The gaming industry continues to expand, with different types of games appealing to wider audiences than ever before. For instance, when Call of Duty: Black Ops (Treyarch, 2010) was released, it made US$360 million in the U.S. and the UK within 24 hours (Stuart, 2010). Further, Facebook games such as Farmville (Zygna, 2009) and technological developments such as motion control (e.g., Nintendo’s Wiimote, Microsoft’s Kinect) seem to have opened up games to new audiences and helped to increase their cultural acceptance. At the same time, there continue to be claims made about the potential of games for learning (e.g., Gibson et al., 2010) not least because games often motivate people to devote hours to solving the challenges presented to them. However, there is a need for more “rigorous research into what players do with games (particularly those that don’t claim explicit status as educational), and a better understanding of the thinking that is involved in playing them” (Squire, 2008, p.167). It can be argued that the field would benefit from investigating both how and what people learn through their involvement with games.
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