ABSTRACT
A student teacher hoping to stimulate learning in his eighth-grade American history class wrote what was to become the most famous educational game of all time: Oregon Trail. There's strong consensus that digital games have the potential to transform education. In fact, the promise of digital games for promoting learning has been cited in a diverse range of societal sectors ranging from the President of the United States and the US National Academies of Science to public school classrooms and education researchers around the world. A number of competing visions have emerged for moving forward in the design and evaluation of effective digital games for learning. These visions have different assumptions about how knowledge of educational games should proceed, how learning occurs, and what the relationship is between scholarship and educational game design. Scholars from each faction typically publish in different journals and to different audiences and have built separate networks for collaboration and seeking funding.
