A Post Structuralist Understanding of Integrating Games in Education

This paper, written by Stamatia Savvani of the University of Essex and presented at DiGRA 2023, argues from a post-structuralist standpoint that the binary framing of games as fun and learning as serious limits how games are integrated into education. It contends that such dichotomies are socially constructed and historically contingent, and that the rise of gamification has reinforced a view of playfulness as a reward system rather than an open, exploratory experience.

The empirical basis is a qualitative, interpretivist study of ten language teachers in Greece who were trained in game-based learning and designed game-informed tasks for their classrooms. Data came from semi-structured interviews conducted during task design and after classroom delivery, analysed thematically. The study asked how teachers integrate games and what drives their pedagogical decisions. Its small sample and single national context limit generalisability, but the depth of reflection it captures is the study's central contribution.

A key finding is that teachers repeatedly experienced a dilemma between wanting games to be fun and needing them to be educationally effective. Teachers questioned whether a game was "fun enough" or "educational as well," and one teacher hesitated to use a game for a spelling assessment because it felt insufficiently serious, even though games had been used to assess other content. The analysis suggests teachers implicitly treat the teaching goal as serious while viewing the game medium as non-serious, which constrains their design choices.

The paper concludes that gamification, as commonly implemented, functions more as a quantified alternative to testing, offering rewards only after learning is demonstrated and risking demotivation through negative reinforcement. It proposes reconceptualising games as serious objects and learning as potentially playful, arguing that a post-structuralist rethinking of these categories could give educators a firmer rhetorical basis for pedagogical decisions beyond the limits set by current gamification practices.