Making Learning Fun:
Quest Atlantis, A Game Without Guns
Sasha Barab
Michael Thomas
Tyler Dodge
Robert Carteaux
Hakan Tuzun
This article describes the Quest Atlantis (QA)
project, a learning and teaching project that
employs a multiuser, virtual environment to
immerse children, ages 9–12, in educational
tasks. QA combines strategies used in
commercial gaming environments with lessons
from educational research on learning and
motivation. It allows users at participating
elementary schools and after-school centers to
travel through virtual spaces to perform
educational activities, talk with other users
and mentors, and build virtual personae. Our
work has involved an agenda and process that
may be called socially-responsive design,
which involves building sociotechnical
structures that engage with and potentially
transform individuals and their contexts of
participation. This work sits at the intersection
of education, entertainment, and social
commitment and suggests an expansive focus
for instructional designers. The focus is on
engaging classroom culture and relevant
aspects of student life to inspire participation
consistent with social commitments and
educational goals interpreted locally.
In 1999, two high school students went on a
murderous rampage at Columbine High School
in Colorado, leaving 12 students and a teacher
dead and wounding 23 others before taking
their own lives. This atrocity triggered unprece-
dented media attention, with many observers
blaming gratuitous violence in video games as
the underlying problem, and others suggesting
bad parenting, insensitive schools, and the
moral decay of our times. Although many
researchers have claimed that no cogent connec-
tion can be found between the use of video
games and violent behavior among youth, oth-
ers insist that there may be a link between video
game use and deviant social behavior (Pro-
venzo, 1991, 1992). On the other hand, some
advocates of game-based learning suggest that
educational video games are the only way that
educators can adequately engage the “video
game generation” (Katz, 2000; Prensky, 2000).
The need to design educational video games
represents more than an attempt to harness their
tremendous motivational power: Digital multi-
media provide a resource for children to
develop a sense of autonomy and an awareness
of consequentiality. Jenkins (cited in Laurel,
2002) suggested that children today have fewer
means for expressing agency, and even fewer
opportunities for engaging in play, than they
have had in the past. Their physical space for
exploration and play has been reduced from
several square miles to an electronic screen.
Squire (2002), commenting on the cultural per-
spective of video games, stated,
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In the United States, this fear and fascination goes back
to the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan extolled the
virtues of games to create a generation of highly skilled
Cold War warriors, while U.S. Surgeon General C.
Everett Koop proclaimed games among the top health
risks facing Americans. (p. 1)
Rather than either blindly embracing video
games or impulsively brushing them aside, our
work involved developing a technological inno-
vation that lies at the intersection of education,
entertainment, and a commitment to improve
the world (Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Squire, &
Newell, in press; Barab et al., 2002). Our goal has
been to develop a technology-rich game without
guns that teaches and informs, where the excite-
ment is about learning, growth and the develop-
ment of a sense of wonder.
Over the past two years, our researchers have
passed time in the same places that youths do,
including carrying out an 18-month ethno-
graphic study at a local Boys and Girls Club, vis-
iting schools, reading teen and pop-culture
magazines, and even playing video games in
arcades. We began with a simple goal: Let’s
make learning fun. As we talked with children,
parents, and others in our community, our inter-
est expanded beyond supporting content learn-
ing and developed into a broader social
commitment. To achieve these goals through
deliberate steps, we had to step away from our
computers, put aside our desire to design, and
instead engage the ethnographic process of
understanding the lives of those we wished to
serve (Barab, Thomas et al., in press; Levinson,
1998). Two years into the process, our experi-
ences and commitments have distilled into a
socially responsive design that is fun and educa-
tional and that engages children in important
personal, social, ethical, and environmental
issues. This innovation, Quest Atlantis (QA), has
been implemented at multiple sites in the United
States and around the world, with hundreds of
users at dozens of elementary school classrooms
and two after-school sites in the United States,
and multiple classrooms in Australia, Denmark,
Singapore, and Malaysia. QA was released in
beta form on January 15, 2003, and within less
than a year, more than 3,000 participants regis-
tered and completed thousands of quests—
engaging curricular tasks that are connected to
academic standards and our social commit-
ments.
QA is more than a technology, or even a
multiuser virtual environment. At its core the
QA experience centers around an intersubjective
connection or identification with the narrative of
Atlantis about a world in trouble. In establishing
this immersive narrative, QA leverages a 3-D
multiuser environment, educational quests, unit
plans, comic books, a novel, a board game, trad-
ing cards, a series of social commitments, vari-
ous characters, ways of behaving, and other
participant resources that collectively constitute
QA. As such, QA is an example of a distributed,
transmedia narrative, referring to the fact that
the story line does not reside in one location or in
one form of medium but is spread across various
media that come together and are given mean-
ing as the user participates in the fictional game
context and investigates relevant personal
issues. Participation in QA entails a personal
and social engagement with the narrative, as
children are asked to contribute experiences,
ideas, and information to the activists of Atlan-
tis. The mythical backstory and unfolding ave-
nues for participation blur the boundaries
between the Atlantian world and local contexts,
motivating students to engage in social issues
that have local relevance. The progression of
quests allows students to go beyond an isolated
acquaintance with these issues and with disci-
plinary content.
Toward documenting the effectiveness of the
project, a series of studies evaluating the impact
of QA on learning showed that, when respond-
ing to personal narratives, students participat-
ing in QA offered character insights that were
either deeper or better supported than did stu-
dents in equivalent conditions; additionally, ele-
mentary students who used QA demonstrated
statistically significant learning over time in the
areas of science, social studies, and sense of aca-
demic efficacy (Barab, Dodge, Jackson, & Arici,
2003). QA has been adopted by more than four
dozen teachers, distributed around the world,
without any external incentive for doing so.
Interviews with a subset of these teachers indi-
cated their primary reasons to be the social com-
mitments, direct connection to academic
standards, and perception that this use of tech-
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A GAME WITHOUT GUNS 87