Revisiting Teaching and Games: Mapping Out Ecosystems of Learning

Seventh-day Adventist games from the 1930s through 2021 show a consistent commitment to a text-centered model of religious education. The work argues that the church's identity as a people who know the Bible, rooted in the Millerite movement and the prolific print output of figures such as Ellen White, has shaped its games around question-and-answer formats, mastery of locating scripture, and memorization. Although Protestant and conservative Christian traditions have historically regarded games with suspicion, associating them with gambling, vice, and idleness, Adventist publishers nonetheless produced a substantial body of Bible-based games, framed as "recreation" rather than "amusement" and promoted as tools for Bible study, family life, and evangelism.

The analysis inventories these games from denominational periodical advertisements, grouping them by period and design characteristics. The earliest catalog, spanning 1938 to the 1950s, includes the first denominational titles such as Seventh-day Adventist Authors and Bible Truth Game. Later titles, from the 1982 Pick and Choose to the 2013 Heroes game and the digital, transmedia Heroes 2 (2021), show movement toward board, mobile, and digital formats, along with agility-based scoring. Across all periods, however, trivia and competition mechanics dominate, with trivia-style question-and-answer and memorization systems accounting for at least half of published games.

The authors conclude that this design pattern sits in tension with the church's stated wariness of competition and its interest in cooperation, and that Adventist games have only minimally explored cooperative play. Their central question is whether trivia-style games remain the most effective and appealing means of cultivating biblical-doctrinal literacy. Answering it, they suggest, will require the church to reexamine long-standing assumptions about how games should teach and what forms of play best reflect its values.