by Jeff Brunner
In July 2024, I had the great privilege of attending the Play Make Learn Annual Conference at the Memorial Union in Madison. I’d been aware of the conference for several years, but for a variety of reasons I’d never attended. After going this year, I hope I never miss it again.
I’ve always played games. Really, some of my earliest memories include playing board games with my parents and at daycare. I know for a fact that I learned to play Candy Land while sitting on the floor of a babysitter’s house. This couldn’t have been any later than 1986. And I have a vivid memory of my mother playing Hi Ho! Cherry-O and Don’t Spill the Beans with me even earlier than that. I can’t think of a Christmas or birthday as a child that didn’t include a game as a present. In fact, while I type this, my copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia (inscribed to me by my parents for my 14th birthday) is within arms reach. I’ve been carrying that book around with me for thirty years.
So, yes, I’ve been playing games my whole life. They’re very important to me. Anyone who knows me, knows this. What they might not know, and what I’ve only recently come to understand, is just how important games have been to my education – how much they’ve shaped how I think and how I see the world. For someone who’s spent so much time playing games, I’ve really only just started thinking about games, at least in this way. The Play Make Learn Conference had a huge impact on that.
At the conference, I met and listened to dozens of professionals who are developing new ways to leverage the power of games, making, and other forms of creativity into thoughtful and effective educational methods.
Field Day is a research lab at UW-Madison and is on the cutting edge of developing video games that are deeply engaging, visually stunning, and incredibly effective at teaching. Filament Games (also in Wisconsin) is a developer for hire that has worked on over 400 projects, helping teach topics ranging from information literacy to plant growth to best practices in cattle ranching.
At the conference, I heard thought-provoking keynote presentations by Aaron Trammell (on white privilege and hegemonic masculinity in early gamer culture) and Dr. Rilla Khaled (on speculative play as a means of addressing complex social questions). I saw a session by Zach Barth about how a year of teaching middle school influenced his game design.
The conference also hosted a group discussion with the winners of the 2024 GEE! Learning Game Award. It was fascinating to listen to so many different developers of games (both electronic and analog) talk about their different approaches to the shared goal of using games as a means to teach and enlighten. As a side note, WiLS vendor partner GamestormEDU was also up for a GEE! Award for their card game Doomscroll.
Like at any conference, there were far more sessions that I wanted to attend than I was able to. And that’s just the sessions about games. The conference has just as much amazing content about making, crafting, and art, which are also growing areas of pedagogical development. There were sessions about incorporating making into STEM and history teaching, using it as an approach to supporting DEI and Social and Emotional Learning, and much more.
So when I look back at my life through the lens of games as an educational vector, they’re everywhere. I learned social skills like taking turns and fair play from Candy Land. I learned to count from Hi Ho! Cherry-O and practiced manual dexterity while playing Don’t Spill the Beans. I learned a ton of math and probability from a lifetime of D&D. That game also taught me a lot about storytelling, narrative structure, and team work. I learned about negotiation and compromise from Diplomacy. I learned about strategic thinking and long-term planning from Risk, Settlers of Catan, and RoboRally. I learned about collaboration and cooperation from games like The Lord of the Rings and Pandemic. And almost none of that took place in the classroom or in the library. It was all informal learning from games that were not even designed as teaching tools.
One notable exception for me was as an undergraduate at UW-Green Bay, I was lucky enough to take several classes with Gregory Aldrete who used games and other outside-of-the-box techniques to teach about the classical world.
I know, of course, that the idea of a game as a teaching tool isn’t actually new. But, I’m excited to see the level of research and development energy being put towards it. This work is happening all over the place, but I’m particularly thrilled about this IMLS grant awarded to Wisconsin’s DPI and Washington State Library for research into games-based library services. I’m even more thrilled to say that WiLS will be helping to manage the project, and I’m lucky enough to be on that team.
It’s an exciting time to be a gamer geek! Play Make Learn, and the broader world of games education scholarship that it has exposed me to, have made me appreciate this lifelong hobby in an entirely new way. I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.