Dr. Ian Bogost’s Keynote

How to Learn Playfully

Twenty years ago, building on the prior three decades of work in educational software, I started a company that built games for learning in corporate, scholastic, and organizational contexts. We believed that the technology of games and simulations, especially their ability to provide operational models for complex ideas, represented a sea change in educational practice. That potential is still there, but the truth is, very little really changed, in education or in games. Instead, the same methods and media re-entrenched—text, image, video, sound. Even as I continued to design and consult on game and software projects, I also looked deeper at what made games powerful learning tools. Maybe it wasn’t just the content that they could deliver, but their form and structure—specifically that games are media that are played. But even now, after publishing a book on play, speaking about play to a variety of professional and academic audiences, and deliberately incorporating play into my own daily life, I still find it a mysterious and difficult practice to describe, let alone carry out. In this lecture, I will talk through some of the lessons I’ve learned about play as I’ve tried to teach, and learn, by means of it.

About Dr. Ian Bogost

Dr. Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Professor and Director of the Program in Film & Media Studies and Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. He is author or co-author of ten books, including Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Newsgames: Journalism at Play, and Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games.


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