In many ways, games and educational systems aim to accomplish the same things. Both are designed to move participants through an experience by equipping them with knowledge and skills. Both games and educational systems rely on goal setting, feedback loops, difficulty that scales along with participant experience, and incentivizing continued participation. Because of the similarities between the design and intent of games and educational systems, it shouldn’t be a surprise that in many cases, they reach the same conclusions about the best way to accomplish that intent. Video games have a big head start on the digital badge community utilizing badges and pathways. The gaming community just uses different terminology for them. In video games, badges are called achievements and pathways are called skill trees.