{"id":200,"date":"2026-05-24T18:29:41","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T18:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/othelloagame\/?p=200"},"modified":"2026-05-25T19:08:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T19:08:16","slug":"reimagining-shakespeare-pedagogy-through-video-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/othelloagame\/2026\/05\/24\/reimagining-shakespeare-pedagogy-through-video-games\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0Reimagining Shakespeare Pedagogy through Video Games"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Prepared for delivery at the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), Spring 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For centuries, the cultural and economic prominence and unique interactive affordances of games have encouraged educators to imagine \u201cgameful\u201d teaching in which students engage learning material more actively (Bloom, Gaming the Stage <\/em>66\u201368, Sheldon 27\u201346). Shakespeare education has not remained untouched by this trend. In an era in which games increasingly mediate students\u2019 encounters with reality (Walz et al. 19\u201322; Wark 22), instructors are increasingly turning to games as tools for fostering \u201cactive,\u201d agential engagement with Shakespeare\u2019s plays (Kaethler 44). Given the increasing appearance of games in Shakespeare classrooms, it seems timely to ask: Where does this interest in using play in education generally come from? And what can games do for Shakespeare education<\/em> that it cannot do for itself? To answer this second question, we must also address what constitutes effective Shakespeare education in the twenty-first century and why games are particularly suited to facilitate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, Laura Estill argued that \u201cdigital humanities has a Shakespeare problem,\u201d contending that Shakespeare\u2019s canonical centrality has disproportionately structured early modern digital and archival initiatives (1). Shakespeare\u2019s canonical dominance has proven similarly problematic within educational contexts, to the extent that Shakespeare pedagogy itself may be said to have a Shakespeare problem, one that increasingly constrains teachers\u2019 and students\u2019 ability to approach his plays freely and creatively. Inside the classroom, this problem stems not only from the historical, cultural, and political forces that have secured Shakespeare\u2019s place in the English literary canon, but also from the fact that Shakespeare education does not exist in a vacuum. It functions within institutional systems and faces the same pressures and constraints that shape higher education today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Media scholar Ian Bogost argues that contemporary academic institutions, pressured by the assumption that their primary duty is to prepare students for the job market, function less as sites of intellectual emancipation than as mechanisms for producing compliant workers. Work, he observes, has become the telos of education, the intended outcome for those who have been \u201cproperly schooled.\u201d (Bogost 275).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The normalization of such a view of higher education has dire repercussions. In Teaching to Transgress<\/em>, bell hooks argues that modern education is facing a crisis: \u201cstudents often do not want to learn, and teachers do not want to teach\u201d (12). According to hooks, one reason behind this issue is that today\u2019s institutions view \u201cexcitement\u201d in teaching as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of \u201cseriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process.\u201d Such contempt for excitement is systemic and, in fact, necessary to secure the institution\u2019s role as a factory for producing disciplined workers within the capitalist economy. Hooks contends that genuine excitement cannot arise without acknowledging that \u201cthere could never be an absolute set agenda governing teaching practices\u201d (7). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But why is excitement so integral to emancipatory learning? According to the French philosopher of education Jacques Ranci\u00e8re, modern institutions operate on a \u201cpedagogical myth\u201d that divides human intelligence into two types, positing a superior intelligence on the part of the \u201cschoolmaster\u201d and an inferior one on the part of the student (7). This presupposed inferiority often renders the student\u2019s independent engagement with primary texts meaningless. By virtue of their presumed superiority, the \u201cschoolmaster\u201d becomes an indispensable component of what Ranci\u00e8re terms the \u201cexplicative order,\u201d in which \u201cthe words of the master must shatter the silence of the taught material.\u201d Ranci\u00e8re uses the term \u201cenforced stultification\u201d to describe this structure: a system in which the master assumes intellectual superiority and sustains an \u201cimagined\u201d distance between their intelligence and that of the pupil. Therefore, the student comes to the classroom already stultified, thinking of the teacher as the guardian of certain truths lying behind old texts. In other words, the real problem is how we view knowledge rather than how we disseminate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read together, these arguments bring the structural problem of contemporary educational institutions into sharper focus. Schools are increasingly compelled to promise preparation for the labor market. To deliver such preparation \u201cefficiently\u201d and at scale, institutions adopt fixed agendas that often come at the expense of collective knowledge production and student excitement. This erosion of excitement perpetuates a regime of enforced stultification that secures the teacher\u2019s position as a master explicator. In today\u2019s Shakespeare classroom, this process is reflected through what Liam Semler terms the \u201cSysEd,\u201d the \u201cover-systematisation of formal education\u201d that characterizes professional teaching and learning in the twenty-first century (\u201cProsperous Teaching\u201d 1), which has brought about the proliferation of tools such as No Fear Shakespeare<\/em> and the gradual disappearance of educational methods focusing on slow and close reading. It is in the face of such problems that welcoming games and play in the classroom proves important. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Play, as a voluntary, disinterested, and unproductive activity (and I should quickly acknowledge that this is a very Western conception of play rooted deep in the works of Kant and Schiller), has been historically conceived as a safeguard, protecting the human mind and culture against the mechanization of social and educational practices. With the establishment of Game Studies as an academic discipline and the rise of concepts such as \u201cgamification\u201d<\/em> and \u201cserious games\u201d<\/em> in the past decades, teachers have increasingly turned to games and play to counter the \u201cover-systematization of formal education\u201d (Semler, \u201cProsperous Teaching\u201d 1).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A survey of Shakespeare education\u2019s engagement with games and play in contemporary English classrooms reveals two dominant approaches: gamified Shakespeare curricula and Shakespeare-game-infused classrooms. The first trend seeks to gamify<\/em> Shakespeare by integrating discrete game mechanics\u2014points, competition, and rule-based structures\u2014into otherwise conventional curricular frameworks. The second approach turns not to gamification but to Shakespeare-themed video games, tabletop games, and card games, which are typically employed either to facilitate close textual analysis or to cultivate theatrical skills, including directing, acting, and spectating (Roberts-Smith et al.,  \u201cShakespeare, Game, and Play\u201d 276).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2016, Liam Semler coined the term \u201cSysEd\u201d to describe \u201cthe state, processes and truths of modern, professionalised education which positions educators and students in an interlocking network of systems that deliver standardisation, measurement and compliance.\u201d According to Semler, the \u201cSysEd\u201d names \u201cthe educational sector\u2019s actualisation of larger neoliberal impulses that promote economies of competitive productivity and responsibilisation\u201d (\u201cProsperous Teaching\u201d 3). The operation of the SysEd inevitably creates what Semler terms \u201cardenspace,\u201d a concept he introduced in 2013 through a pedagogical reading of court and exile in Shakespeare\u2019s As You Like It<\/em>. For Semler, \u201cardenspace\u201d designates temporary spaces of experimental teaching and learning established outside the constraints of the SysEd (i.e. the court), spaces intended to afford educators and students more fertile educational experiences (Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe<\/em> 54\u201355). In other words, \u201cardenspaces\u201d function as pedagogical sanctuaries beyond the rigid, exam-driven structures of the institution, inviting students to exercise creativity and critical thought in less constrained, more exploratory ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Semler, gamifying the Shakespeare classroom can effectively accelerate the production of the \u201cardenspace\u201d by diminishing the aura of seriousness that surrounds both Shakespeare as a cultural icon and modern academia as a system oriented toward the reproduction of predictable outcomes in service of the neoliberal economy. To substantiate this claim, Semler points to \u201cShakeserendipity,\u201d a project developed by the Better Strangers team in 2015. The project engages players with Shakespeare-related resources through the use of playing cards, creating ardenspaces by privileging serendipitous discovery over \u201cintended learning outcomes\u201d (Semler, \u201cProsperous Teaching\u201d 4). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the passionate promises of gamified practices, we must reckon with the limitations of gamification: a term rooted in behavioral economics and originally developed to deploy game elements in the service of productivity and profit maximization. Modern game scholars argue that the proponents of gamification predominantly subscribe to \u201cthe liminal use of games and play as a conservative perfection of means toward the given goals of the existing social order\u201d (Walz et al. 9). As such, they argue that gamification often reproduces hierarchy under the guise of experiences that are framed as fun, interactive, and productive of extrinsic rewards (Jagoda 143). Rooted in economic rationality, gamification thus risks reinstating the very consumerist neoliberal logics that Semler\u2019s \u201cardenspace\u201d aims to resist. Furthermore, gamification is frequently deployed in educational contexts to \u201cmake typically boring tasks fun by transforming labor into an action-oriented and interactive game\u201d (Jagoda 120). Viewed in this way, gamifying the Shakespeare classroom risks implying that Shakespeare and (its) learning are in essence \u201cboring\u201d or \u201cburdensome,\u201d necessitating the use of gamification techniques to entice students into engaging with the plays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But gamification is not the only way play has found its way into the Shakespeare classroom. The field of Shakespeare video games has witnessed an explosion in the past two decades (Bloom \u201cVideo Game Shakespeare\u201d 114; Way 256). Shakespeare games are gradually finding their way into the Shakespeare classroom. In \u201cVideo Game Shakespeare,\u201d Gina Bloom sorts these games broadly under the two categories of \u201cdrama-making games,\u201d which enable their players to control a Shakespearean character to change the outcome in a dramatic plot, and \u201ctheater-making games,\u201d which turn the students into directors or actors of Shakespearean plays to give them a sense of \u201cwhat it is like to put on a play, in all its diverse facets\u201d (115).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arguing that drama-making games often fail to enskill their players in the \u201cexperience of theater\u201d (Bloom,\u201cVideo Game Shakespeare\u201d 115), Bloom\u2019s vision of a successful pedagogical Shakespeare video game is that of a motion-capture \u201ctheater-making\u201d game, Play the Knave <\/em>(ModLab, 2020), which uses Microsoft Kinect to map players\u2019 movements onto avatars while displaying Shakespeare\u2019s lines in karaoke format (Bloom et al., \u201cVideo Game Shakespeare\u201d 119\u201323). In their emphasis on embodied textual analysis, performance-based games such as Play the Knave<\/em> resemble performance-centric pedagogical theories that became popular in the mid-twentieth century with the works of scholars such as Rex Gibson, the writer of The Cambridge School Shakespeare <\/em>series, who insisted activities in the Shakespeare classroom must embrace the \u201cexperimental ethos of the theatrical rehearsal room\u201d (qtd. in Stevens 43). As children of such performance-based teaching theories, performative video games such as Play the Knave <\/em>can be emancipatory insofar as they increase student agency in exploring Shakespeare\u2019s plays through embodied practices and reduce the role of the teacher in the Shakespeare classroom to a \u201ccatalyst\u201d who guides student learning without directly interpreting or \u201cexplicating\u201d the plays for the students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless of the prevalent optimism toward the effectiveness of embodied teaching, performative games such as Play the Knave<\/em> have yet to be critically studied for their limitations. For example, while Bloom and Bates claim that Play the Knave<\/em> can effectively build a safe space in the classroom where students can engage with painful topics in Shakespeare\u2019s plays from a distance, the game\u2019s focus on performativity might just as easily prove problematic, as students might not always feel safe performing before an audience. In Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters<\/em>, Emma Whipday notices that \u201cthe most significant barrier to incorporating embodied activities in the classroom can be student discomfort, particularly among students who, in choosing a literature module, did not expect to learn through their bodies\u201d (8). Scholars such as Carol Atherton and Katherine Hennessey have similarly noted the stress associated with in-class Shakespeare performance and criticism, particularly for non-English-speaking students (109\u201319; 172\u201380).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Future studies on performance-based video games must also acknowledge the facts that the required equipment for running games such as Play the Knave<\/em> is costly, environmentally unsustainable, and increasingly obsolete with the decline of motion-capture technology. Engagement with such games also often remains confined to the classroom, and the format usually excludes students with disabilities or mobility limitations. Finally, the proponents of performance-based games are yet to make a strong case for what their games bring to the table that traditional performance-based teaching methods don\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While contemporary Shakespeare scholars are writing passionately about the possible ways in which games and gamefulness can offer new ways of approaching Shakespeare in the classroom, little attention has been paid to how the unique affordances of video games as the most prominent media format in the twenty-first century can enable a learning model that reduces student dependency on the educator and empowers them to explore Shakespeare\u2019s plays on their own terms. I believe that the problem stems from the fact that discussions of game design and gameful curriculum design can never precede the question of why we need games and gamification practices to teach Shakespeare in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning and Literacy<\/em>, linguist James Paul Gee argues that the study of \u201cgood video games,\u201d which he defines as games that embody strong principles of learning and cognition, can effectively \u201cilluminate ways in which learning works when it works best for human beings.\u201d For Gee, good game designers are \u201cpractical theoreticians of learning,\u201d since what makes games \u201cdeep\u201d is that players exercise their \u201clearning muscles,\u201d often without paying overt attention to the matter (Good Video Games<\/em> 21).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, Gee argues that \u201cthe purpose of games as learning \u2026 should be to make every learner a proactive, collaborative, reflective, critical, creative, and innovative problem solver.\u201d In solving problems, Gee believes that video game players constantly build patterns of associations between what they know and what they aim to learn. This process is also key to Jacques Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s theory of universal teaching (Ranci\u00e8re 20). In Shakespeare Studies, Edward Rocklin echoes this logic, arguing that we must teach the students \u201cto read as talented interpreters of Shakespeare do,\u201d guiding them to ask: \u201cwhat does X do? (and to what purpose), where X is \u2018any element of a Shakespearean play from the title to the actions\u2019\u201d (52). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gee also argues that \u201call learning in all semiotic domains requires identity work\u201d (What Video Games Have to Teach Us<\/em> 77\u201378). This \u201cidentity work,\u201d entails \u201ctaking on a new identity and forming bridges from one\u2019s old identities to the new one.\u201d For example, \u201ca child in a science classroom engaged in real inquiry, and not passive learning, must be willing to take on an identity as a certain type of scientific thinker, problem solver, and doer.\u201d The child must also see and make connections between this new identity and other identities that they have already formed (What Video Games Have <\/em>51). Similarly, a student in a Shakespeare classroom must be willing to take on new identities as a theater director, a choreographer, an actor, and even a literary critic, all the while making connections between these new identities and the identities the student has already formed and brings with them to the classroom. Video games are ideal venues for such identity work, as the player is constantly encouraged to navigate between their own identity, the identity of the video game character, and the \u201cprojective identity\u201d produced by the synthesis between the first two (What Video Games Have to Teach Us<\/em> 55).4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, Gee argues that a good video game operates within the learner\u2019s \u201cregime of competence,\u201d something that rarely happens in today\u2019s institutions. In other words, a good video game \u201coften operates within, but at the outer edge of, the learner\u2019s resources, so that at many points the game is felt as challenging but not \u2018undoable\u2019\u201d (Good Video Games <\/em>70). In Shakespeare education, Malcolm Hebron emphasizes supporting students in operating at \u201cthe edge of their regime of competence.\u201d Drawing on poet and critic Don Paterson, Hebron distinguishes between two types of reading. In \u201cprimary reading,\u201d students read a poem, feel something, but do not \u201ccomb through\u201d it from the beginning to the end. Unlike primary reading, secondary reading is \u201cthe construction of a second text based on the first,\u201d which Hebron views as \u201can exercise of critical analysis.\u201d For Hebron, the reason why Shakespeare\u2019s works are difficult for young readers is that \u201cthey are forced to start at the second level\u201d (101\u20132). Slow games, games that cannot be played at the high speed normally expected by players (Ensslin 184), are particularly useful in helping their players operate at the edge of their regime of competence.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, games are great tools to enable emancipatory Shakespeare education by eliminating the distance between the student and the primary text they are aiming to explore. They turn learners into active problem solvers; they allow students to explore different identities and make connections between them; and they facilitate expanding students\u2019 regime of competence. Nevertheless, all of these affordances are overlooked by gamification models and performance-centric game designs. Rather than forcing video games to conform to consumerist or old pedagogical and aesthetic models, educators and designers must trust the capacities of the medium itself and continue developing games that work through, rather than against, its formal strengths. Such an approach is especially important today, as video games constitute a medium with which contemporary and future students possess an increasing degree of familiarity, fluency, and cultural investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Atherton, Carol. \u201cTeaching Shakespeare and Social Media: How Many Facebook Friends Had Lady Macbeth?\u201d Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy<\/em>, edited by Pamela Bickley and Jenny Stevens, 1st ed., vol. 1, Routledge, 2023, pp. 109\u201319, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.4324\/9781003188704-16.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloom, Gina. Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater<\/em>. University of Michigan Press, 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloom, Gina. \u201cVideogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games.\u201d Shakespeare Studies<\/em>, vol. 43, 2015, pp. 114\u201319.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames<\/em>. 1st ed. MIT Press, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ensslin, Astrid. Literary Gaming<\/em>. 1st ed. The MIT Press, 2014, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.7551\/mitpress\/9450.001.0001<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Estill, Laura. \u201cDigital Humanities\u2019 Shakespeare Problem.\u201d Humanities<\/em>, vol. 8, no. 1, Mar. 2019, p. 45, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/h8010045<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gee, James Paul. Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning and Literacy<\/em>. 2nd ed. Peter Lang, 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy<\/em>. 1st ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hennessey, Katherine. \u201cShakespeare, University Education, and Anti-Racism in Kuwait: A Drop of Water in the Breaking Gulf.\u201d Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy<\/em>, edited by Pamela Bickley and Jenny Stevens, 1st ed., vol. 1, Routledge, 2023, pp. 172\u201380, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.4324\/9781003188704-23.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom<\/em>. Routledge, 1994.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jagoda, Patrick. \u201cGamification and Other Forms of Play.\u201d Boundary<\/em>, vol. 40, no. 2, 2013, pp. 113\u201344, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1215\/01903659-2151821.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kaethler, Mark. \u201cAll the Game Is a Stage: The Controller and Interface in Shakespearean Videogames.\u201d The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface<\/em>, edited by Paul Budra and Clifford Werier, 1st ed. Routledge, 2023, pp. 44\u201357, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.4324\/9780367821722-5<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ranci\u00e8re, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation<\/em>. Stanford University Press, 1991.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roberts-Smith, Jennifer, and Shawn DeSouza-Coelho \u201cShakespeare, Game, and Play in Digital Pedagogical Shakespeare Games.\u201d Games and Theatre in Shakespeare\u2019s England<\/em>, edited by Gina Bloom et al., Routledge, 2021, pp. 275\u2013302, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1515\/9789048553525-014<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rocklin, Edward L. \u201cPerformance Is More Than an Approach to Shakespeare.\u201d Teaching Shakespeare through Performance<\/em>, edited by Milla Cozart Riggio, Modern Language Association of America, 1999. pp. 48\u201362.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Semler, Liam E. Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System<\/em>. 1st ed., Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.5040\/9781472538956<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014. \u201cProsperous Teaching and the Thing of Darkness: Raising a Tempest in the Classroom.\u201d Cogent Arts & Humanities<\/em>, vol. 3, no. 1, 2016, p. 1235862, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/23311983.2016.1235862<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sheldon, Lee. The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game<\/em>. 2nd ed. CRC Press, 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stevens, Jenny. \u201cLifting Shakespeare Off the Page in Twentieth-Century Classrooms.\u201d Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy<\/em>, edited by Pamela Bickley and Jenny Stevens, 1st ed., vol. 1, Routledge, 2023, pp. 41\u201349, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.4324\/9781003188704-7<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walz, Steffen P., and Sebastian Deterding. The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications<\/em>. The MIT Press, 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory<\/em>. Harvard University Press, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whipday, Emma. Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters<\/em>. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press, 2023, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1017\/9781108975650.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prepared for delivery at the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), Spring 2026 For centuries, the cultural and economic prominence and unique interactive affordances of games have encouraged educators to imagine \u201cgameful\u201d teaching in which students engage learning material more actively (Bloom, Gaming the Stage 66\u201368, Sheldon 27\u201346). Shakespeare education has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n\u00a0Reimagining Shakespeare Pedagogy through Video Games - Othelloagame<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/othelloagame\/2026\/05\/24\/reimagining-shakespeare-pedagogy-through-video-games\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u00a0Reimagining Shakespeare Pedagogy through Video Games - Othelloagame\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Prepared for delivery at the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), Spring 2026 For centuries, the cultural and economic prominence and unique interactive affordances of games have encouraged educators to imagine \u201cgameful\u201d teaching in which students engage learning material more actively (Bloom, Gaming the Stage 66\u201368, Sheldon 27\u201346). 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