Lost Words: Beyond the Page

Teaching with Games: Formative Gaming in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics

Playing to Grow examines whether video games can serve as meaningful instruments of character education, social and emotional learning (SEL), and moral instruction.

• A 2023 roundtable of game scholars and educators argues that player-choice games may offer richer pathways to character development than extrinsically rewarded systems such as PBIS and MTSS, positioning games as conversation openers rather than standalone solutions.
• The most concrete empirical evidence is a UNESCO MGIEP study of the interactive fiction game Bury me, my Love with students in Dubai and New Delhi, which found a positive correlation between empathy and compassion, with compassion gains attributed to players translating empathy into action.
• Beyond the UNESCO MGIEP study, supporting evidence is largely qualitative and anecdotal, drawing on titles such as Lost Words: Beyond the Page, Quandary, This War of Mine, Sky: Children of the Light, and the Lost & Found series, a limitation participants openly acknowledge.