The aim of this forum paper is to extend upon the study by Linda Bonne and Joanna Higgins (2022) by exploring alternative ways for understanding games for learning science. This paper focuses on how games may be defined through both formal rules and alternatively, through rules as reasoning-in-action. It also considers how thinking about game rules may contribute to understanding the reality of learning in gamified science education.

Bonne and Higgins’ (2022) research extends previous studies in both the gamification of science education and the application of methods for understanding emotional climate and its interplay with learning events during game play. In this forum, I adopt a broad view of science education that incorporates the various elements of STEM and how STEM knowledge and reasoning may be embedded in peoples’ everyday lives (cf. Ritchie 2019). I view gamification as the application of game elements to create and promote structured game play as learning experiences for students, which may be in digital, non-digital, or blended environments (Davis and Bellocchi 2020a). Gamification supports game-based learning that encompasses diverse ways of learning through playing games and game design (Bolstad 2018).

Research into the gamification of science education has grown over the past decade. While Catherine Milne (2012) notes the lacklustre interest in gamified science education as recently as 2010, CSSE made a substantial contribution to the field in 2012 with a special issue on digital games in science education. More recently Brant Miller and Gillian Roehrig (2018) investigated play with American Indian students and their engagement with a traditional game of snow snakes as a way of teaching STEM with culturally based resources. As evident with Miller and Roehrig’s (2018) study, there is increasing recognition that gamified learning in science education does not need to be on digital platforms and can involve a diverse blend of online and/or offline resources (Kalogiannakis, Papadakis and Zourmpakis 2021).

Bonne and Higgins (2022) adopted class-wide games led by the teacher and involving high levels of social interaction to solve problems and answer questions. The games they investigated were called Round-the-world, Skunk, and Greedy Pig. The investigation of these games was notable because of their class-wide application, which was different to many other previous studies that describe game play at the individual or small group level of interaction. In addition to being a non-digital example of gamified learning Bonne and Higgins (2022) investigated game playing and fluctuations in emotional climate (EC). EC is a collective experience of emotive arousal evident at the classroom level through social interaction and is measurable via self-reported feelings of intensity and positive or negative valence (Bellocchi, Ritchie, Tobin, Sandhu and Sandhu 2013). Bonne and Higgins (2022) contribute to this field by applying both the study of social interaction and self-report methods to understand fluctuations in EC across different games with different class configurations and with different teachers leading the games. While there are numerous studies investigating abstract constructs in gamified learning such as motivation and student engagement, there are fewer studies focusing on social interaction and in-the-moment emotive experiences such as EC from sociocultural perspectives (cf. Kalogiannakis, Papadakis and Zourmpakis 2021).

Thinking through social interaction

A further innovation by Bonne and Higgins (2022) is their social and phenomenological framing of the study, and their regard for game rules as enacted phenomena that are performed and experienced through, and as, the game itself (Liberman 2013). In science education, this is a novel application of an ethnomethodological orientation (Garfinkel 1967) where enacted rules may be evident through the utterances, prosody, silences, facial actions, and gestures of people who are playing out the game by interacting with each other. These bodily actions evident in social interaction are the peoples’ (ethno) methods, which people use as interactional resources for achieving meaning and localised social order in everyday situations (Liberman 2013). Studies of ethnomethods treat these everyday interactional resources as the topic of research to understand how people achieve their sense of reality, which people assume is shared with others and is typically represented through formal analytical processes, inferences, and logic (Garfinkel 1996).

For example, the game of checkers is commonly defined by a formal system of rules and its physical, symbolic representation through the checkers, the checkerboard, and changes in positions on the board (Livingston 2006). If we were to ask a checkers player how they play the game, they would typically explain the game by referring to these rules as a type of logic that is atemporal and disembodied from the actual playing of the game. If however we were to experience the play of a game of checkers we would be engaging in practical cross-board reasoning, or what I am calling reasoning-in-action, as the time specific and embodied performance of the game. Such an experience becomes possible through a cultivated perception of the game grounded in an ongoing culture of playing checkers. Importantly, our experience of cross-board reasoning would be driven by the aesthetic pleasure of game performance and fluctuations of emotive experiences as game events unfold (Livingston 2006). It is the aesthetic and emotive experiences of the game that would maintain our anticipation and draw us towards our next game at some time in the future, which is why game play may become a repeatable ritualistic practice like other practices in science classrooms (cf. Bellocchi, Davis and King 2018).

In analysing game play through the study of ethnomethods, the positioning of emotive experiences is important to consider. While there are studies of ethnomethods where formal analytical understanding of emotions is the topic of study participants, there are fewer studies that fully explore emotive experience as the essence of ethnomethods (cf. Davis 2017). Liberman (2007) recognises the importance of emotive experiences in his study of formal reasoning in Tibetan philosophical culture, where he describes how experiences of emotional energy bring to life occasions of formal reasoning as reasoning-in-action through face-to-face rituals, writing, and the generation of ideas. Emotional energy is an individual and collective experience of solidarity and togetherness arising out of social interaction and evident through the convergence of ideas, the mutual entrainment of bodily actions, and the fluency of interaction (Davis and Bellocchi 2019). A science education example where emotional energy is regarded as a foundation on which formal reasoning is brought to life is the study of objectivity in school science inquiry by myself and Alberto Bellocchi (Davis and Bellocchi 2018). In that study, we explicitly exclude emotional energy from the research question that asks How does objectivity come to exist? We exclude emotional energy because we understand it to be positioned within the how, or within the ethnomethods that give rise to the emergence of objectivity as a temporally situated, embodied performance and emotive experience of scientific practices. Emotional energy is therefore important for learning as it helps with the achievement of meaning and social order, such as the production of objective science through enacted practices of reasoning-in-action.

Formal rules and rules as reasoning-in-action

The formal rules of a game are an important feature of game design and are typically what people first reach for when learning a new game, looking for how the game should start, where it should progress to, and how it is won or lost. For example, one of the games described by Bonne and Higgins (2022) required class members to “follow the metaphor, round-the-world” by sitting in a large circle around the classroom. The teacher started the game by nominating two students to compete against each other by answering a question she posed. One student stood inside the circle, facing the other who also stood. The first student of the pair to answer correctly then moved around the inside of the circle to compete with the next person in the circle. Play continued until every student had taken a turn, with the last student remaining as overall winner. To communicate these formal rules I was able to extract this sequence of logic from Bonne and Higgins (2022) and lay this formal analytical logic out on this page. Printing the rules is one of the advantages of formal rules.

What is notable about the formal rules of a game are the different ways in which rules appear when understood through in-the-moment performances and experiences. For example, the game round-the-world involved mathematical questions, where paired students competed against each other to utter a correct solution. While we assume correct solutions were developed by individual students using mathematical reasoning, as distinct from guessing, the correct answer as an enacted practice was not determined by checking the mathematics against formally represented logic. Instead, the student would make an utterance that was observed by the entire class, and the response of the class would publicly confirm the student’s utterance as correct or incorrect. This is an example of the enacted practices described by Bonne and Higgins (2022) being evident as the formation of rules through reasoning-in-action.

These interactional practices of playing the game are evident further in Bonne and Higgins (2022) when Jack realised he had won, making a “victorious cry and fist raised above his head”, which was Jack’s response to the class reaction to his utterance. What makes Jack’s utterance of his answer a possibility is his presumption that his utterance will present a reality that is shared with his class peers, evident by the fluency of the interaction (Garfinkel 1967). This presumption of a shared reality by the speaker is fundamental to everyday human interaction and involves a form of confidence that enables people to make utterances in social interaction. In most situations, the presumption is taken-for-granted by people in the moment of interaction and only becomes evident where the presumption fails, the interaction breaks down, and interactional repair is needed. These concepts of social interaction are applied and illustrated in science education research (e.g. Davis and Bellocchi 2020b). In the context of Bonne and Higgins (2022), although Jack may have believed his answer to be correct at-the-moment before his utterance, it was only produced as socially correct, and objectively verified upon the response of the class, within the cultural context of game play. Achieving socially objective outcomes is a process of social consensus through interaction. Jack’s realisation of victory was then “echoed in the behaviour of the other students who cheered, laughed, clapped, and surged forward”. The actions of Jack and his peers illustrate how the formal analytical logic of game rules involving mathematical reasoning unfolds through the performance of reasoning-in-action of game play.

The two ways of understanding rules are important for curriculum and pedagogy because they illustrate the differences between understandings often explained formally by the teacher and enacted understandings embodied by students in the reality of a particular time and place as reasoning-in-action. In the situations described by Bonne and Higgins (2022), where formal rules are aligned with canonical knowledge, we can see difference between formal mathematical knowledge and mathematical knowledge performed as enacted practices of reasoning-in-action. This has implications for the way we may interpret curriculum, design assessment, and set our expectations for what teaching and learning practices could look like in the reality of a classroom.

Another aspect to this reasoning-in-action is the individual and collective emotive experiences of game play. These experiences are evident in the above description of Jack’s cry and fist gesture followed by the cheers, laughter, and clapping of his peers as evidence of an intense collective emotive experience. Such experiences not only involve the actions described by Bonne and Higgins (2022) but also bodily sensations and feelings that unfold over the duration of the collective experience of reasoning-in-action (cf. Davis and Bellocchi 2020b). Such experiences are challenging to document in research contexts, but they are commonly well understood and appreciated by researchers who are present with study participants where the researchers can also feel the experience of game participation. It becomes evident from such studies that reasoning-in-action possesses an emotive element that is not captured in the logic rules of scientific or mathematical reasoning or in the formal rules of game play.

Playing games with reality in science education

Some of the challenges for gamification gaining traction in science education as a legitimate way of learning is the link between games, and learners having fun or enjoying the aesthetics or emotional experience of game play. In this section, I challenge the notion and language around serious games (Kalogiannakis, Papadakis and Zourmpakis, 2021), and even the need for serious science education. So what are the differences between the fun and presumed fantasy of playing a science game compared with doing an authentic science inquiry activity that may be regarded as a more objective and serious form of learning.

To explore this issue, I refer to my work with Alberto Bellocchi mentioned earlier, where we investigated the performance of objectivity and emotive experiences during a school science inquiry activity (Davis and Bellocchi 2018). That study illustrates how a group of Grade 10 students established rules through reasoning-in-action that were imbued with emotive experiences. The inquiry involved a model for ocean currents and the influence of heat, using tea leaves and a warming beaker of water. Different practices emerged during the activity that elicited emotive interactions and shaped further practices giving rise to the performance of objectivity. For example, the act of observation was initially established after two students began to speculate on what would happen to the tea leaves, and a third student in the group responded “awh: no: you have to observe what it is” (p. 1429). This action by the third student elicited a response from the others who stopped making speculative comments and focused their attention on watching the beaker contents. At a later moment, one student probed the beaker contents with a pen which interrupted the action of the water, and this drew an emotive response from another student with “awh now look what you did” (p. 1434). Subsequent actions following this moment of peer reprimand led to a gradual emergence of practices such as physically detached observation, a shift from everyday language to the use of science language, and an increased sense of mutually enforced self-restraint leading to tentativeness associated with doing science. The emotive aspect described in that study was referred to as respect, aligned with Emile Durkheim’s (1912/2008) notion of feelings of respect for sacred objects.

Clearly what the study of objectivity and emotion illustrates is the formation of student-directed and student performed rules for what constitutes an objective form of science inquiry. Importantly, these rules were not formally defined. Instead, the rules for doing objective science inquiry unfolded through student interactions as a form of reasoning-in-action that was observed to be experienced emotionally by the students: Doing science inquiry without a gaming framework involved moments of peer reprimand, sharing jokes about the science and inquiry practices, and laughter, intertwined with focused science practices and use of scientific language (Davis and Bellocchi 2018). This raises some questions as to what the difference is between reasoning-in-action through games and reasoning-in-action through authentic science practices? Where is the line between reality and fantasy? What more is there that distinguishes game playing from doing science?

What more is there?

The blurring of boundaries between gamification of science learning and learning through authentic scientific practices is further complicated with alternative reality gaming. My own experiences in teaching through the development of alternative reality games (ARGs) (Davis and Bellocchi 2020a), led to my understanding of games as always being situated in reality. In an ARG the game is designed and played with the TINAG principle in mind. TINAG being the acronym for This Is Not A Game meaning that players are not leaving reality, but are simply taking action to change their present reality into some alterative form of reality.

So if games are not about leaving reality to engage in fantasy, what more is there that distinguishes game play from doing authentic science? I suggest it comes down to the positioning of emotional and aesthetic experiences as leading elements in game design for motivating students to engage with the game and to learn through game play (Kalogiannakis, Papadakis and Zourmpakis 2021). While emotions are still present in the more serious performance of authentic science practices (e.g. Davis and Bellocchi 2018), the emotions and aesthetics of doing authentic science are rarely considered explicitly when designing a science lesson. If gamification of science learning is an effective way to encourage science teachers to foreground fun and enjoyment in doing science, then clearly we need more game play in science (i.e. STEM) classrooms where scientific reasoning is embedded in the formal rules, and performed and experienced as reasoning-in-action.

Conclusion and implications for research and practice

In this forum paper, I have both generalised and particularised the nature of rules in the realities of games and authentic scientific practices in learning science. Bonne and Higgins (2022) have illustrated through their analysis of game playing and fluctuations in emotional climate, how formal rules are different from rules as reasoning-in-action. Further, with their example in a mathematics classroom they have illustrated how well-designed games with formal mathematical reasoning embedded in the rules will lead to learning experiences, along with experiences of fun and enjoyment. Gamification in science (i.e. STEM) education research has come a long way in the past decade. It is now time for more rigorous game design strategies to be developed and evaluated for empowering science teachers with the confidence and skills to design games as a common way for delivering science to their students. A culture of science education where learning experiences are designed with aesthetics and emotions at the forefront of teachers’ minds will greatly enhance student emotional experiences and learning. Further research into the development of game design strategies is needed to make gamification a more accessible way of thinking for science teachers. Structured support for teacher education and professional learning in this field is an important area for development and research (Bolstad 2018). Teacher development and education research should go beyond teachers learning about the integration of game mechanics: It should be promoting the design of aesthetic and emotive learning experiences during game play in science education contexts.