Gaming the System: Why Understanding Play Can Transform Learning
My favourite definition of a game comes from Bernard Suits' book The Grasshopper. Suits argues that a game is simply
“…the voluntary overcoming of unnecessary obstacles."
This elegant definition captures something essential about play. Is throwing a paper ball into the bin from halfway across the office a game? If you're treating it as one, absolutely. Is Monopoly a game? Definitely, just not a very fun one. Is football a game? As Sartre noted, everything in football is complicated by the presence of the other team, so that's definitely a game.
But Suits offers a fuller explanation that's worth exploring:
“[Games are] an attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs using only the means permitted by the rules, where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.”
When we challenge a colleague to throw that paper ball into the bin behind a desk, we're creating a game. There are rules permitting certain actions and prohibiting others, and the method of playing favours inefficiency over efficiency. You could walk over and drop the ball in, but that's not playing the game. We seem to know this almost intuitively, and it’s worth exploring in more detail.
Playing Games and Language Games
The definition Suits offers owes, I think, a significant debt to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's work. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein was fascinated by how language actually works, arguing that words don't get their meaning by being special symbols that represent things in the world - the world is all too messy and ambiguous for that. Instead, he proposed that words work like games.
In one card game, an ace is high; in another, it's a one. Which is the "true" meaning of an ace? Neither. It all depends on what game you're playing. The card gets its meaning from how we use it.
For Wittgenstein, the same is true of words, and they work a lot like a game, he thinks. What any word means depends on the language game we're playing. Are we being scientists? Lawyers? Teenagers? The BBC news? All of this changes how we might use a word and thus changes what that word means. Tell your vet you've got a sick dog, then tell a teenager, and notice the difference.
Wittgenstein used the word "game" itself to illustrate his point. What defines that word? What makes something a game? His answer was that there really isn't any single defining feature. There's no essence that makes a game a game. In Philosophical Investigations, he says,
“Don't say: 'They must have something in common, or they would not be called 'games'" but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won't see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!”
Into The Magic Circle
If we combine Wittgenstein and Suits' insights, we discover that a game isn't a single, definable thing, but rather a family of things sharing what Wittgenstein called a "family resemblance." Poker, curling, Tetris, and Dungeons and Dragons are wildly different, but there's still a thread connecting them all in the same way that I, my parents, my siblings, cousins, and grandparents may be very different, but there can still be a family resemblance between us.
This thread leads us to what Johan Huizinga, called "the magic circle”, the place that game playing brings into being. For Huizingha this is,
“…a temporary world within the ordinary world.”
In Huizinga's conception, this “magic circle” is a space that is temporary, self-contained, and an interlude in the everyday. It's a place where special rules and unique ordering exist, where normal conventions are suspended, new structures emerge, and new relationships form. When we play a game with others, we bring such a space into existence, whether it is at a poker table, a football stadium, or a chessboard.
As an educator, I find it impossible not to recognise this description as perfectly fitting a classroom. A classroom sits outside the ordinary running of day-to-day life, allowing for new forms of interaction and ways of being, and creates space for new kinds of experience. The classroom is, essentially, a play space. It is a temporary world within the world, a magic circle.
Inhabiting As-If Spaces
If classrooms are magic circles, and if the horizon of possibility for what constitutes a game is so vast, then the potential for game-based learning (or ludic pedagogy) is expansive. What's crucial is recognising how educational spaces can be, and perhaps essentially are, ludic spaces.
Between Wittgenstein, Suits, and Huizinga, we can see that these spaces are inherently:
Voluntary: Participants choose to engage; their freedom is paramount.
Transformative: They offer opportunities for change and growth, for exploration, experimentation, and ideation.
Experimental: They allow for safe trial and error, and they give psychological distance.
Absorbing: They demand engagement and attention; they form a break with our everyday lives.
Autonomous: They grant choice and responsibility within new structures.
At the heart of both meaningful teaching and deep gameplay is the separation of our usual selves from our “learning” or “ludic” selves - between the everyday me and the “student” or “player” me. Who I am in the classroom or in the game is, in an important sense, a temporary me. This is a me that can experiment freely, make mistakes without fear, try new roles and rules, iterate, change, and shift. I can adopt new identities, new judgments, and try new activities.
When playing Monopoly, I can try on the guise of the ruthless capitalist and crush opponents beneath unmanageable debt. When playing Dungeons and Dragons, I can explore life through the eyes of a great and noble hero or a powerful, wizened sorcerer. In the classroom, I can engage with the world as a historian, physicist, or poet. I can see, move through, and interpret the world anew. I’m not just going through the motions; I’m playing this other person. Being this other person.
From Theory to Practice
Understanding these connections opens up concrete possibilities for classroom practice. Consider these examples:
The Great Decimal Heist (For younger children – Maths / Numeracy)
Someone has stolen the decimal point!
Students discover that a villain (the nefarious Dr. Rounding Error) has removed all the decimal points from important global systems - money, measurements, recipes, and scientific data. Their mission? To recover the decimal point by solving increasingly tricky puzzles, mathematical problems, and measurement challenges where things have gone hilariously wrong. (“This cake recipe calls for 145 grams of salt instead of 1.45… what could go wrong?”)
The classroom transforms into an investigation unit. Students must work through math problems, spot patterns, and "restore order" to the number world. Each challenge solved earns them a clue to Dr. Rounding Error’s location. The inefficiency (working through broken systems rather than solving standard problems) creates humour, curiosity, and a sense of urgency, making the math meaningful through play.
The Archive of the End of the World (English / Literature / The Humanities)
The year is 2317, and civilisation has collapsed!
A small team of students are Archivists tasked with reconstructing and preserving key elements of lost human culture, language, literature, and identity. They’re handed fragments of texts (a stanza from Shakespeare, a line from Austen, a section of a Grimm fairy tale) with no context. Their mission: to decode what these texts meant, what kind of world they came from, and how to preserve their significance.
As they reconstruct texts, create timelines, and curate a “final archive,” students engage in deep reading, interpretation, historical context, and critical analysis. Their inefficiency, trying to understand literature without a ready-made interpretive framework, forces real engagement. They are not just reading texts; they are saving them. Each session feels vital and dramatic, not rote.
The Impossible Organism (Biology / Science)
In outer space, evolution has gone haywire!
Students are assigned to teams of scientists on a faraway planet where evolution has taken a wildly different path. They must design and explain a new, fictional organism capable of surviving the planet's unique ecosystems, but they can only use a limited, inefficient supply of Earth-based biological principles (no access to full textbooks or digital research). They must "rediscover" core concepts like osmosis, respiration, or symbiosis by trial and error, simulating experiments, comparing failed prototypes, and drawing from what they remember or can model.
Eventually, they must present their creature to a panel of interstellar biologists (the rest of the class) who will ask probing questions about how it breathes, eats, reproduces, and maintains homeostasis.
Once again, the inefficiency is the point: without a simple "copy and apply" model, students must really understand the biology they're using. They play at being scientists in a strange world—but in doing so, become real scientists in their own.
These approaches work because they recognise that learning spaces are already game-like spaces where:
Normal social rules are suspended - students can challenge ideas, take intellectual risks, and freely explore because that’s what’s required of the game.
New identities become possible - they’re no longer themselves, they’re scientists, investigators, and archivists.
Failure is reframed as iteration - mistakes become learning opportunities because it’s the process that is the point, not the outcome.
Engagement is voluntary yet structured - students choose how to participate within clear boundaries, giving them autonomy, mastery, and purpose; essential for engagement.
In both of these examples, and in any really transformative game-play experience or learning experience, we see that the process is the point. We become incredibly narrowly focused, in games and in teaching, on goals and outcomes, but where the impact always resides is in the experience. After all, the rules are arbitrary and the obstacles unnecessary, so where else can the real value lie than in the process?
Designing Play with Purpose
As always, everything I’ve said here is just as applicable to a primary school classroom, a high school lesson, professional development training, or a workshop setting. All that changes is the framing of the experience and the tone and form of the game. At its heart, we’re doing the same thing in each case - using play to create spaces in which meaningful learning can occur. As learning designers, then, when designing games with an educational purpose, we must recognise that our learning spaces and our play spaces are already deeply similar in nature. We need to understand and make use of this deep affinity, designing in ways that acknowledge and utilise everything that goes with it.
This understanding transforms how we approach teaching, learning, and education. Instead of seeing games as external tools we bring into learning, we can recognise that the most powerful learning experiences are already game-like in their essential nature. Our task becomes not to “gamify education”, but to help educational spaces realise their full potential as the magic circles they already are.
The voluntary overcoming of unnecessary obstacles, Suits' definition of games, perfectly describes the best learning experiences. Students and participants voluntarily engage with challenges that could be solved more efficiently (Wikipedia instead of research, delegation rather than personal engagement, calculators instead of mental math, summaries instead of primary sources) because the inefficient means make possible something valuable: deep learning, critical thinking, and personal transformation. The process is the point, and inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.
By understanding what makes a game a game, we discover what makes learning truly transformative. Both invite us to step into temporary worlds where we can become more than we were before, where the journey matters as much as the destination, and where the magic lies not in the efficiency of our methods, but in the richness of our experience.
Bibliography
Suits, Bernard & Hurka, Thomas (1978). The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Peterborough, CA: Broadview Press.
Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Boston, MA: The Beacon Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953). Philosophical Investigations. New York, NY, USA: Wiley-Blackwell. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe.