Ludic Epistemology: What Game-Based Learning Can Teach Curriculum Studies

Abstract

"Ludic epistemology" references the need for educational game studies to remediate traditional (linguistically mediated) epistemologies. Its guiding questions are about what it means to encode knowledge in the form of a game, and how we might conceive coming to know as a process of playing. In digital game studies, a theory of ludic epistemology is concerned with the distinctive demands of-and the particular constraints upon knowledge representation in the development of computer-supported game-based learning environments. Its primary theoretical questions are about the re-mediation of educational knowledge and its representation. What educational game studies does for curriculum is to radically stir things up. Its core theoretical project of formulating a "ludic epistemology" can advance epistemic inquiries into media and learning, and respond to what have become serious questions for educators about how game-based technologies for learning, and emergent digital epistemologies, reform and re-forge relations between learning and play.