From Gamers to Scholars: Challenges of Teaching Game Studies

Zagal and Bruckman's paper examines the pedagogical difficulties of teaching game studies at the university level, drawing on interviews with twelve instructors in the field. Its central argument is that the discipline faces distinctive obstacles rooted in its students' identities and experiences. Students often arrive with deep but narrow gaming histories, and while this background can heighten motivation and supply rich material for analysis, it frequently impedes critical reasoning. Learners cling to genre-specific assumptions, dismiss older titles, and resist perspectives that challenge their sense of themselves as "gamers," sometimes conflating skilled play with analytical insight.

The authors identify several structural barriers that compound these pedagogical challenges. The field's relative youth, its lack of an established canon, and practical difficulties in accessing games, including platform obsolescence, time demands, and uneven prior exposure, all complicate instruction. To address these issues, instructors have developed approaches such as game design vocabularies, reflective journaling through a tool called GameLog, and the collaborative Game Ontology Wiki. Despite these difficulties, the authors conclude that teaching game studies is both demanding and rewarding, and they call for further research into how familiarity with other media transfers to the analysis of games.

The paper's scope is focused on higher education instructors and their students, with its evidence drawn from the instructors' accounts rather than from large-scale classroom measurement. Its reference list grounds these observations in broader literature on game design, learning theory, and intrinsic motivation, and it engages with calls, such as Mäyrä's 2005 appeal for a "quiet revolution," to establish game studies as a rigorous academic field. The paper's broader implication is that the discipline must consider how its pedagogical challenges shape who is able to participate in game scholarship.