A Problem of Play for Democratic Education? Abstraction, Realism, and Exploration in Learning Games. A Response to The Challenges of Gaming for Democratic Education: The Case of iCivics

In this review article, I argue that games are complementary, not self-supporting, learning tools for democratic education because they can: (a) offer simplified, but often not simple, outlines (later called “models”) of complex social systems that generate further inquiry; (b) provide practice spaces for exploring systems that do not have the often serious consequences of taking direct and immediate social, civic, and legal action; and (c) use rules to allow players to explore this aforementioned outline or model by making decisions and seeing an outcome. To make these arguments, I perform a close reading of three examples of participatory and playful media that could be germane to, but are not designed for, educational settings: the early-20th-century board game The Landlord’s Game, YouTube videos advising about law enforcement encounters, and the dystopian indie game Papers, Please