This chapter reviews research on how video games have been used in schools and other learning environments and how they impact learning outcomes. This chapter reviews four functions of video games in learning. Games as content teach specific disciplinary knowledge, for example in history, math, second language learning, physics, and medicine. Games as bait leverage the engaging aspects of video games to attract students to the game even when it is not obviously about learning. Games as assessment use the “leveling up” feature of games, where players advance to the next level as their skills increase, as a way to assess the player’s developing knowledge. Games as architectures for engagement are studied by examining how and why people play games and how they can be designed to best foster learning by fostering involvement, immersion, and investment – often using narrative structures. There is evidence that when games are designed on learning sciences principles, they contribute to deeper learning.

Imagine an entire 3D world online, complete with forests, cities, and seas. Now imagine it populated with others from across the globe who gather in virtual inns and taverns gossiping about the most popular guild or comparing notes on the best hunting spots. Imagine yourself in a heated battle for the local castle, live opponents from all over collaborating or competing with you. Imagine a place where you can be the brave hero, the kingdom rogue, or the village sage, developing a reputation for yourself that is known from Peoria to Peking. Now imagine that you could come home from school or work, drop your book bag on the ground, log in, and enter that world any day, anytime, anywhere. Welcome to the world of massively multiplayer online gaming.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) are highly graphic 2D or 3D video games played online, allowing individuals, through their self-created digital characters, or avatars, to interact not only with the gaming software (the designed environment of the game and the computer-controlled characters within it) but also with other players’ avatars. These virtual worlds are persistent social and material worlds loosely structured by open-ended (fantasy) narratives where players are largely free to do as they please – slay ogres, siege castles, barter goods in town, or shake the fruit out of trees. They are notorious for their peculiar combination of designed “escapist fantasy” yet emergent “social realism” (Kolbert, 2001): In a setting of wizards and elves, princes and knights, people save for homes, create basket indices of the trading market, build relationships of status and solidarity, and worry about crime.

In Section I we heard from game design luminaries on themes core to both industry practice (how designers think about the titles they create) and their role in learning (which we argue for throughout this book). Games, however, are more than designed artifacts, hewn from the creative labors of a designated team of experienced and thoughtful designers. They are, in fact, emergent cultures – social groups or organizations that share common knowledge, practices, and dispositions that emerge around a given game title. The attributes and tendencies of these cultures are not merely under the dictates of the creators of games themselves; more often than not, in fact, they surprise, if not confound, those original authorial intentions. Examples abound. Lineage II players forgo the core activity of the game, guild versus guild castle sieges, in order to ban together in cross-guild alliances to wage collective war on so-called Chinese adena farmers that they believe to be a “cancer” on their game (Steinkuehler, 2006a). LambdaMOO members establish their own forms of self-governance after an “evil clown” uses a code-based voodoo doll to rape another player’s character (Dibbell, 1993). CivIII players mobilize online to support their own learning, establishing online universities complete with deans, faculty, students, and curricula, all based on a collective desire to hone their gaming expertise (Squire et al., 2005). An enterprising PlayStation Network (PSN) user creates a fully functioning calculator within the game Little Big Planet (Pereira, 2008). If game play cannot be accounted for solely by the way that the games themselves are designed to be played but, in fact, proves contingent on player practices and norms, then what about the forms of learning we argue throughout this volume that are associated with game play itself? In other words, what role do emergent game cultures play in learning?

Our chapter relates to an ongoing and continuously evolving research and development project that has as its goal the design of a socio-technical system (a technical environment and related social structures and activities) that will constitute a good model for distributed teacher professional development programs conceptualized as knowledge-building communities. We focus primarily on a part of our work that is situated within the Secondary Teacher Education Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We begin by describing the original ambitious vision for this program that we set out to implement, including its theoretical basis. Then we discuss how both our initial failures and the theoretical framework itself led us to more carefully consider how the historical and institutional contexts of such community-building efforts might influence the social processes of learning and teaching within the community. To illuminate this idea, we present a contextual analysis of the program as a prelude to an interaction analysis of a representative discourse from a group learning activity within the program. Throughout this chapter, we consider lessons learned from studies such as these and from our immersion in the experience of designing a socio-technical environment for supporting community-based teacher education. Drawing on these lessons, we describe our modified goal and the latest results of our efforts to develop an online system for structuring and supporting group learning, including the online mentoring of such learning, within teacher education programs.