Novices, Gamers, and Scholars: Exploring the Challenges of Teaching About Games

Teaching about games should be easy. After all, students enjoy engaging with course content and have extensive personal experience with videogames. In reality, games education is surprisingly complex. We report on the results of a study that explored the challenges faced by instructors of games studies classes. Our results indicate that learning about games can be challenging for multiple reasons. For example, prior videogame experience often interferes with students’ abilities to reason critically and analytically about games. Students also have difficulties articulating their experiences and observations. We describe some solutions that instructors are adopting to overcome these challenges. We also describe common misconceptions about the knowledge of expert players, and provide a characterization of what it means to have a naïve understanding of videogames. Finally, we draw attention to the issue that current game studies courses run the risk of limiting the diversity of people who could become game scholars.