ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on structured play that fits the standard definition of "game", which generally includes the presence of rules, turn-taking, and some sort of end goal state such as winners and losers. The dynamics of collaborative board game play seem to parallel the dynamics of complex educational settings like public schools, and we have preliminary data showing positive correlations between games scores, specifically Expertise and other measures of master teachers' performance in the realm of technology integration at the graduate school level. Fundamental to our description of game play is the idea that human behavior is a dynamic interaction of perception and action, a person-environment interaction. From the ecological psychology perspective, human behavior is an emergent interaction between an intentional agent and a dynamic environment. The agent-environment interaction is the basic unit of analysis for any understanding of game play or distributed cognitive teamwork. Board games are just one form of the broader category of playful learning.
