‘Economists Who Think like Ecologists’: Reframing Systems Thinking in Games for Learning

Over the past several years, educators have been exploring the potential of immersive interactive simulations, or video games for education, finding that games can support the development of disciplinary knowledge, systemic thinking, the production of complex multimodal digital artifacts, and participation in affinity spaces or sites of collective intelligence. Examining verbal interaction data from a game-based after-school program, the authors offer evidence that expert players of learning video games: (a) think relationally and strategically about elements of the game system; (b) draw on their experiences in similar activity domains when approaching systemic problems; (c) consider systemic properties as they are tied to action; and (d) think and act in markedly social ways while engaged in systems-oriented reasoning. Using discourse analysis, the authors examine the talk and game play of two participants to understand how they think about the relationships between elements of the game system. From thes...