What Video Games Have Taught Us: Two Decades of Gaming and Learning

Book Chapter — Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be

This chapter uses James Paul Gee’s landmark 2003 monograph What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy as a focal lens for analyzing the boundary formation of game studies as a field. By tracing how scholarship on games and learning functioned as a site of disciplinary definition during the field’s early years, the chapter illuminates a critical flashpoint in field history: a moment when utopian promises about the pedagogical potential of games, drawn from a broad array of disciplinary backgrounds, briefly united with the nascent game studies community. The analysis juxtaposes close reading of Gee’s work—including its characteristic three-part rhetorical structure of personal legitimation, utopian advocacy, and interdisciplinary framing—against later metanalyses of the field, in order to show how reflections on the field’s past have shaped, and continue to shape, its future contours.