Studying Games in School: A Framework for Media Education

Pelletier's paper argues that digital games deserve to be studied in schools as a subject in their own right, not merely as tools for teaching other disciplines. Its central thesis is that games should be understood through an integrated framework of design, play, and culture, adapted from Buckingham's three-part media education model of text, audiences, and institutions. The authors contend that young people's informal game literacy is uneven and shaped by unequal social access, which makes structured classroom study, including practical game-making, valuable for building both conceptual understanding and production skills.

A key finding is that games resist traditional literacy and multiliteracies frameworks, which typically treat literacy as medium-specific and socially embedded. Games blur the boundary between text and audience and combine semiotic and mathematical systems, so existing approaches struggle to capture their specific features. The paper surveys competing models that treat games as systems, as representational media, or as narratives and ludic configurations, and concludes that rules, play, and culture must be examined together. Rather than presenting "game literacy" as a precise conceptual term, the authors value it mainly for opening curriculum space in which games can be analysed.

The scope is primarily conceptual and theoretical, grounded in media education, game studies, and multimodal literacy scholarship, with the model being researched in schools and youth clubs. The framework is explicitly tentative, and open questions remain about how it should be implemented pedagogically. The authors acknowledge that the competences it describes will not be acquired through formal study alone. Nonetheless, they offer a way to conceptualise how games are taught and learned and how students' existing abilities can be built upon, advocating for a single, integrated subject area that analyses games' multiple aspects together.