Note from the Guest Editor

My own path into gameful approaches to education started years ago in South Korea, before I knew the terminology or the research. I was teaching at a private academy where middle school students were in class until 10pm, after a full day of school. And, as you can imagine, engagement with the learning material was challenging.

My first experiment was a co-created classroom management system called the Wheel of Misfortune. Looking back, now that I have more knowledge about pedagogy, it worked because it made expectations clear and gave students a sense of agency. Later, when I landed a job with more creative freedom, those ideas grew into narrative-driven experiential activities that connected games to learning outcomes. That winding route eventually led me into instructional design and technology and a PhD focused on digital games for education and wellbeing.

That's the lens I brought to this issue of The Connected Professor. Try something different and see what happens when learning becomes something students do, not something that merely happens to them.

You'll see a range of approaches across these pages, where students make choices, test ideas, see consequences, revise, and try again. You will also hear about how these gameful strategies began, the challenges they faced, and the effects on learner engagement. Before you dive in, I want to quickly get you up to speed on the two main ways of describing gameful strategies in education. People often use "gamification" and "game-based learning" interchangeably, but they are not the same.

The official definition of gamification is applying game elements to non-game contexts (Deterding et al., 2011). For example, changing grades to points, allowing students to create an avatar, or adding a time limit to a drawing activity could be considered gamifying elements of your course. During my career in education, Marczewski's Periodic Table of Gamification Elements (2015) has been a huge source of inspiration when brainstorming. This is not an exhaustive list; however, it can be very helpful when you're exploring ideas for your activities.

While gamification takes place in non-game contexts, game-based learning is where games are used as a vehicle for learning. These are often more challenging to implement but can be extremely valuable when aligned with learning outcomes, sometimes just because of the novelty factor alone.

These concepts all live under the umbrella of gameful education. One common misconception is that gameful activities need to be fun. The fact is, these activities need to align with learning objectives. Could they be fun too? They could be, but there are many games that require complete immersion and can inspire motivation without necessarily being entertaining. For example, the Dark Souls games are so challenging that they can be tied to self-determination theory (Váscones-Román et al., 2026).

One of my favorite things about gameful approaches is the freedom to fail. Well-designed games normalize learning from failure, which is also a money-maker for arcades because it creates opportunities to try again. This means practice is visible, feedback is immediate, and persistence is socially acceptable. When students aren't terrified of being wrong, they can become more curious, and curiosity is an amazing intrinsic motivator.

In this issue of The Connected Professor, we are not arguing that every class should become a game. The aim is to showcase examples and ideas you can borrow from—and to provide a few different "on-ramps" to a gameful learning experience in your classroom, depending on your time and subject matter. This issue has a variety of game-based approaches, which include board games, simulations, role-play, and escape-room-style puzzles. You'll also get a student perspective on what it looks like when game-based learning not only supports studying, but also inspires someone to build their own learning experience.

If you're intrigued but thinking, "I'm not a game designer," the good news is that you don't need to be. Most faculty in this issue didn't start by trying to design a masterpiece. They started with a pain point. My advice is to look for these opportunities, then backward design the win condition (always map your gameful strategies to learning objectives).

To support the reality of faculty life, you'll also find two "food for thought" pieces. Sometimes the right move is to adopt an existing simulation or game that's already been field-tested. Other times, you may want to try DIY, especially when you're building for your specific students, your course rhythm, and your learning outcomes. Both paths are valid.

My hope is that once you've read this issue, you will understand the language and be inspired to try a small gameful strategy in your own teaching (and iterate from there). Also, if you pilot a new gameful strategy and want an enthusiastic playtester/soundboard … please invite me!