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Abstract: Interactive immersive entertainment, or videogame playing, has emerged as a major entertainment and educational medium. As research and development initiatives proliferate, educational researchers might benefit by developing more grounded theories about them. This article argues for framing game play as a designed experience. Players' understandings are developed through cycles of performance within the gameworlds, which instantiate particular theories of the world (ideological worlds). Players develop new identities both through game play and through the gaming communities in which these identities are enacted. Thus research that examines game-based learning needs to account for both kinds of interactions within the game-world and in broader social contexts. Examples from curriculum developed for Civilization III and Supercharged! show how games can communicate powerful ideas and open new identity trajectories for learners.

Four approaches to playing MUDs are identified and described. These approaches may arise from the inter-relationship of two dimensions of playing style: action versus interaction, and world-oriented versus player-oriented. An account of the dynamics of player populations is given in terms of these dimensions, with particular attention to how to promote balance or equilibrium.

Guest post By Marianne Malmstrom: insight regarding students experiences using minecraft in education.

Jane McGonigal spoke about games and education at EDUCAUSE 2013 in Anaheim, Calif., and gave a famous Ted Talk three years ago. Ted Talk 2010 video ANAHEIM, Calif. - Video games may sound more recreational than educational, but experts believe that games will play a greater role in student engagement in years to come.