 2011), educators should be cautious of adopting unproblematic positions that seek to leverage critical pedagogies for the purpose of demystifying digital games for students. I am reminded of Buckingham’s (1996) critique of the limitations of critical pedagogy, specifically the belief that such an approach to teaching and learning will emancipate learners from their own delusions. Shifting authority for meaning-making from game designers to teachers to determine supposedly correct readings is not a viable solution. Educators must resist the temptation to adopt teaching positions which assume a single critical reading of a digital game is possible. This will be challenging given that, as Burnett and Merchant (2021) remind us, the goal of literacy education has too often been to support students to possess and reproduce such correct readings.

A pedagogy that aims to raise new subjective positions towards digital games will benefit from considering meaning as always in process (Derrida, 1978) and meaning-making as a site of struggle. Providing learners with many opportunities to engage critically with digital games and recognising the knowledge and experience they bring with them to their critical meaning-making raise many questions about the how and what of CDGLs education. These questions include: How can educators support students to problematise and reimagine digital games and gaming cultures, and what forms might such critical activity take in classroom contexts? How can educators foster critical digital game literacies without assuming a position of authority that privileges their own readings over students’ interpretations? What alternative approaches to conceptualising and enacting critical digital game literacies might emerge if we resist the impulse to define them too precisely?

One aspect of research on digital game literacies which has received extensive criticism is the overemphasis on game design and interaction at the expense of attending to the complexity that surrounds the deployment of digital games in school contexts (Koutsogiannis and Adampa, 2022; Bacalja et al., 2026a, 2026b). As deHaan (2021) demonstrated in his review of classroom-based studies of game-based learning, reports on interventions tend to offer little detail on the role of teacher instruction or guidance surrounding game use. Critical scholarship is needed which investigates the claims that accompany digital grand narratives (Knox, 2019) and to hold to account the hyperbole that has accompanied much educational technology research (Jandrić et al., 2019), including that focussed on digital games and schooling (Robinson et al., 2026).

One way to answer questions about the kinds of criticality scholars might investigate is to adopt a postdigital sensibility towards understanding contemporary gaming practices in education. This will require focussing attention on all of the ecology within which game literacies interact. Shifting attention away from sweeping, decontextualised claims about the effects of digital games and towards the specific, co-constitutive ecologies in which game-based meaning-making actually occurs will go some way to unravelling the specificity of critical practices. Attending to the specific dynamics of empirical occasions where CDGLs are the objects of focus is consistent with postdigital literacies research (see Bhatt, 2023) which concentrates on local configurations of phenomena. From a postdigital gaming perspective, classrooms, curricula, assessment regimes, material artefacts (controllers, screens, workbooks), platform affordances, peer interaction and prior out-of-school textual experiences all intra-act (Barad, 2007) to produce highly specific configurations of digital game literacies, critical and otherwise. A sensibility to all parts of the ecology within which researchers might explore CDGLs raises a number of questions, including in what ways are critical digital game literacies entangled with broader socio-material, political-economic and cultural contexts, and how might researchers attend to these entanglements? What methodological approaches would enable researchers to trace the relationships constituting critical digital game literacies, rather than isolating variables or elements? How can researchers resist universalising claims about critical digital game literacies and instead attend to the highly specific, contingent configurations through which they emerge in particular contexts?

Rather than subscribing to techno-deterministic positions, or alarmist rhetoric about potential dangers, it is important to accept that digital games are, and for the foreseeable future will remain, ubiquitous technologies through which young people learn, inside and outside of schools. How educators theorise their educative potentiality impacts the narrative that emerge about their place in English and literacy education. Positioning CDGLs as a central plank in the literacy project of schooling reflects a responsiveness to youth people’s cultural worlds. It also reflects a recognition that digital technology proliferation requires critical attention.

The ideas we need to advance English and literacy education in response to the rapidly evolving digital landscape have been with us for some time. This paper brings these ideas to the fore so as to contribute to the evolution of the concept of critical digital game literacies. It also encourages conversations about the kinds of knowledge and experiences we want young people to have with and through these technologies.