When is a Game Not a Game?

Educational games are designed with playful affordances, yet have the serious purpose of supporting players’ learning. Given this, how players perceive these activities may influence how they interact with them, and therefore, whether they actually learn from them. We present player perception of an educational game through the triadic game design framework. Selected cases are presented here from one educational game teaching Newtonian physics to better understand the relationships between player perceptions and the nature of their game experiences, in terms of reality, meaning, and play. The findings we present indicate that players’ perceptions of educational game affordances as school-like or gamelike contribute to divergent experiences with the same design.