The Promise of Digital Games

Local governments need to devote considerable money, time, and attention to civic ties for traditional public engagement practices (Lowndes et al. 2001). However, conventional public meetings, or any other institutionalization of public engagement, are limited in the extent to which they can serve as a learning venue where the public can deepen their understanding of a policy issue (Evans-Cowley and Hollander 2010). Mostly, people attend these events to express their views and hear the views of others. As a result, much attention is now being given to engaging the public online, as digital engagement requires less money and time when compared to traditional face-to-face events (Best and Krueger 2005). In addition, promises of online forms of public engagement's ability to “elevat[e] the public discourse in an unprecedented manner while providing an interactive, networked environment for decision-making” abound (Evans-Cowley and Hollander 2010, 397).

In parallel, the education field has turned to various forms of engaging and educating people online. Digital games are hugely popular. In the United States, 63 percent of households has at least one person who plays video games regularly, or 3 hours or more per week (ESA 2017). Digital learning games are defined as “an entertainment medium designed to bring about cognitive changes in its players” (Erhel and Jamet 2013, 156), characterized by having both elements of serious learning and interactive entertainment (Erhel and Jamet 2013; Prensky 2003). The presence of rules and constraints, dynamic responses to players’ actions, appropriate challenges inducing perceived self-efficacy, and gradual increases in difficulty have been found to contribute to digital game-based learning (Mayer and Johnson 2010).

Whether digital games can and do actually facilitate deep learning is under debate (Graesser et al. 2009). According to Graesser et al., digital games have innate constraints that “make it extremely difficult to integrate deep content, strategies, and skills” (2009, 12). Scholars have called for more empirical analyses that examine the efficacy of digital games in catalyzing motivation and learning outcomes (Connolly et al. 2012; Gee 2003; Prensky 2003; Shaffer 2006). While digital games’ efficacy in motivating players is less contested, how much digital games contribute to players’ learning, especially in comparison with more conventional teaching methods, has yet to be resolved (Erhel and Jamet 2013).