Video Games for Entertainment and Education

While the morality of games and their ethical implications in an educational context have been questioned from the very beginning of game technology evolution (e.g., McLean, 1978), video games1 have become not only increasingly attractive for players of both genders (Burke, 2000), various ethnicities (Bickham et al., 2003), and ages (IDSA, 2003), but are also utilized more and more for educational purposes (see, for example, the annual serious games summit, http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/). Thus, studying the education potential for this new and controversial medium is of tremendous importance. Although comprehensive effect theories on the specific impact of video game playing are still missing, more than a decade of research provides us with an impressive body of literature demonstrating mostly negative, but also significant positive effects (see, for introduction, Mitchell & Savill-Smith, 2004). The majority of research has focused on the potential negative effects of video game playing; however, this is due to an abundance of studies on violent games and does not reflect the potential of video games as a medium. While Weber, Ritterfeld, and Kostygina (chap. 24) discuss the findings on violent video game playing, hostility, and aggression, Lee and Peng (chap. 22) as well as Lieberman (chap. 25) give a comprehensive overview on effect studies with an emphasis on learning, and Durkin (chap. 21) further elaborates the benefits of video game playing for adolescents. This chapter focuses on the potential of video game playing to facilitate developmental processes through the unique combination of interactive entertainment and learning, while at the same time taking a rather theoretical perspective. The term “developmental processes” refers to an understanding of media usage and effects in the context of human development. Human development is the result of continuous transactions between a person’s biological constitution and his or her physical, social, and media environment over the life span. According to this perspective, media usage is not random but already reflects the developmental processes of a user who is selecting some media or content over others, and processing it according to his or her developmental capacities, previous